Dear LPG, 

I know that I have left sending this message to LPG a bit late for this year, but after three whole months I have just finished it, and when I started to write all this down, it was mid-January 2023. 

If you can remember that far back I suspect that like me, the panic and urgencies surrounding preparations for Christmas were all over and all the extra food that I bought to celebrate with had finally run out. My many family members had stopped phoning and dropping in as often and as suddenly as they started just before the holiday because school and Workplaces had all reopened and were back to normal. Every year it leaves me e feeling like there is now very little to look forward to.

Perhaps all the hustling and bustling of the past couple of weeks have left me with a need to relax a little and venture out less, and the weather is depressingly cold and dark anyway. 

The fact is that until this morning, I have to admit that the whole mood was rubbing off on me. 

I am not sure I am ‘depressed’, but I am not as upbeat as I felt a couple of weeks ago. Even the act of taking down the few Christmas decorations that I could put up has left me with that ‘nothing to look forward to’ feeling.

For a few days now, I have been doing very little and blaming the aches and pains that all the extra effort of present buying and the routine interruption of those late-night family visits caused me physically and mentally.

After two Christmases that we have been forced to more or less miss out on and despite all the strikes and financial restraints that our utility and grocery bills have imposed, perhaps the need to have an even more special Christmas this year, regardless of the outcome, may have left us older family members all with further to fall from into that post-Christmas pit of depression. 

Writing all this down is my way of saying it is time to look forward to Spring positively. Now that it is not that far away.  

As I mentioned before, I started writing this down about three months ago now but I hope that if there is anyone else out there who can identify with what I have written here, reading it might just be the message they need to make a bounce back, even if the downward slide started before last winter.  

NH, Catford 

LPG has found an online quiz to help with the assessment of where you stand on the depression scale and a little information on symptoms and help for those who might be affected…

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…and adds some information on today’s celebration…

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