Dear LPG, 

I am writing on Tuesday 3rd January 2023 when I am betting that a lot of people will be feeling the same as me.  Because Christmas day was a Sunday this year we have woken up to the morning after the holiday before but I am talking about the feeling that hits home on January 2nd most years.  The holiday is officially over.   We have celebrated Christmas one way or the other and the New year is well underway.  

School children are starting to think about going back to school, while many workers are likely to be up and ready for the commute after a week of not seeing their place of work.    If life’s daily routine is a merry-go-round, it will have stopped for a while but, each year at about this time it starts to accelerate again and, by tomorrow, it will be as if it never really slowed down at all

Apart from the really young babies and toddlers, the people who will be least affected by all this are likely to be the pensioners of this world.  We are the age group who can please ourselves about what we do every day and, sadly for us, we are also likely to be the section of the community for whom the anticipation that accompanies the whole Christmas holiday event will have made the least difference.

Until 1974, which was the year when New Year’s Day officially became a bank holiday in the UK, just having a two day Christmas holiday meant that we did not have too much time to forget the daily routine, but by the end of that decade a lot of workplaces just skipped the whole week although the hospital workers and essential service workers have never really felt the benefit.  Shop workers also missed out because of the boxing day sales and banks needed to be open so that we could get the money to spend on those I suppose. 

But for so many of us older people nothing has really changed and, if we do see today as the beginning of the rest of the year, it can look pretty depressing.  

So I am proposing a new celebration day for this day each year and I think that it should be called ‘National Defy back to the old routine day’.

I propose that, even if you are one of those people who avoid the whole New Year’s Resolution tradition, this should be a day to step back and take a really good look at your routine before you sort a few small but serious improvements.

I have asked LPG to keep my message safe for a year because I thought of it a bit late for the start of 2023, but I hope that some other readers will be able to post some positive accounts of where their lives are heading after acknowledging my unofficial celebration.  

SI, Bickley

LPG found a video or two that might inspire if you substitute the activities mentioned in them for more age-attainable ones where needed…

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