Dear LPG,  

I have always been a bit of a hoarder I suppose although I am getting better at remembering that all the things that I want to keep near me often just get left in a cupboard or draw with the result that, in the end there becomes less and less room to move around in my home while more and more items end up hidden all over the place.  

I thought that my children were quite ruthless the day that they decided to come in and organise me but, while they all had different ideas about what should stay and what had to go, they were right.  It was a painful process and if my three girls had not got it started, I would have been on the cusp of really being labelled a hoarder. 

Organising is one of the things that I find most difficult to do but letting my very grown up and responsible daughters loose in my house for a day has made all the difference.

While going through my things they came across a mobile smart phone they bought me the previous Christmas.  I remember smiling when I got it and then completely ignoring it.  Then came lockdown which was when necessity forced me to work out how to use it.  It took a while to learn how to phone people on it, but now I have learned, I know that I am not the only older person who uses one to keep in touch.  If it wasn’t for the loneliness and need to talk to the outside world, it would still most probably be in the box.  

Once you get started, and past the frustration phase, it is surprising just how much you can do with one little box of tricks and, once I could get out and about again, I can say that I really enjoy the fact that I have an instant camera to capture all those memories

I remember cameras as the things you only took out once a year when you went on holiday, or for the occasional wedding or christening, and I also remember the wait while getting the pictures processed.

But now that I have learned how, I find myself pointing and shooting pictures all the time, not to mention little videos; that was until the phone told me that there was no more space.  

That is when I learned something else about mobile phones.  They need as much organising as houses do.

My daughters came in handy again and I now let them transfer the pictures from my phone to be stored in other places and I have learned that digital pictures, and especially videos, take up quite a lot of space even though there is no actual piece of paper or film involved when you want to take a look at them.  

The internet confused me more than anything but the one thing that I did learn there is that, in reality, you can only have so many pictures in a camera at any one time, and the same is true of your mobile phone.  There are three basic choices when it comes to storing them somewhere else.   You can either put them on a special device designed to store them which will be some sort of memory stick, transfer them to your laptop or desktop computer if you have one, or store them in the cloud (a data storage bank that works rather like a real bank does when it comes to storing your money).   Doing that might sound fairly easy but I don’t think it is.

I have found some online solutions for the more technically minded mobile phone picture takers amongst us, but suffice to say that it might be a good idea to get someone who knows enough about it to take a look and see just how much space you have in your mobile phone from time to time.  

SF, Forest Hill

SF has found a little information which is likely to confuse most of us, and suggests getting a computer savvy expert to look at how much memory is in your mobile phone … 

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…and LPG adds some information on today’s celebration…

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