Dear LPG, 

I live alone these days.  Lockdown has been over for a while now but the so-called new normal has left me with few reasons to go out of the house and even fewer visitors. It is only when someone does visit that they see how things have changed.   A friend who I have not seen for ages came to visit me recently and she made the smallest of comments which got me thinking that I have been letting things slide a little.

When we are young, no matter what age we were young during, one of the biggest lessons that we have to learn is the importance of respecting the things we have to do and doing them before we spend time on the things that we do because we want to do them.

I think that I have always been one of those people that would rather choose to do the more enjoyable things first which might be why there are so many things that I regret not having done now that I am this old.  

No matter the era we grew up in, as we go through those motions, we soon learn that, if we don’t make time to complete those often boring and repetitive activities, there will be consequences.  Very little has changed for children during the past half a century although the punishments are now more likely to be the confiscation of a computer or smart phone as opposed to a clip around the ear, while they are learning this life lesson. 

I think that, both from what I remember as a child and what I have observed, if the children do not learn the lessons of putting clothes and toys away and, keeping bedrooms’ tidy, mums and dads will offer a bit of a telling off but, if you can let that go over your head, they will usually do the sorting out for you in the end.

It all gets a bit more complicated when you have to explain why your homework is not done to the teacher in front of the whole class and we all know that peer pressure is one of the most motivating kinds.  

When you get a bit older work and family commitments become the two ultimate bits of motivation for doing what you have to do.  If you are not seen to be pulling your weight at work, you won’t keep a job for long and that will impact on your entire lifestyle while a visitor who has not seen you for a while will have something to say if things don’t look up to a certain standard.

But then we retire and, especially if you find yourself living alone, we are back to making our own rules. This can often be when reverting back to not needing to do much because there is absolutely no one to check and offer consequences can put us on that slippery slide which takes us back to not really bothering again…

It is so easy to decide that tomorrow will be the ideal day to do a few of those somethings that make all the difference, but as they say, ‘tomorrow never comes’ if you are not careful and even though the spirit is willing the flesh can be too tired to comply sometimes.

We all know that being locked down during the corona virus has not helped and there may well come a time when we really need help with the repetitive aspect of tidying up, but perhaps now might be the time to take an objective look around the house and at those things that perhaps we have been ignoring for a while…

DP, Lewisham