Dear LPG, 

We cannot help but collect them. Some are informative, while others end up in the bin.

If you are a pensioner who still gets out and about, you cannot help but see the many that are everywhere. They decorate desks and sprout from the purpose-built leaflet holders you find at doctor’s surgeries, supermarkets and community centres, not to mention the ones thrust into your hands as you walk past a person in the street who is there to ensure you get one. Then there are the ones accompanying your letters as they drop through your front door each morning. They are everywhere.

Whether they are trying to introduce you to a new idea or sell you something that it will be in their interest for you to buy, advertising is everywhere. Some of them are well worth reading, and others are not. 

The internet says that the people who produce and deliver them are likely to get a response from perhaps one person for every 100 they distribute, but now and then, one does catch your eye.

If you are like me, by the time you get home from shopping, put the groceries away and have a cuppa, you will have mislaid the one that got you interested, only to find it all scrunched up at the bottom of your shopping bag or in your coat pocket weeks later.

I found myself at a community meeting one day not so long ago where, in the beginning, there were so many piles of different leaflets offering all sorts of information neatly displayed in the middle of the table, but it took minutes for them to become a disordered pile.

With nothing else to do but wait for the main event to start, I took a look, and so did the other people there and before I knew it, I had made a selection of quite a few that caught my interest. Then, one of the other ladies did something I will do in the future. She took out her smartphone and took pictures of the ones she wanted to look at later.

I have had a smartphone for a while now, and it never occurred to me to take a picture of the ones that interest me. Doing that means that you don’t have a lot of paper to lose on the way home, the bits of paper don’t get screwed up in your bag, and you know exactly where to find them when you want the information they offer.

So many of us oldies have acquired a smartphone, so if you do have one, I advise you to learn how to take a picture and find it on the phone when needed. You will save yourself so much time (which won’t be wasted while you search), space (they won’t be littering your home), and anguish (you will know exactly where to find them when you want them). 

If you have a phone with a camera, why not take a picture rather than a leaflet… 

AK, Sydenham.

LPG would just like to make the point that it is worth taking a quick look to make sure that your pictures are legible as soon as you have taken them.