Dear LPG,

I am betting that, like most of the people who visit the LPG website I am pretty old and I accept that my car is no different, but I feel lucky because, as old as it is it survived ULEZ. 

I have continued to keep my driving skills up with regular trips to the shops and there are a few friends that I feel privileged to be able to help out by driving them from here to there from time to time.  Every now and then I still find myself taking on an adventure that leaves me needing to negotiate the odd journey into unknown territory, but my car like me is relatively old and so I have bought it a few mod cons. 

When I am not sure where I am going (I mean, when I am not sure of how I am going to get there) I get brave and employ my specialist equipment.  My old car does not have such things built in, so I still use the sat nave and dash cam that I bought at least a decade ago to help me when the going gets too tough for me to remember the way.  And when I venture out into the unknown, I am not too proud to have the wiring dangling from the windscreen as necessity dictates.

This was the case when I decided on a recent trip and so I factored in an extra quarter of an hour to put all the wiring in place before setting off.   The trip was fairly uneventful and I felt quite proud of myself for not having forced the sat nave to ‘recalculate’ because of any wrong turns on the day.

Once I got home, I thought reviewing the dash cam footage would be a good idea and, as focussing on a bigger picture works better for my ageing eyes, I transferred the storage card to my old fashioned laptop to remind me of the way in case I ever needed to go again.

Please don’t ask me how I managed to get the footage upside down but the whole journey was filmed with the sky at the bottom of the picture and the road on top.  It was easy enough to turn the picture the other way round but, before I did I took a look for a while. 

As I looked at the upside down version of my journey, the sky looked like an endless sea and the fact that gravity was the only thing keeping me and the car attached to the earth became worryingly apparent.  

I suddenly became aware of how small and how vulnerable we are and, while being in a car makes you feel a bit protected, I could not help but imagine what would happen if the world stopped spinning.  One thing is for sure and that is that the advantages of being really free are truly relative.  Imagine being absolutely free of gravity!  

I found the single picture quite worrying but a bit of moving footage made me feel really threatened and I am a member of Codger Productions who I persuaded to turn what I think as a somewhat disturbing thought into a little film.  I couldn’t but help ask LPG to help me to share that  mini film… 

What do you think?

ND, Forest Hill.

Codger productions invite anyone who would like to become a part of their mini film production company to come and join us on Friday afternoons between 2.30 pm and 4 o’clock at Stanstead Lodge 260 Stanstead Road, SE23 1DD (tel: 020 8291 1164).  No special skills are required.

ND shares her upside down view of Lewisham…

(►►►) 

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

(►►►)