Dear LPG, 

What is it that they say about friends?  You can’t live with them, but you can’t live without them. There are the casual ones you meet in one particular setting each week.  For years, they will have been the people you can depend on to be at one of the day centres you frequent, and I bet each one has a particular quality that you wish they didn’t. 

Nearly every Tuesday for the past fourteen years, I have visited a lunch club where we play out the same scene weekly.  The building which serves as the venue seems to have been there forever, and the people in it at that time on that day each week all do the same things with worrying repetition. 

I often asked the same mental questions about some of those acquaintances, although none of us would physically ask some of the more personal ones.  We have pieced together what we know about our dining companions from the little comments and facts offered as we have passed the salt and offered our assessment of the taste of the food.  I must admit to another repeated thought coming into my head as I sat at that table.  It would start, ‘… if I had not come today, I could have been…’ and the following words would describe some activity I wanted to finish. 

We each sit at the same place at the same table, eat similar meals, and have similar conversations and, in some ways, it all looks repetitive and mundane.   Or that is what I thought until that day in March 2020 when we were told we could not leave our homes. 

I wonder if, during that time, I was the only one who found it extremely hard to get through missing something similar to the Tuesdays I have described.  After the first couple of weeks, when not having to get up and ready for the outing was a bit of a novelty, I found myself with a recurring, ‘if not for lockdown, I would have been at the lunch club’ moment despite all the projects I could have been getting on with at home.  While sitting at that lunch club dining table, one of the rituals was often such a thought-provoking exercise.  I would often think about something I really wanted to finish, which was taking so long, and follow it with, ‘If I had missed this club today, I could have got to the next stage of my project’.  Now and then, I would see expressions of others around the table, which also appear to reflect similar ‘if only’ thoughts in the hidden minds behind them.  

It did not take long to get bored with sitting at home, and on Tuesdays, there were times when I would think of what I would have been doing at the lunch club and wonder if I would ever be a part of that very ordinary Tuesday routine again.

It occurs to me that we only miss things when they are unavailable, but a forced time away has changed my perspective.  Most of the old crowd is back now, and even though little has changed and I still have to leave the latest thing that I am in the middle of making at home for a while, I have now learned a whole new level of appreciation for, what I once saw as one of the relatively commonplace aspects of my life… 

SP, Lee