Dear LPG, 

I am sure that I am not the only person of any age, no matter the circumstances, who has experienced complete chaos for all the planning that they have done, as they arrive the night before one of those significant events they have been helping to organise, only to realise that everything that can go wrong has done so.  I am talking about the 60th, 70th or 80th surprise birthday party you have been arranging for a relative or friend, or the day that your long lost but hard-to-impress family member is coming to stay and, in your eyes, the house is still a tip.

For me, it could have been Easter or one of our summer family gatherings, but it was last Christmas Eve, despite the quiet day I had planned.  The extended family had all decided that we were having a big celebration later in the week. So, I thought this would mean a nice, quiet day without any hassle because my only guest would be my mother, and we would have a lazy day in front of the telly.  

I could do the big food shop after Christmas, and everything would be a little cheaper; I would have a post-Christmas opportunity to get presents for those who already have everything, and it would not matter if Christmas dinner were not ready until teatime.

But, in my rush, I managed to sign about 10 of those last-minute personal Christmas cards with a wish for the wrong Happy New Year (I wrote 2023 instead of 2024), which is costly.  The brother I least get on with phoned my mother, who mentioned that he would be alone for Christmas, and she invited him to dine with us. To top that, I managed to break my dentures.  I wondered what else could go wrong.

My mum phoned and wanted to go out for a last-minute shopping trip and, after we had visited nearly every shop in the precinct, she realised that she had lost her keys.  This meant extra time and a lot of retracing our steps through every shop we had visited without success (although I reached my smartwatch step goal before midday).  Then it was home to phone the police and dig about under the car seats.  

Things looked bleak despite all my planning, and it took the whole day to get back into her flat while she made endless phone calls to her friends, telling the story over and over again: where she last saw them, where they couldn’t be, an item-by-item explanation of the significance of each of the lost keys on the bunch, not to mention how worried she was.  The repetition did not help my mental well-being or hers.  

But after all the fuss, I stopped, had a ‘breathe-out’ moment, wrote a list of all my problems down, and then went through each, working out what I could do about them. 

I crossed out the ‘3’ and put a ‘4’ on each card. Nothing was to be done about the keys until after the big day (and by the next morning, my mum was in a more accepting mood). My brother did come, and I think our relationship progressed a little in the right direction. I worked on talking and smiling throughout the holiday week with my mouth closed.

I wrote all this down to remind readers that the problems that seem so big are all sortable, and no matter how big they are to you, the people around you will understand.  Not everything can be sorted in a day, but somehow, it all works out in the end, and there is very little, no matter how awful it seems to you, that someone else will not have been through before. 

And even later that evening, when all the fuss had died down, we found the keys under the car seat while looking for something else. 

So, when it all goes wrong on the day, my advice is to stop, breathe out, list the problems and what you can do about them (even if the answer is nothing!) and remember you are only human… 

AK, Bellingham