Dear LPG

My mum, who I live with, is now in her late 80s, and I don’t know what she would do without her phone.   She does have a mobile, but I am not talking about that one.  The landline takes up more than half of her time.  There are friends that she calls or who call her daily, and I have to say that I often wonder what they find to talk about for so long.

That last statement is an exaggeration because, with the advantage of our four extensions in the house, some of the calls are three-way affairs, although I tend to drop in and out of her chats.  She also uses her mobile for those equally long chats with friends and family who live on the other side of the Atlantic because of the cheaper cost. Still, she tells me that she prefers the more ergonomic shape of the landline if she is not using the hands-free loudspeaker facility.

They talk about things that, in my early seventies, I am just getting an inkling of.   Their aches and pains, the next doctor’s appointment, what happened in yesterday’s episode of the soap operas.  They encourage each other when they are feeling down, talk about how their children are getting on and put the world to rights regularly without ever running out of things to say.  My mother manages to do this while seeing many of the friends she talks to on an equally regular base.  She is one of the few of her friends who still drives and still gets out regularly, and one of her most visited destinations are the shops where her friends who are not so mobile trust the results of her shopping for errands more than those their children will bring.

To hear her talk on the subject, it is her friends who won’t let her put the receiver down, but they are all as guilty as each other when it comes to chatting on the phone for hours on end  (literally!). I am sure they are not unique, but my mum and her telephone-talking buddies got me thinking.

According to one snippet of online information, the average Brit spends 4 hours and 14 minutes daily doing this and that on their smartphones, and I bet they are not all just talking.  But my mum quickly spends that much time just using her phones (both landline – and mobile) to indulge herself in one of her favourite pastimes…  talking.

I found very little online regarding mobile telephone usage and just talking, but I bet we oldies do much more of that with a phone than our younger counterparts… 

RM, Lee 

 RM offers a few facts about telephone usage…

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