Dear LPG, 

I am a pensioner who can be described as ‘getting on a bit,’ I can still get around, but I have reached the stage of my life where two or three friends of a similar age have had sudden events happen to them that have made mobility a little more challenging. We all have to be realistic, and what happened to them reminded me that my turn could come someday.

I have a neighbour who broke a hip a couple of years back.  She lives alone, and while she was laid up, I could visit her quite a bit because I live close to her.  I remember when she couldn’t get out of bed independently and depended on visitors and carers to do the simplest things for her, reaching for a dropped phone or turning on the light.   She is better now, but we all know that the process takes so much longer as we get older. 

My son thought about all this years ago, and that year’s Christmas present was his idea of safeguarding against such a contingency.   Since Christmas 2019, I have been living with Alexa, that little round box in the corner of the room that does things when you talk to it.  I can control some of the less complicated settings with my phone, but he has it all, too, just in case I get it wrong. 

When he first set it up, I remember worrying about how intrusive it was supposed to be. I was told it would be able to hear everything I said and monitor me, but it is surprising how quickly you get used to these things when they are sitting there, ready for action. 

I live alone now with my cat, but I have had Alexa for a few years and learned how to use it to keep me company.  Over the years, I have acquired a couple more and can now call one wherever I am in my house.  I have set them up to remind me to do things like take my pills at night and let the cat in.  It also saves me from that age-old habit of panicking when the phone rings because when my children call, I now have to talk to them through the little box’s speaker.

My son has also added smart lights that I can turn on and off by telling them to work. My lights come on at different times because they are pre-set, and I need to tell them if I want to vary the schedule. I don’t have to poke my fingers out of the bed covers on cold winter mornings before seeing everything.

I remember how difficult it was not to do what has become second nature all our lives when I leave a room: switch off the light.  When I first started using them, and it was quite a while before I rewired my mind to tell Alexa to do it for me rather than flick the switch myself.  If I do that, when I want to turn it on again with my voice, it won’t happen.  Alexa can do many things but cannot produce the electricity needed for lights by itself.

They recently changed how it all works, and the lights needed to be reprogrammed. I had to wait for my son to do that, but it was a week or two before he could visit.  

The silly thing is that it took me months to remember not to turn the light off at the switch so that Alexa could do it for me, but during the week that those lights weren’t working, I had utterly forgotten that automatic impulse that makes you turn them off with a click of the switch by the door.  

I cannot help but be astonished at how quickly our minds adapt. It was as if a few years of living with technology had rewired my brain entirely… 

SC, Honor Oak.