Dear LPG,

My nephew started his vocational life studying to become a lawyer, but one year at university taught him that he did not want to spend his life doing that.   He soon changed track and, now seven years later, he is an actor who has travelled extensively throughout the world working in the theatre and on television, although he has yet to’ make it big’ as they say.  We see actors on the television taking on all manner of roles but they have the script written down for them to learn, and he often spends time mumbling some speech or other in an effort to practise.  I have not seen much of his work, but he has played many roles, so far. His portrayal of a boxer looked quite painful at the time and I was particularly impressed with his version of the genie in Aladdin.

I think that we all fall into categories and have our social roles to play in this world and, after more than 60 years of experimenting with the best ways to do that, most of us LPG readers will have honed those skills without even realising.

I can almost guarantee that every one of us has overcome the hurdle of how to make a success of being either a man or a woman over the years, and we can all relate to the difficulties that puberty and adolescence played as we worked out how to face the transition to that point from the role of being a boy or a girl.

Then there is the whole coupling-up thing which most of us have encountered, the minefield that is becoming a spouse, a social role that many of us will have tried more than once, unless we decided that living together was the way forward.  There is the role that our work forced us into and, at our time of life, I am sure there will be many of us who changed track on that score more than once.

Parenthood is another minefield that the vast majority of us have become acquainted with at some time during our lives, some having planned the time and place while others will have just found themselves on the way to parenthood after it was a bit too late to do much about it.  This nearly always leads to grandparenthood which we have even less control over!

There are so many other social roles in life although we, for the most part, often are forced to play our parts purely by accident.  So many of us have tried the roles of tourist, host, visitor, carer, charity worker, landlord, patient, tenant and so many more even though we have no script and, in this internet age far too many textbooks which all offer completely different ways to go about nearly everything. We social actors have one advantage though, we usually have a limited audience, unlike my nephew, although their criticisms of our performance are much more likely to affect us on a personal level; the most critical audience member being ourselves in retrospect.

I have to say that one of the most challenging roles I ever needed to adopt in life was that of the transition from worker to retired person, and most people who read this will have played that one out already. 

Having said all this I think that the most important role we all need to play is that of ‘friend’.  All through life we find ourselves making them and losing them but as we get older they often get a little thin on the ground so I propose that we all continue to keep practising and playing out that role most of all.

Even though I hope that my nephew does one day, I suspect that there is a really great actor in all of us even though we will never get an Oscar for any of our performances.

 NM, Bellingham