Dear LPG,

I have decided that I should talk about a somewhat unsavoury and embarrassing subject that I don’t think I alone found funny at the time although I never thought it would ever really affect me. 

When I was quite young I remember that an uncle came to visit from southern Europe.  He was very well off and booked himself into one of those really swanky hotels in the middle of London and during the couple of months he and my aunt were there we seemed to visit him all the time.  We were impressed with the hotel but we children spent a lot of time waiting outside his room rather than in it with our parents which we saw as a form of punishment.  He spent a lot of his time passing wind and we found it really hard to hide our smiles and inability to deal with the smell.  It was quite funny at the time, but we later found out that he had some really serious flatulence-related medical problems which he had visited London in an attempt to get medical help for.

My young siblings and I thought it all very funny at the time, but now I am beginning to wonder if his condition was hereditary. The other thing that my childhood experiences did not prepare me for was how uncomfortable it is to feel bloated for so much of the time, but some of us learn all about that as we get older.   Mine has got worse lately although lockdown means that I have no young visitors to laugh at me, thank God.

I don’t have anything like the problems that my uncle did all that time ago, and I think that I have to blame having so much more time on my hands since this pandemic started.  Some people used that time to overthink their way through it while others spent the year doing all the spring cleaning that they have neglected over the years.  Others used their phones to talk their way through 2020 or to find a new respect for computers, the internet and I.T., but apart from watching too much TV, I have to admit to eating my way through the pandemic with the obvious negative results.  

 At the moment my little problem is still mine but as lock down threatens to come to an end I have decided to do something about it so that my friends will not have the same opinion of me that I had of my uncle all that time ago. 

I am lucky because, unlike my uncle, my difficulties are completely of my own making so, even though it all seems to be common sense and we have heard so much of the advice so many times before, I started with a look at the internet which has taught me what I can do to rid myself of the feeling and other unfortunate results of treating my gut so badly for the past year.  Hopefully self-isolation is over or at last really coming to an end and we all have a few things that we need to deal with before we take them out into polite society again.

I have written about it and hope that what I have written might benefit any other readers who have fallen into the trap of eating the wrong things at the wrong times and in the wrong ways during a year when there has been not much else to do. 

XX, Internet Land

XX, who has decided that, while this topic needs to be talked about, he doesn’t need to give anything away about who wrote his message, offers some of the internet advice that might remind us about how to minimise our need to succumb to it...

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Today is World Digestive Health day and LPG has found a little information on that too… 

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