Dear LPG, 

I am not sure, but I suspect that I am not the only reader who might have come across this hobby.  It would be an understatement to say that the past year or two have been uneventful although spending a lot of it at home has had very different effects on different people.  I know that the first days at home with not a lot to do resulted in my deciding that a grand tidy up was the way to go but I didn’t get very far with that.  

After a few weeks of real frustration, I found something in a cupboard while trying to continue with the tidying up one day.  I opened the tablet that I bought tried, became really frustrated with and left in the shadows, which was to change my lockdown outlook.

I am talking about a tablet that I bought tried and gave up with about two years ago.   It is funny how, when there is nothing else to do, the most annoying of things that you have tried, tested and given up on can hold your attention again. I learned to video call my family and do many other things that I would never have done but for the want of my need to find anything to hold my interest during that time.  I really learnt about the ins and outs of emailing and resurrected the email address that my son set up for me when I first got the thing, and I also found myself video calling and doing a bit of online shopping.

But the thing that I really got into was asking Google this and that.  I must admit that now I have learnt how to ask Google, I spend far too much time asking it what I think must be some of the most obscure questions ever.   I suppose it is partly the case that I genuinely enjoy learning the answers to really obscure conundrums (the ones that you really want to know those answers to but that you don’t ask your friends in case they work out just how odd you are), but there is also the whole challenge of finding out if Google is infallible and will actually generate that answer.

Let’s face it, she (he or it) knows what the weather will be like tomorrow and what day Christmas Day will fall on in the year 2031.  (By the way that will be a Thursday if anyone is interested).  With the help of You Tube I learned how to straighten my lop-sided apple tree, fix the drive belt on my hoover and how to cook an artichoke and it has an answer for everything.

You must exclude personal questions of course but it is quite sobering to realise that there are very few people (even those who have never actually used it themselves) that are not featured somewhere on its webpages, even if it is only as an online statistic somewhere. And if you are there Google is likely to find some piece of information about you. 

I think that the ultimate search you can do is on yourself.  The internet will tell you that people who are still of working age should be worried about doing this because of information that they might find which prospective employers might also find, but we retired oldies have nothing to lose.   

CJ, Lewisham