Dear LPG, 

The internet is full of interesting statistics, and I found one which triggered my imagination because it occurs to me that over my fairly long lifetime I have only ever left the shores of England three times.  That is not even once for every decade.  I read on the internet that about a quarter of the British population have never left its shores and I suspect that many of them are older people.  

This means that some of us have had lots of time to be aware of all the changes that have happened over the years in our own locality, in my case the streets of South London and, even though it is so easy not to notice those updates and alterations as I have passed through them, having the opportunity to be able to look back with the help of the little hints of memory-jogging ammunition that YouTube provides these days got me thinking about the sights and sounds that have changed so much, and that gave me a bit of a reality check. 

I think that we often see those changes much more readily than we hear them because our powers of navigation tend to depend on what we see rather than what we hear.   There is something quite special about some of the sounds that we were so used to hearing, but so many have either been replaced or disappeared lately.  

I am talking about the sounds like that of a bus conductor saying that familiar phrase, ‘Anymore fares please?’, which has now been superseded by all those electronic announcements, or the shouts of the rag and bone men as they went up and down the streets.   The sound of the coalman emptying sacks of the stuff down the coal holes of our neighbours’ homes, morning wakeup call of the milk float, and the absence of people talking to themselves (I mean their mobile phones) that we have had to get used to since the turn of the century to name but a few.  I have to admit to having invested in a mobile and adding to that disturbance from time to time.

I don’t think that not having moved around much has left me too disadvantaged because, while there is so much to see once you leave our shores, there is quite a lot to experience here and the difference which I have missed geographically has truly been made up for when I think about all the historical changes that I have seen and heard over the years without doing too much extended moving around at all.

DP, Lee 

DP has found a few internet memories…

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