Apr 11, 2015
Though I never met him I feel that I knew George Arthur Moss who was, to use his own words, “a fairly quiet man with a good sense of humour”. Others describe him as caring and gentle. George died in 2008 aged 86, having been diagnosed with dementia four years...
Mar 22, 2015
Margaret Miller sets quite a challenge to ageism. Just take a look at her photo – she’s the one on the left with the stylish hat, the other woman is somebody called Kimberley Walsh. You might think that, at 104 – yes that’s right, one hundred and four, I too...
Mar 10, 2015
It’s NHS Change Day so I’ve decided to dedicate this week’s blog to someone who exemplifies everything it stands for. She is, to use her own words, a disruptor and a radical who wants to bring about change. She’s a boat-rocker, a distinguished member of the Twitter...
Feb 25, 2015
I’m old enough to remember where I was when John Lennon died – helped by the fact that his shocking, untimely death occurred on my birthday. I was in my second year at Southampton university, vaguely getting to grips with how to cook for myself and occasionally...
Feb 5, 2015
“House of Memories is a very good idea put into practice”. So reads the opening sentence of Liverpool National Museums’ description of a training programme designed to enhance the lives of those with dementia – and I couldn’t agree more. As with all the best ideas,...
Jan 24, 2015
It was New Year’s eve at the Ilford Palais. As midnight struck, a young man asked a girl to kiss him, once for 1966, and then again (cheekily) for 1967. And that, as 64-year-old Jan Inman tells me, was how it all began. The story of Jan and her husband Ron runs to...
Jan 13, 2015
I first heard about care farms at an Alzheimer Europe conference, where I discovered that they are used extensively in the Netherlands as an alternative to day care centres for those with dementia. It’s a wonderful, heart-warming concept that brings people with...
Dec 12, 2014
I used to have an irrational fear of hospices. The very sound of the word, with its soft susurrations, whispered to me of sorrow and foreboding. On the rare occasions I allowed myself to imagine what a hospice might be like, I conjured up visions of corridors...
Dec 1, 2014
Sometimes in life, in a piece of writing or music or art, at a given moment or over a longer period, everything comes together – it all just works, often seemingly by chance. And when it does, it’s magic, with the whole providing so much more than the sum of its...
Nov 23, 2014
Imagine being confronted with concrete evidence that your husband, who has dementia and lives in a nursing home, is being abused by those responsible for his care. Think how you’d feel as you switched on the small tape recorder you’d hidden behind a chest of drawers...
