Diary: June 2018

2 June 2018, Brighton

Spotted outside the Taj Middle Eastern supermarket

6 June 2018, London

Something magical happened today. Because I am cheap, I use Spotify Free, rather than pay the £10 monthly subscription. The thing is, the curated collections in Spotify Free only allow you to play songs on SHUFFLE. So you don’t know what you are getting next. It’s random, sort of. I was obviously overjoyed when Elton John’s ‘Tiny Dancer’ came on, but imagine the ecstasy when the next song was Bruce Springsteen’s ‘Thunder Road’. OK, you had to be there. Two fantastic love songs (in different ways) and two songs that have such a powerful piano voice.

7 June 2018, Hackney, London

At Headway today there was a difficult interval with P. P is a bit of a food fascist and believes everyone but himself is ingesting poison in the form of the everyday meal. The food at Headway is cooked fresh on the day, but today P saw fault where innocent mistake was probably the real case. The “savoury bread-and-butter pudding with green-bean and red-onion salad” was the victim of his rant. While most of us just got on with eating this bargain meal at £2.50, P told his table (loudly) that we were suffering a systemic disgrace in silence. We were lapdogs to a food culture that is not only degenerate but evil. At some point, P2 said something along the lines of “OK, we hear what you are saying, move on” and he went mental (“Go back to Ireland, Irish girl). Yes, the bread-and-butter pudding was slightly overcooked and very crunchy; the salad was actually more of a salsa, but P targeted P2 and, when coordinator James tried to pacify him, he switched into full-blown psycho. I sat there wondering what kind of training enables a Headway staffer to bring this fragile situation under control. I thought about setting off the fire alarm, but instead merely got out of my seat and moved away. By this time, P is actually enjoying his bad behaviour, swearing, threatening physical violence and acting like a totally unhinged dickhead. I was outside by now, but somehow the staff managed to usher him out to the arch (art studio). This meant the arch was unavailable to other members to use and that studio manager M, who had not witnessed what I had, was tasked with defusing the bomb. My heart went out to her. This was all witnessed by a man from the borough of Newham, who was checking on HEL’s performance. He told me later how impressed he was. Members who spoke to me later about the incident agreed that brain injury is no excuse for being a tosser. For that, I loved them even more.

7 June 2018, London

Sitting in the Two Brewers enjoying a pint of Timothy Taylor Landlord ale, listening to Neil Young on my earbuds and reading Sherlock Holmes ('Sign of Four'), I come to a pause. On removing the earbuds, I notice that Neil Young's 'Harvest Moon’ is playing on pub sound system. That is the song I was listening to on my earbuds.

12 June 2018, Islington, London

Peggy Ennis has two interesting ways to describe dementia to those who know little about it. In the first she likens the inner wiring of the right side of the human brain to a set of fairy lights that are not performing at their peak. Some of the bulbs are dim, some are flickering. Others have packed up altogether. It all means we are no longer quite as bright or as flashy as we used to be.

In the second description Peggy uses the metaphor of the bookcase. Imagine, she says, a bookcase made of plywood. Each of its shelves are full of books; each of the shelves represents 10 years of your life; all of the books on each shelf are your memories of that decade. On the bottom shelf are your earliest memories, on the top are your most recent. Push the shelf slightly and it will sway; push it harder and the books on the top shelf will begin to fall off. More pushing and the books on the other shelves will do likewise, but the books on the bottom shelf (your long-term memories) will only fall off after an almighty shove. As you try desperately to put the falling books back on their shelves, many of them will get mixed up. In other words, you become confused. This is what dementia is like.

Now imagine a bookcase made from solid oak. The books on the top shelves might fall, but the stability of the unit will hold many of them in place, allowing the displaced books to be re-stacked on the shelves with some sense of order. This, Peggy says, illustrates the importance of “brain fitness”. Keep your brain exercised and nourished and the effects of dementia can be eased. She has a slogan for this exercise: “a healthy heart means a healthy head”. In other words, regular exercise keeps your mind in tip-top condition.

In the dementia awareness training Peggy delivered to a small group at St Luke’s Community Centre, she then spoke about the left side of the brain and the importance of the emotions. Quite often, she said, we will forget what people told us, what their names were, where we met them and what time they arrived. But we will remember how they made us feel, so using our emotional recollections rather than our factual ones is a good way to compensate once dementia and/or memory difficulties set in. Happy, sad, angry, disgusted, frightened or shocked: these are the experiences we can use to put those books back on the right shelf.

Peggy told us how people with dementia can appear a bit confused, bonkers even. To someone with dementia a polished vinyl floor might look like water; a black rubber slip-mat outside a supermarket door might look like a hole in the ground. This took me straight to a film idea, ‘Dementia Tour Of London’, a kind of funny/serious travelogue in which offspring and parent with early onset wander the capital’s streets seeing everything from a demented point of view.

14 June 2018, Hackney, London

Two SLT revelations at Headway today. Sam joined the band we have with Music Therapy student Sam. She is our  token 'girl singer’, was brilliant, and I believe she got a lot out of it. She steamed through the lyrics of Steely Dan’s 'Do It Again’ fearlessly. Then she took on the job of banging the cymbal at the end of the chorus WITH HER RIGHT HAND (Sam is left-handed). Song-singing as an alternative to reading practice must always be worth a try. Inhibitions fall and confidence rises by having a band - albeit a crap one of me, Stuart and Barrie - to support you.

The second revelation came at Pat’s touching memorial in the arch, led by Michelle and Ben (who told a funny story about meeting "Jackson" for the first time and falling for the prank that his name was "Michael Jackson") Member after member (Cecil, Tony A, Errol), many with acute speech difficulties, lined up to talk fondly about Pat, driven by pure emotion and the will to do the decent thing. Others ad-libbed cheeky comments (special thanks to Eddie) and we all sang Elvis’s 'Always On My Mind’.

14 June 2018, London

I am becoming more and more convinced that in Abraham Lincoln’s determination to establish an American government “of the people, by the people, for the people”, the Corporation of London saw an opportunity to translate it to government “of the people, by the rich, for the rich”.

20 June 2018, London
Being on regular medication can be quite daunting, and not just for the patient. Ahead of a recent holiday to Spain, I visited Portman Pharmacy in Cherry Tree Walk to request a regular repeat prescription. The idea is that the pharmacy contacts your GP surgery and, hey presto, two days later, your life-saving medication is ready for collection.

Twice in a row now, this seemingly simple and streamlined process has crashed. In the most recent case, having made my request to the pharmacy on a Friday and told the medication would be back for collection the following Wednesday, it wasn't there. What's more, the chief pharmacist mined new depths of bad manners and arrogance to tell me, first, that the GP surgery was to blame, and then that it was MY fault because my “expectations are too high".

I turned and left, then made the journey to my GP surgery, the Neaman Clinic, was treated with great courtesy, collected the prescription and got my medication from another pharmacy. Endov Portman Pharmacy, hello Boots New Change.

21 June 2018, Hackney

Cecil on his 80th birthday.

23 June 2018, Winchester

“If the real point if the European Union is to achieve an ever closer union among the people's of Europe, the British have never really wanted a place in it."
Helen Thompson
LRB, 21 June 2018

28 June 2018, Murcia

In a tapas/enoteca restaurant in a place called Baños y Mendigo (Baths & Beggar) we watched England go down 1-0 to Belgium. At the end there was some speculation as to whether England manager Gareth Southgate was being strategic in trying to come second in the group (he made 8 changes to a team that had won 6-1 in its previous game), but that sounds very risky to me.

29 June 2018, San Pedro Something Or Other, near a La Manga, Murcia

About 50m from the sandy beach is an inflatable playground, with slides, trampolines, climbing frames, etc. The water here is still and quite shallow, so this is an ideal spot for such a glorified bouncy castle. It's best feature is a vertical climbing wall in the shape of the grand upper deck of a cruise liner. What would have been portholes on the cruiser are toe holes for the climber to scale straight from the sea to the top of the deck, from which they can then slide back into the sea, and so the joyous, safe process repeats itself.