Stick to lying about Diana, why don't you

Oh God.  The Daily Express seems to have taken up dementia as its latest hobby horse.  Which means that everything it reports will be wrong.  A month ago this most repulsive of all the British tabloids predicted an icy cold winter, which I found reassuring: I work on the principle that whatever the Express tells you, it's pretty safe to believe the exact opposite.  Europe.  Immigrants.  House prices.  Whatever. Take the Express as your misrule of thumb. 

Yesterday Jeremy Clarkson got himself into bother for saying that those who took part in the national strike against public sector pension cuts (myself included) should be taken out and shot: well, that's his shtick.  I'm not sure how seriously he always takes himself but he can be funny and knows how to wind people up, which is partly how he earns his millions (with no doubt an accountant helping him to avoid as much tax as possible).  I loathe everything he stands for, especially his "drive fast and screw the environment" attitude, but he doesn't offend me.  Who does offend me?  Express owner and pornographer in chief Richard Desmond, that's who.  Shooting's too good for him though.  Where's the Spanish Inquisition when you need them?

Today's front page headline is "SIMPLE WAY TO FIGHT OFF DEMENTIA".  Fight off.  That implies making it go away, n'est-ce pas?  The possibility of victory?  Well I know, professionally and personally, that there ain't no such way, so whatever the article might imply, the truth will be otherwise.

First paragraph: "Simple puzzles which stimulate the brain can halt the advance of dementia as effectively as some drugs, it has been revealed."  That "can" covers a multitude of caveats.  In some circumstances some patients, when given puzzles rather than drugs, show a slower rate of decline than patients given drugs alone.  Really.  On the other hand, in other circumstances, a different lot of patients on a different lot of drugs may well decline at the same rate whether they do crosswords or not.  Who knows?  This is one very small study we're being asked to look at here.

Lower down we read

"Dementia rates tend to be lower in people who are mentally active throughout life."

This is an assertion, with no evidence to back it up.  My own experience suggests that dementia is absolutely no respecter of high intelligence or mental vigour. 

"Results from researchers in Germany supported earlier work showing that people doing a crossword four days a week had a much lower risk of dementia than those who did one puzzle a week."

Again, really?  That isn't quite borne out by the detail which follows.  For a start, the research was carried out on people who already had a diagnosed dementia.  It's one thing to experiment with different care regimes, leading to the hardly novel conclusion that progress deeper into dementia can be slowed down by appropriate non-pharmaceutical interventions.  Now tell me something we don't know.  It's something else entirely, indeed flat wrong, to suggest that doing crosswords reduces the risk of getting dementia in the first place.  The underlying principle here is so trivial I hesitate to spell it out, but Express readers might not have grasped it yet: it is better for one's quality of life whether one is well, ill or even dying to be occupied rather than bored.

At least the Express  had the decency to go to the Alzheimer’s Research UK for a quote.  Unfortunately, its director of development, Dr Marie Janson, spoke in such terms as in effect to render the entire article worthless. 

“It’s believed that cognitive stimulation can be an effective method of helping people cope with the symptoms of mild to moderate dementia... if [the findings of this small study] can be replicated in large-scale studies, this could greatly improve the lives of people with dementia. It will also be important to see how long the benefits might last.

“While any advance that can help people cope with their symptoms is to be welcomed, we still lack a way to prevent dementia or stop it in its tracks"

In other words, the reported research is of some value in devising care regimes for people with dementia.   More work is needed to confirm even its modest conclusions.  It is absolutely NOT a "simple way to fight off" the condition.  The Express headline is a lie, offering false hopes to people who may be beginning to suspect that they or someone they love has been stricken with the condition.

This is just the latest in a string of misleading stories carried by this alleged newspaper.  On October 10, it led with

"A daily 10p vitamin pill could prevent millions of people being struck down by Alzheimer’s disease.  Research has found that vitamin B can help protect the brain from dementia."

Wrong.  There may be some connection, but more research is needed to get anywhere near verifying the Express' claim.

Back on June 30 it was cinammon. " Scientists are hailing an everyday cooking spice as a possible cure for Alzheimer’s – after finding clues in the Bible."

No they aren't.  The Alzheimer's Society said on this occasion "Although these results look promising in mice and fruit flies, it’s too soon to know what effect it would have in people."

And so on.  On planet Express the royal family conspired to have Diana murdered; the EU has banned children under 8 from blowing up balloons (no it hasn't, merely suggested they should be supervised: a bit "nanny state" maybe but hardly restrictive), and dementia is a preventable condition.  Lies, lies, lies.

Tell you what, all this tabloid tripe is making my blood boil, which could put me at risk of a stroke.  Conclusion: one good way to lower your chances of avoiding vascular dementia is not to read the tabloids.  Now that would be an interesting piece of research: which newspaper's readers are more likely to get Alzheimer's than any other?  I have read recently a paper by some expert from the University of Tottletosch in Transylvania proving conclusively that it's the Daily Express.

Talking to the invisible man

Dad sounded really unhappy tonight.  Confused as ever, still thinking he's going home any day, but complaining of feeling tired and not interested in music - are you registering this?  Not interested in music.  That's like the girls in the Daily Star not bothering to take their clothes off.

Perhaps it's the medication.  The ward seems to be concentrating on his hallucinations, so have prescribed him an anti-psychotic.  Fair enough, it's preferable for a man to be in touch with reality, but it seems there's a price: these drugs can lower the patient's mood.  And I'm asking: suppose he's happier talking to the invisible man, maybe imagining that the invisible man is talking back?  I'm not saying it's a lifestyle choice, like he's booked a holiday on some alternative planet, but have they thought that pychosis might be the brain's way of trying to cope with the dementia, as if when reality is too confusing, let's try something else?  Is it doing him any harm to be off the planet?

Maybe if it's also accounting for the withdrawal from the ward day-room and his lack of interest in things that would normally give him pleasure.  Personally I'm more bothered about his incontinence - or is that an aspect of the hallucinatory state as well?  More to read up on.  Must make sure I talk to an actual doctor now they've got the measure of him and are starting on the medical interventions.  The nurse who answered the phone earlier said "we can't give you too much personal information over the phone" like there was some doubt as to who I am.  "I'm not trying to be offensive", she said, sensing the irritation in my tone.  I told her I wasn't offended but on reflection, I was.  They'd tell me if I was there, I can give her information only a son would have, to prove my bona fides, what's her problem?  All right, it's my problem and it's the usual: three hours drive down the effing M1 coupled with, on this occasion, the fact I'm tied up this weekend and genuinely can't make the trip.

I don't mind being Dad being muddled but I expect the ward to keep him happy.  If that means letting him hang on to his psychosis, so be it.  Even in the real world we have the right to our delusions: that the UK needs nuclear weapons, that an angel showed Jospeph Smith some gold plates and helpd him translate them into the book of Mormon, that who footballers and film stars sleep with is of the slightest interest to the general public.  We don't medicate people who believe such twaddle, why pick on some harmless old man  just for talking to a someone who isn't there?  And even as I write those words I know I'm being unreasonable.  So?  This blog is at least partly about how I feel, dammit.  And people don't always feel reasonable.

Nov 18: Sondheim at the Town Hall

Val emailed me with an intriguing request: would I accompany her for some pre-concert entertainment at the Town Hall?  It would give us a chance to talk up our work with singing and dementia, have some fun and by the way there'd be a small fee.  Wild horses etc.

For me, she's the girl who leads community music-making, for which she chooses an appropriately populist repertoire; but her background is opera and tonight she went for the Marriage of Figaro, with some Mendelsohn to follow.  Well, it was a classical concert so she felt she needed to be in keeping: other community musicians invited to the same pitch have just done their usual stuff.  We dressed up for it, out came my dj and bow tie, Val had a posh frock on.  The atmosphere at the Town Hall bar was relaxed rather than rapt, people listening with one ear but chatting away too, which was the way we wanted it: if they had been concentrating too hard they would have spotted all my wrong notes - I play a lot of popular stuff myself, but the discipline required for accompanying classical singing is something I've let slip and the last couple of days have seen me practising frenetically so as not to let Val down.  In the event Val had a sort of flu-y bug and wasn't in terribly good voice, for which she beat herself up mercilessly.   She was going to kick off with Puccini then bottled it: reckoned the high notes would have defeated her.  I couldn't say she was brilliant because that wouldn't have fooled her, but by the standards that I sensed the concert-goers might have expected she was still pretty damn good, and I did my best to reassure her.  They weren't paying to hear us so they should have been grateful, and many of them were. Apparently Val has a number of highly critical (and I suspect highly jealous) sisters who were always putting her down and she's internalised their jibes. 

She gave me the chance to do a solo, and guess what: I went for Sondheim, the song I quoted back in February.  No way could I do justice to that lyric and play the tricksy accompaniment at the same time (especially as I don't have proper piano reduction), so I scored it in midi, saved it to memory stick and plugged it into the back of the keyboard.  Used a few other voices besides piano - vibes, strings, bit of synth: I'm familiar with the relevant software but was still surprised how quickly I got it finished.  Now, I don't have Val's quality of voice  but I can project a song OK and I got some applause that was a touch more than polite, and at least one little cheer.   I was on cloud eight, with nine to follow.

In the interval Val was back in popular mode and I was vamping underneath her, occasionally soloing to give her voice a break and make sure we didn't dominate proceedings.  Gershwin's Summertime, A Nightingale Sang in Berkeley Square, Blue Moon.  We were more relaxed now (that glass of wine helped).  Val started to work the nearby tables, I was your lounge  cabaret piano man and - bear in mind this was partly an awareness raiser for dementia - thinking of my dad who, fine organist though he was in his day, loved accompanying more than any other kind of music-making.  Tonight I understood why.  I'd had my moment of glory with the Sondheim, but the deeper pleasure lay in enabling a far better singer than I'll ever be to do her stuff, and wondering if Dad would have been proud of me.   He would have played the Mozart properly, but he was never an improviser and so I guess he might.  And that, folks, really IS as good as it gets.

As we went home Val was talking about doing it again some time.  We might be starting our own double act. I wonder if she'd sing "The Little Things You Do Together" with me?  or maybe even "Remember", from A Little Night Music - appropriate if a tad suggestive.  Two great Sondheim duets.  Joy of joys would be for me to accompany her in "The Miller's Son", also from Night Music, but it's a bit steamy and I don't know whether she's quite up to playing the trollop.  What an astonishing song though: and in a way even appropriate, because it's about seizing the moment - you never know how short it might be.  We live, according to the lyric, in the "meanwhile".  Pwd's have no option, time is a complete muddle to them.  Well, you can dream: and dreaming is what I should be doing right now, instead of writing this blog at some unearthly hour but this is fresh and I'm still high after the concert.

Off to see Dad tomorrow.  That will bring me down to earth.

Remembrance Sunday 2011

Leading the remembrance ceremony at Coxhoe: I was the community parson for half an hour, since the parish church is currently waiting for a new vicar and the Catholic priest had to be elsewhere.  I don’t mind doing the formal thing: I can deliver a text professionally enough and know how to use a mike.  I just struggled internally with certain things the text was saying: greater love hath no man than this, that a man should lay down his life for his friends, is categorically not about war.  I find such abuse of scripture deeply offensive, and I don’t take offence easily.  One could see how it might have resonated in 1919 or whenever the liturgy was drawn up: men in the Great War really did imagine themselves to be making sacrifices to prevent the invasion of their homeland by the ghastly Hun.  By 1939 we had, surely, become more realistic about what war means: it’s a filthy, disgusting, destructive business to which no honour, no glamour should be attached. 

That is not a pacifist statement: I cannot affirm that fighting a war is in all imaginable circumstances preferable to not fighting one, and from that it follows that I support in principle the existence of armed forces.  In practice I think everything to do with them stinks: they guzzle up human and material resources, show off in their planes by flying low over the countryside and frightening the cows into miscarriages, mis-manage their budgets something atrocious and are never held to account… and then they expect us to admire them, defer to them, address their commanders by their rank like it confers some kind of virtue on them.  Sorry, Colonel, you’re just a posher-talking variety of killer.  Of course, Hitler had to be defeated.  Which raises many questions about how he might have been stopped before 1939, but come that year few denied that war was the only way.  That doesn’t justify all the tactics we then used, in particular the fire-bombing of German cities in revenge for the Blitz.  Those bombers were taking risks, of course, but they weren’t laying down their lives for anyone: they were trying to take as many lives as they could, without surrendering their own.  That’s sheer wickedness and the brave people I honour are those who not only saw this at the time but dared to speak their minds.

The question that demands attention through all this is: who decides what should be remembered and controls how we should do our remembering?  I don’t actually object to Remembrance Sunday as such, and find it intriguing that many people much younger than me see it as a meaningful day: clearly not because they grew up under the shadow of WWII.  There were Brownies and children from the primary school laying their wreaths at the Coxhoe war memorial.  I hope they come to reflect on the stupidity of war and pledge to make a better job of running the world than their parents’ generation did.  But I do object to the assumption that we have to use the same sort of language now that was appropriate in 1919 and maybe 1946, when the sheer relief of a by no means certain victory and the trauma of so much loss and hardship entitled people to take a few liberties with language and even maybe to bend Holy Scripture to their purposes of mourning and finding comfort and meaning in the midst of the destruction.  We should know better now.

Dad never made a big deal of Remembrance Sunday, I guess because he had memories he wanted to well and truly bury rather than summon to consciousness.  He wore his poppy but didn’t attend any do’s at the local cenotaph that I can recall.  Good old Dennis.  No-one was going to tell him how to do his remembering.

He’d been called up in 1942, when he was 18.  The following year they sent him to Burma and it was a grim time.  However his most remarkable story is of a freaky escape (and I am studiously avoiding the word “miraculous” here) on Christmas Day 1944, when his entire regiment walked into a Japanese ambush and were, let’s say, Daleked.    (In the hackneyed mythology of war that I grew up with, the Japanese were more like soulless killing machines than other human beings who just happened to be fighting on the opposite site.)  I’m told the incident gets a mention in the footnotes of the history books of the war in the Far East, but I’ve never looked it up.  Anyway Dad missed all the Christmas carnage: he’d contracted something like dysentery and had flown back to India to recuperate; but for that illness he’d have been one more for the Japs to exterminate and I wouldn’t be here.  Other than that, and some strained admissions that he’d done a spot of exterminating of his own, he never talked about the Burma years.  After VJ day he was transferred to India to, what, help maintain law and order during the time to transition to independence? Splendid job we made of that then, but anyway, those were exciting years for my dad and he’s talked about them increasingly since Mum died in 2003.

But then there was the curious incident of the Second Photograph Album.  Dad, I have to say, was never particularly good at or interested in photography, but he had cameras and took snaps as many do.  Gave it up long before increased affluence allowed him and Mum to travel abroad, on trips where he would have seen many sights worth shooting: the prospect of being camera-less in the Alps would mortify me, but not my Dad.  Anyway, the regular family album, with its collection of wedding photos, followed by a sequence of me as a baby/toddler/precocious little horror was brought out regularly.  But on the same high wardrobe shelf, out of my reach, there lived another album which was never produced.  One day I was in my parents’ bedroom, and noticed that it had gone.  Later I would learn that it was Dad’s collection from the war years, and he and Mum had come to an arrangement: once I was old enough to ask what was in it, out it went.  Apparently I had asked, though I can’t remember.  Oh for heaven’s sake – why couldn’t he have stashed those photos in the roof or somewhere I’d never go?  It would be absolutely fascinating to see them now, but here I think is the truth: he wanted a pretext to destroy those memories, and my curiosity would serve the purpose.

They shall not grow old as we that are left grow old, the lucky bastards.  At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will carry on with our lives as though that blithering war never happened.  There are memories we keep; there are memories we deliberately suppress; there are memories we lose; and now, for Dennis, there are memories that he can’t remember he ever had.

Awareness Weeks

Rabbit, Parkinsons, Dyslexia, Deaf, Brain, Business Continuity, Mental Illness, Salt, MS, Eating Disorder, Asexual, and Alcohol are, believe or not,the first dozen hits resulting from a Google search on * Awareness Week.  Who would have thought it?  Alcohol one might have predicted, cancer certainly (though why male rather than cancer in general?  one might have thought Breast would be more prominent, if that's the word...) and maybe even Parkinsons.  I'm glad that Mental Illness makes the top ten.  But Rabbit Awareness Week as the no.1?  Someone has been manipulating Google to produce that outcome, surely. 

Further down the list - I am not making this up - are awareness weeks for Ragwort, Compost, Groundwater, Capitalism, Orangutan, Encephalitis, Sea Otter, and Zombie (which isn't a joke, it refers to a particular form of cyber-crime, of which I wasn't previously, er, aware.)

Perhaps there should be an "Awareness Week Fatigue" awareness week.  Dementia has a lot of competition.

It doesn't figure in the early hits, although if you're in the trade, so to speak, our Awareness Week, in July, feels like quite a big deal.  Certainly I was heavily involved in Fantastic Fred's planning team, and recruited my sister in law to produce the publicity for us.  We had a full programme of events, an information stall, a showing of "Iris", a specially commissioned piece of drama, a recreation of "Partial Recall"  at the carers' information centre .... my own contribution was to organise a special singing session involving children from a primary school next to the day centre where I regularly do my thing.

I daresay we raised some awareness, how much is hard to quantify.  The Week had a very different feel to me now that dementia is something that involves me personally.  Some of the comments we picked up reminded me, which must be obvious to anyone who doesn't live and breathe the subject, of the extent of the stigma that still attaches to it.  The condition is still seen by many as something shameful, a stain on the family to which the sufferer belongs, much in the way that cancer used to be.  If we are now able to talk more freely about cancer, saying "tumour" when we mean tumour, rather than "growth" or "lump", that's all to the good but maybe reflects the advances in medicine whereby cancer is no longer an automatic death sentence.  People survive it as they never used to; with some forms they are even likely to survive it.   But no-one recovers from dementia.  It's an early warning of the inevitable and what's more it robs victims of their dignity and ability to fight it.   You can hardly blame people for taking the "ignorance is bliss" attitude.

I was also reminded of the difference between savoir and connaitre.  I prepared a rolling Powerpoint to run in the background at the carers' centre.  I researched it thoroughly and it has been widely appreciated, so I "know" my stuff.  A year ago, however, I knew it only in the savoir sense: I was well informed.  This year it was connaitre, I know it through having encountered it personally as a carer, and my own slides hit me with a poignancy they did not have before even though they convery the same information. I look at them now and think: that's my dad they're talking about.  Real connaitre would be knowing that you have the condition yourself, but here's the perpetual irony: the more you have it, the less you know you do.

Dementia and ID

ID standing not for identity but Intelligent Design.  In its more developed form, the theory is largely confined to fundamentalist USA and argues that the complexity of some organisms is such that they could not possibly have evolved as Darwinism proposes but rather provides evidence for the intervention of a Creator.  This Being is never specifically identified as the Christian God, but it is striking how many ID enthusiasts turn out to be Christians of a particular persuasion.  Their ideas are often seen, I think rightly, as a Trojan horse for full-blown creationism in all its majestic craziness, and while I'm pretty knowledgeable on that subject it's not what I'm discussing here.  Suffice to say it's balls, and while ID may appear to be on to something it too has been thoroughly discredited other than among those with an ideological and/or theological axe to grind.

I'm more concerned with the kind of "soft" intelligent design theology that IS widely held in this country, even at a superstitious level among many whose Christianity is of pretty sketchy kind.  It goes: if there's a God, he must have a plan for people's lives.  Things happen for a reason, because they are His will, or don't happen because they're not.  There's a purpose in everything, an overall design. 

"With God things don't just happen, everything by him is planned", goes one popular song; and "every fox and every hare/Must fit in a special place somewhere" burbles another.  The second is for kids, maybe they both are, but that's no excuse.  I don't know whether to be sad or angry at the level of deception, maybe self-deception, on display here.

God or no god, the world is a random place.  Randomness is part of how we got here, as both Darwinism and, in a different way, quantum mechanics combine to tell us.  Shit happens for a reason in the sense that events have causes - those two lumps of metal got seriously mangled because they were travelling towards each other at a combined speed of 150 mph - but not for any purpose (God clearly meant to kill the passengers in those cars, with the exception of one who suffered brain damage and will never speak another coherent word again?  Bollocks).   Some people miraculously survive earthquakes, right.  Many other people miraculously don't.  There is no helpful answer to the question "why should my child get cancer", only the distinctly unhelpful "because there's a one in 100,000 chance that any given child will and yours won the devil's jackpot".  Only the devil has nothing to do with it either.  Nor does the so-called "Fall", which creationists insist on as the moment when sin, suffering and death entered the world for the first time.  As God's punishment for a single act of curiosity - hey darling, wonder what that apple tastes like - when He himself set up the temptation and issued the prohibition in full knowledge that Adam and Eve would break it?  Oh come on.  As I am forever telling people, Genesis 3 is about the dawning of human consciousness.  Until that apple gets eaten, the divine plan is stuck in neutral.  It has to be eaten, God makes sure it gets eaten by putting it within easy reach, drawing attention to it and even supplying a talking snake to persuade the all-too-innocent couple.  And who, pray, endowed this snake with the gift of language in the first place, if not the Almighty himself? 

I digress, but my point is clear. Among the shit that happens is dementia.  Not all old people get it, some quite young people do, and it affects every sufferer in a different way.  No God worthy of human worship could plan such indignities; a devil might, but Christianity declares that the devil has been bound, however one may interpret that metaphor.  Dementia is part of  is part of the price we pay for having learned how to extend our life expectancy.  Why it exists at all is part of the larger problem - why pain, why disease, why the associated degradation?  Can theology make sense of this?  I think it can, but not in terms of a God who actively wills these things as some kind of revenge on us for doing our own thing (otherwise known as sinning).

An Intelligent Designer, to finish where we began, would surely have come up with a dementia-proof brain.

The day they sectioned him

Nov 10: a day to remember.  Or maybe to forget; but then it began with Dad completely and quite uncharacteristically forgetting himself and causing an incident.  Which he now professes that he can’t remember.

It goes like this: around 9 o’clock Dad’s keyholder tries to ring me only I’m driving so I can’t take the call.  When I’ve arrived and before I can respond, the care agency rings  - at a time when I know it means there’s a problem; usually that he won’t let the carer over the threshold.   This time I’m told that he has wandered across the road in his underwear, the keyholder has seen him and tried to encourage him back home – whereupon Dad makes some kind of sexual advance to her.   The lady is duly perturbed, makes him return, and then rings someone for help, I think a lady from church who also knows Dad.  The care agency is on the case and so is the CPN, as you’d expect, but then it’s what they get paid for.  That two ladies from church agree at no notice to sit with him for a couple of hours to make sure he doesn’t do any more stupid things is a classic instance of Christians going the extra mile.  Meanwhile I’m at work trying to organise a bit of live music, partly in order to publicise the work I do with singing and dementia.   Later I will need to drive to the coast for a conference; fortunately and most unusually I have a passenger with me who not only can take calls on my mobile while I’m at the wheel, she is a former CPN herself and can comment knowledgeable on the situation down in Grottsville as it develops.  Both the care agency and Dad’s CPN ring en route and my passenger’s expertise proves is invaluable.

Knowing that she’s an unbeliever, for want of a better word, I tell her she’s just had proof that there is a God.  On the one day I really need a passenger to take my calls, otherwise I’d have to stop and make myself late, he not only provides me with one but a passenger with exactly right credentials.  Aware that I’m winding her up, she follows the logic through.   If God so engineered matters that I find myself driving a passenger just when I need one, am I also implying that he fixed it for my Dad to make a pass at his neighbour?  Fifteen all.  But as I then remark, Christians think like this all the time.  On those good days, when everything surprisingly works out, all the lights are at green, you get the last parking space and you bump into an old friend you haven’t met in years who gives you a vital piece of information that un-snarls a situation that’s been snarled up since forever, well there’s Providence aka God doing its thing, shaping your end.   They call it "God-incidences", a coinage that makes my toes curl.

So what of those other days when you get stuck in road works and turn up late for a meeting where you’re giving a presentation, only your laptop won’t talk to the projector, then your wife rings to say the cat’s been run over – what was Providence doing then – sleeping on the job?  Trying to teach you a lesson?  Punishing you for going on that porn site the night before?  Suppose you’d been on the porn site the night before that other really good day as well – it doesn’t work, doesn’t it?  The example I give my passenger is more succinct than this of course, I’ve got some thinking time right now.  The substantial point is that Christians talk glibly about God being at work in positive situations and ignore the fact that many situations are basically shit.

It occurs to me that I am now the son of a dirty old man.  Let’s hope it’s not hereditary, says the famous Eccles when I convey this thought to him

Underneath the levity I am worried not that the mental health team will section my dad but in case they don’t.  My passenger, who has been in such situations many times, assures me that they are following procedure but that there can be only one outcome.  Dad clearly cannot be trusted in public and in that sense is not safe; I want him on a ward where they’ll look after him but also watch his every move, and find out why his condition has worsened so quickly in the last few weeks.  The phone eventually rings again at around seven, with a young psychiatrist clearly relieved at not having to explain to me what a section is or persuade me that it’s my dad’s best interests.  He wants me to persuade him to go voluntarily, and I promise to try.  Otherwise they’ll have to use strong-arm tactics, which will be traumatic for him and another potential risk.

In the conversation that follows Dad is still worrying about the huge sums of money that are owing to him and which people won’t hand over.  I try to make him remember what’s really happened earlier but it’s clear that he can’t or won’t.  He knows he’s been across the road to the neighbour’s but not that he wasn’t dressed properly or that he’d made an improper suggestion.  Well, he’s a gentleman, and no gentleman would behave in that way, therefore the incident never happened, so of course he can’t remember it.   He’s handed reality back to the shop and demanded a refund.  He puts up the “just a minute, just a minute” barrier again to assert his control over the situation, but it’s surprisingly fragile and after I’ve stood up to him a couple of times his defences suddenly crumble and he agrees grumpily to go to hospital – for reasons that make no more sense than his earlier defiance, but at least I have a result.  I end the call, ring the psychiatrist’s mobile, and Dad is whisked off compliantly in an ambulance while he can still remember that he’s promised me he would go.

In consequence, he goes to hospital in the clothes he has on and with nothing else.  I will have the task of packing a case for him before I go to visit him the following day.

At home I find a dozen instances of what happens when Dad resists the carers coming in and tries to manage by himself; he doesn’t.  For example: a tub of whipping cream, bought two shopping trips ago and ten days past its sell-by.  It’s been in the fridge all that time but tastes disgusting and has to be chucked out.  For that matter, two pints of milk which aren’t up to their sell-by have gone off as well, presumably because they spent a good deal of time NOT in the fridge.

He’s been particularly naughty about washing, which Zoe is supposed to do for him only he now reckons he’s “sacked her” for skimping on her hours.  So we’ve got a pile of washing on an armchair waiting to be ironed; a load in the machine, which has been stuffed so full it can’t have been washed properly; and a plastic bag full of dirty washing, some of it very pongy, in a wardrobe where carers wouldn’t necessarily think to look.  That’s not to mention the mucky pants just strewn on the floor and another pair soaking  in the bathroom washbasin which suggest he might have been taken short.  I don’t have time to deal with this, Zoe will need to pay another visit.