A giveaway moment

My dad has a very old friend, who we'll call Harold.  He's as English as toast and marmalade, as was his late wife, and all their respective families; for the first nine years of my life he was our next door neighbour and we still keep in touch.  Now in his 90's, he's physically much frailer than Dad but possessed of a full set of marbles.

Last time I saw Harold he had some old photograph albums out.  He's always been pretty handy with a camera and did his own processing for years.  The pictures he was reminiscing over were of Antwerp during World War II, where he served not as a soldier but in some technical support capacity, and they were typically striking compositions.

I reported all this to Dad, who said "well of course, Harold got married in Belgium, you know".

I didn't need to check my facts; the statement made no sense.  Why should good old English Harold have dragged off equally good old English Elsie to Belgium for their nuptuals?  How on earth would he have sorted out the legalities for a start?  I pressed and pressed, but Dad wouldn't budge.

We can all get daft ideas into our heads sometimes: let's say I hear the word pancetta and am convinced it refers to a variety of cheese.  I later discover that it's a kind of belly pork and realise that I was under a misapprehension.  Silly me, I might say, don't know how I could have got that wrong.  But I would know that I had got it wrong and admit the mistake.  Dad just couldn't see how impossible his idea about Harold getting married in Belgium was; and even on a later occasion, when I reminded him of it, he tried to make out that it might have happened, he just wasn't sure.

In fact there's no way, and the clue to this being more than normal forgettery in an old man is in the complete absence of a "silly me" reaction on having it pointed out to him.  Dementia is like that: you say daft things but don't know that they're daft.  There would be other incidents in the second half of 2010 that told me what I was dealing with, but this was the first that really rang alarm bells.