Authors Electric

Solo Newspaper is at a premium in our household just now – it’s not just that it’s the fitting-out season and I’ve got a bilge-and-ballast-cleaning operation underway on Peter Duck : we also have a resident puppy. He’s called Solo and he belongs to Bertie -- though it’s me who’s become uncharacteristically protective about the carpets. This blog, however, is not about carpets, bilges – nor even puppies. It’s about family visiting in care homes (though if you've got a picture of a new puppy, it seems daft not to use it).  I was busily spreading newspaper whilst meditating on a recent trip north to talk about John’s Campaign with care home managers, when I spotted an article that was much too good to be peed on.  Jenni Russell of The Times  told the story of an elderly couple, Victor and Edna, who had died at great ages in sheltered accommodation. Their shared funeral would have been a small affair, attended by a few care staff members, until someone alerted the R...

Mum with 'Mr Cuddlebear' a present from her great granddaughters. There's more than one way to 'Be With'.  I think my mother may be dying – or perhaps she's 'just' seriously ill? She has an acute urinary tract and kidney infection, her lungs are crackly, her throat full of mucus.   She hasn’t eaten or drunk for several days and her breathing is rapid and shallow. She can no longer get out of bed, is alternately restless and drowsy, confused, hallucinating, dehydrated, delirious. She thinks she’s dying -- but she often thinks that (most nights, when I leave her). Is this time different? I know so little about death.   When I go to the internet and consult the Marie Curie site  I see Mum’s symptoms checking almost all the boxes – but also these may equally well be the manifestations of her severe infection, diagnosed ten days ago. So there’s no let-up in the struggle to get the antibiotic medication into her, as she spits and claws and hurls ab...

My friend Nicci Gerrard wrote a characteristically clear and compassionate article about care homes in last Sunday’s Observer newspaper.  Here’s the sub-editor’s heading “ Care homes can be lonely and cruel places. But they can also be inspiring and show us how best to give hope and pleasure. ” Having failed to go gracefully into retirement at the end of 2016  the scope of John's Campaign has extended.  Now we’re asking residential homes as well as hospitals to join this movement: to write a pledge, to put up a certificate, to be determinedly up-front in their welcome to families. We’re also offering them space on our website and facebook page to tell us about all the good things they do. The barrage of bad publicity and horror stories has been so intense recently, the crises in both social care and health so much on the public mind, that it’s easy to forget the impact this may be having on the morale of the many kind and decent people who work in these settings – and...

THANK YOU KAREN BUSH / MADWHIPPET for this extra day's grace and for your brain-blowing alternative alphabet.   Do your whippetties play it with you? They look intelligent enough... I blame my delay on the power of stories, their power to break their bounds and invade our minds and knock our lives hopelessly off course. The John's Campaign logo by Claudia Myatt It was two years to this date (yesterday) that I wrote my first John's Campaign blog post  on this site. My friend Nicci Gerrard had, over that previous summer, been telling me the story of her father's catastrophic decline and eventual death following the period he had spent in hospital, severed, by Visting Hours regulations, from the loving support of his family. I'd also been reading Sally Magnusson's narrative of the night she and her sister were banned from remaining in hospital with their mother when she had broken her hip and I was selfishly determined to ensure that nothing like that was ...

Two of your children have been haunting your flat. They are trying to act normally but they are talking about things that you don’t understand. You feel frightened. You haven’t been sleeping well for a long time now. The place where you live is big and dark and quiet at night and there are people who are out to Get you. Your daughter leaves. The other one stays. Later it becomes clear that the Strange Man who is in your flat is going to kill you. You scream and scream until the Man telephones  your daughter. She's only just got home, she says. She can't come back. It'll be another hour. She's tired. She's with Francis and the boys. Instead she tries to reassure you. She puts on her best and calmest voice. She tells you that this Strange Man is your darling youngest son called Neddy who has been with you and her in the flat all day. And the day before. You've never heard anything so ridiculous! You can’t possibly believe her and anyway she isn't...

I don’t usually talk about work in progress. The ideas that make stories are such delicate gifts, potentially so fleeting. They must be nurtured in secret and over time. I don’t usually talk about relationships either, not the ones that matter. So how stupid have I been, I wonder, to publish insights from my mother’s recent life – and mine – when our stories are still a work in progress and what is true today may be fool's gold by tomorrow? Relationships change as people change -- well, we all know that -- but there's something about a close relationship with someone who is living with dementia that feels quite frighteningly unstable. You discover how the faculty of memory ballasts the most everyday interactions. You both know, you assume , that the reason you’re both rather achy and therefore grumpy is that you’ve just returned from walking too long in the sun. But, if the fact of the walk has vanished from one mind, only the grumpiness remains and that can be disconce...