Authors Electric

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 ...

One of the key players in John's Campaign has been Nicci Gerrard's bike The beginning of John's Campaign didn't feel like a thunderclap. Nicci Gerrard and her family were on a extraordinarily long bicycle ride from Islington to Suffolk and had stopped with us in Essex for a sandwich and a map-check. I asked Nicci about her father who had recently left hospital and was so heart-wrenching un-able. She talked about the difference it would have made if they'd been allowed to spend more time with him. I'd recently been reading Sally Magnusson's Where Memories Go , an account of her mother's dementia which highlights the trauma AND TOTAL STUPIDITY of being forced to leave a vulnerable woman in an incomprehensible environment with no family support. Actually I think it's worse then stupid and wasteful, I think it's cruel and just plain WRONG. (It's okay, I've stopped shouting. I'll go on with my story now.) So there we were in t...

"Pet Therapy" - as approved by Dr Moreira Pinned to my mother's sitting room wall is a small and slightly worn piece of paper. It's headed Dr Moreira's Good Advice. Dr Moreira's title is Speciality Doctor Later Life Care Community Psychiatry and I hope she realises how invaluable she has been in helping my mother (and me) through periods of particular distress. My mother has both Alzheimer's and vascular dementia and there have been moments when I have feared that medication might be necessary. Dr Moreira asked us questions, listened to the answers and offered preliminary advice. This was the list I jotted down later: Drink water frequently Eat as healthily as you can Take exercise but don't get over-tired Avoid disorientation Have some fun Don't get ill I remember thinking that the last one must be some sort of doctorly joke. Illness is something that just happens: you get it cured and carry on. People with dementia,...

Do you remember those signs that used to crop up on office walls? “You Don't Have to be Mad to Work Here / But it Helps.” I always suspected that they were the hallmarks of a rather aggressive sanity. There's a type of person too – happy to announce “Oh we're all quite mad , you know!” – when one knows quite well that they're not; they're just a bit loud and attention-seeking and probably SMUG. I almost lost my sense of humour when I noticed members of a writer's group cheerfully claiming to be “mad”. Mental illness is so un-funny and I've usually assumed that most of us write to remain sane, to make some sense of our experience of life – to try to keep the madness at bay. Dementia is (currently) an incurable mental illness which gradually takes away the ability to read, write and speak. Last year I read Naoki Higashida's autobiographical The Reason I Jump: One Boy's Voice from the Silence of Autism  and found unexpected insight into aspects of ...