Authors Electric

  When John’s Campaign went to the House of Commons in March 2022 to explain why legislation is needed to ensure the right to a care supporter, we were asked who we would like to speak on our behalf. Without hesitation Nicci Gerrard and I invited Wendy Mitchell. We feel passionately that there should be ‘nothing about us without us’ but as a dementia campaign it is not always easy to find people living with the condition who feel able to describe their experience in public. Wendy was diagnosed with early onset dementia in 2014 when she was 58. At first, she sank into a deep depression but then decided that there was hope.   She would live as well as she could for as long as she could – and encourage others to do the same. Since then, thousands -- perhaps millions -- of people have been inspired by Wendy though her blog ‘Which Me Am I today?’ her books, her public appearances and her extraordinary feats such as sky diving and wing-riding, undertaken when she discovered that ba...

In the Thatcher room at Portcullis House, Westminster at a cross party meeting of MPs lobbying for a new right. This lovely young woman is 27  yet her disabilities are such that she is  at the level of a toddler. Should she be restricted to interaction  with her mother behind a perspex screen?   In fact, it’s such an old and basic human need that it’s astounding that it must be lobbied for. We are asking for the legal right for patients, residents or service users in the health and care system to maintain their closest personal relationships and be supported, in time of need, by someone who loves them.  And it's not 'them' - it could just as easily be me, or you. Imagine that you're living with some disability, impairment or trauma which means you can’t manage the system for yourself. You need your cognitive guide-dog, your back-up brain - your spouse, partner, dearest friend, child, parent, sibling. The person who you have chosen and you trust. The perso...

The final ‘Bernie Gunther’ thriller, Metropolis by Philip Kerr was published last Thursday.  So was Nicci Gerrard’s What DementiaTeaches Us about Love . Missing from the celebrations were Philip Kerr, who died from cancer in March 2018, and Nicci’s father Dr John Gerrard whose ‘catastrophic’ decline and death in 2014 was the starting point both for John's Campaign and for the much wider concerns of this passionate new book. At the pre-publication party for  Metropolis Philip Kerr was represented by his wife Jane Thynne who quoted Philip Larkin’s famous line, ‘what will survive of us is love’. She would have been as aware as anyone in her audience that this statement, in context, is not unadulterated Valentine’s Day schmaltz.   Here is the last verse of  Larkin's ‘An Arundel Tomb’: Time has transfigured them into Untruth. The stone fidelity They hardly meant has come to be Their final blazon, and to prove Our almost-instinct almost true: ...