Dementia - already?

I suppose everyone my age worries about dementia - and I have tried to ignore the possibility, however, in the light of the recent death of my cousin, the writer Moyra Caldecott, and her experiences, it has been on my mind more than ever.

Moyra had a form of dementia called progressive aphasia - perhaps not strictly dementia - but technically a definite diminution in intellectual capacity - as far as one could tell.  After all, once a person has stoppedi talking, who knows what is going on.intellectually.

Of course, famously, as soon as we read about the symptoms of a disease, we begin to feel that we could be suffering it too.  I immediately related to the stories of how she lost her vocabulary - and it really struck home.  Most stories about dementia begin with people forgetting things more often.  I forget things occasionally - but this isn't a new phenomenon, I had the first "what did I come up here for?" experience when I was 8 or 9 - because we were still living in Bayswater when that happened.  So, I've always gone with positive view that as one gets older one expects to be more absent minded etc., and so one notices it more.   I haven't actually noticed it more - but I have noticed two or three things.  They may be the signs of dementia - or they may just be coincidental - connected with tiredness, or having drink taken the previous day.




1.  Losing words, more frequently - little - temporary - gaps, opening up in the vocabulary.  I usually retrieve these words subsequently.
2.   Mis typing - I am not a perfect typist - who is, but occasionally recently I have noticed the occasional gibberish word appearing in front of me - which cannot be explained.  Or I type a completely wrong word, sometimes these are normal mistakes like confusing "their" and "there", but yesterday I typed "cake" when I meant "gate".  Perhaps that was a Freudian slip - highlighting my subconscious desire for the forbidden -  cake.
3.  General fuzziness.   I don't feel as alert some days as I used to.  I attribute this, to some extent, to spending a lot of time on the intuitve/creative side - and perhaps the elastic between this and the intellectual side is a bit slacker than it was,  making it harder to adjust my focus.  I do notice though that my sudoku completion rates (they are timed on the phone) are slower on average.  And I have less will to try an "extreme" one in case I feel too stumped by it.   The fuzziness is very annoying - I will have a burst of clarity and write an effortless email/letter/passage - and then I'm back to having to make a great effort.   I am hoping it is tiredness.

"A waiter at my own party"

Yesterday was my eldest son's 21st birthday - it was a lovely sunny day and the garden was crammed with 20 odd friends and relations - all people who had known him as a small scrap and there were presents, fizz, goodwill, bonhomie and all sorts of nice things.  Here he is cutting his birthday cake and being toasted.

Before the party I asked if he would help pour drinks and see that people had what they needed.  "So I have to be a waiter at my own party?" he asked angrily.   Later it made me think that that was a very useful metaphor for life - and as my sister P said "particularly so if you are an H---- woman" - "Except of course, you don't get your own party" I pointed out: we laughed.  Like drains.    I am not being martyrish I hope, but this party took a lot of planning, hard work and money, I did a lot of work, his father did a lot of work and even his brother worked on the house and helping out with the preps.  24 hours later, after a successful party - and then having to have the house open for his mates in the evening - I have yet to hear the Thank You...I mildly suggested he could take a plastic box full of chili back to Norwich with him to share with his housemates - and you would have thought I'd suggested he'd taken a route march home via Cardiff, carrying a 48lb pack.

However, today - with few duties except continued tidying up and wondering how to dispose of the leftovers - is absolutely beautiful.  The countryside is beautiful - seeing the wheat ripening in the fields, and the black pigs snoozing in the sun on our way to and from Minster was lovely.   We spent most of the morning sitting in the garden with The Observer and Ned did make us a tray of tea and we ate some of the second birthday cake.  Then we went out to the Corner House in Minster for a late Sunday lunch - and I hoped a jolly mood would prevail - but it didn't.  There are so many topics we aren't allowed to mention... I really don't know what to do.  Usually I find having a scream-up clears the air - but the hostility has been palpable since he returned on Friday evening and stood rigid when I gave him a welcoming  hug....and he's here for such a short time it doesn't seem worth having a row.   He did indicate to his godfather J that he realised it had been a lot of work for me....but honestly the only time he's been really sincere and friendly was when he told me that his new Fender Stratocaster was "just the right colour".... well, let us be grateful for that.  Do all eldest children feel so entitled?  I certainly didn't, but I was a girl of course...

The Garden

The garden has peaked this weekend - we have a wall of jasmine - it smells gorgeous - there are some Compassion rose amongst it.  In the main bed are a huge Mme Alfred Carriere, a libertia grandiflora, nigella, orange perennial poppies, centanthrus ruber, a geranium, and the yellow scabious, as well as a bright blue one.... it looks utterly gorgeous.  The Lady Hillingdon rose looks fantastic - a clematis tangutica is growing into it - so the bright yellow roses  arch against the blue sky, while green yellow buds of the clematis swell below.... it is perfect.  Apart from all the blank bits, where the cat sits...

Friendship - rightness - Afghanistan

A rather random number of items, based on the fact that I met some Dari Afghans last week - they spent the night here in fact - and were fascinating to talk to....It was exciting to hear about Afghanistan from a non-Taliban perspective - they were devout Muslims - but very liberal - disliked burqas and were shocked to see them when they arrived in London!

The Panjir valley - home of my visitors. 

A lot of what they said explained things to me - especially the role of Pakistan in Afghan politics and how they resented it.  I told them how we had had a Saudi student here and what he had said - this made them laugh a lot!   They are not fond of the Saudis, the Taliban or any other manifestations of unhelpful Islam.  They were also exceptionally courteous - I can't say how much I liked them - I felt I was getting the story of Afghanistan from "the horse's mouth" except that this horse looked like the kind of man you would see on a 3,000 year old bas-relief from Persia.  It made me happy to meet them - because what they were saying felt right.  They were justifiably annoyed at the way the West portrayed Afghanistan as an "ungovernable, primitive" country - Z pointed out reasonably, that Afghanistan had been well governed by a peaceful monarchy for centuries - and it was generally incursions by Russians, British etc. that caused the trouble.  Of course I know little of Afghan history but this certainly chimes in with what I understand.   Rather like medieval Scotland - once there's a power vaccuum, lots of great lords come out to try their hand... and there've been appalling power vacuums.      They also said that Khasi (spelling?) was NOT a good thing - and very personally corrupt.

I was able to run these ideas past my friend A tonight - and he agreed with that they had said (he's an "old Pakistan hand" i..e. BBC Correspondent there for a while) and that the Dari were Persians and that Persia/Iran held the key to everything in the ME now.... this could be confirmed, because one of their complaints was that the US was obsessed with Iran and keeping it down, while the Paks rampaged freely in Afghanistan, spreading nasty versions of Islam.

Friendships
A was of course fascinated to hear of my latest friend bust up...he crowed "I told you - first about the witch and then about....".... "You are not as good at spotting these baddies as me!".   I said that basically I gave people more slack than he did, I tolerated lots of things more.  I suppose my dislike of conflict means I don't respond so much to provocation, I pull my punches - and sometimes I have a slightly arrogant feeling that it doesn't matter what they think, because it doesn't in any way begin to challenge what I think. Obviously, these people are not fools - they know they are not getting the full version of what I think...and they feel snubbed by it.  So they react.   At the risk of sounding like that Randy Newman song - "My life is good!", even though I have fewer people to dally with, I don't find my life is terribly impoverished by the fact that I've shed a few friends in the last year (it's been far more impoverished by deaths: Strat, Paul C, Marion).   One can't get everyone to agree - one hopes that friends will accept that, and change the subject, but if they insist.... the fact is, however much I value and enjoy someone's support and interest, if they cannot accept that I'm different from them, then fundamentally there's no real friendship there: there may be kindness, affection and all sorts of things - but to me friendship is about support, and maybe occasionally a bit of critique, but fundamentally about mutual acceptance, warts and all.  Once one person stops accepting the other's warts - there's an end to it!