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!

Maytime

The main flowerbed in late May - a few years ago.

I was trying to think about why May is so utterly gorgeous - already the blossoms on the fruit trees are over, and the roses are just beginning.   What is so beautiful about it is that while one watches the blossoms fade and fruit beginning to set, one can also clusters of buds, roses, honeysuckle, pinks preparind to flower in the next few weeks.  Still lots of potential even while things are already looking wonderful.  

 In the last few days I have just about begun to shake off the post-election disappointment, although one friend who voted Tory rang up today because she fancied a political discussion, ended up so annoyed with me that she has de-friended me on FB.... I suggested we agree to differ three times and tried to change the subject, but she wasn't having it.    Over many years of political life I have heard all the arguments - I can't see myself having a Damascene conversion to the Tories at this stage.      Meanwhile, between bouts of gardening, drinking and socialising I am getting on with the book - I have nearly 50,000 words on The Malice of Fairies - and that is really encouraging.  I don't want it to be much longer than about 80-85,000 words.  I've got most of the plot sketched out - so it should be straightforward to write it.  I guess I could do it at a gallop by the end of June - but I think I will do it in a slightly more leisurely way.

What else is new?  We have bought a lovely painting from out neighbour Steve Lobb - and we are about to have works done on the house.  I do hope my father can be persuaded to give us the rest of the money he promised us.  Or, even better that we can earn some - our lives are very full without earning money - which isn't much fun.  Still we had some lovely visitors this weekend and earned a massive £161...

Resisting UKIP

Some of my comrades in the Stand up to UKIP group want to write a pamphlet - with the working title of "How we beat UKIP".  Although we have agreed that this will not be the title - I feel this highlights a fundamental issue.   My analysis of what happened in the general election in Thanet South is very different from theirs, and I don't think there is much chance of an honest discussion within the group of "what really happened" or the "truth" as the more philosophically inclined of us like to call it.

SUTU did a wonderful job in encouraging people to realise that they were not alone... and that we should try to resist the Purple Menace with all our might.  Despite my occasional suggestions that we should do something to undermine UKIP's attempts to seize the council, this was contradicted saying "Farage is our focus".  He didn't win the seat, but both Thanet District Council and Ramsgate Town Council are now dominated by UKIP.   Last night - at our post election meeting - it was said by several speakers that having a UKIP Council (the only one in the country) was somehow "a good thing" because it gave us a focus to continue the struggle.   It may well be - but I cannot see it being objectively a "good thing" for the people of Thanet.   It is "a good thing" perhaps that more people have been politicised and engaged than for a long time - but at what cost?

Personally I would rather not be continuing the struggle - personally I would like to be cultivating my own garden and not attending meetings etc.  I would like to do something useful, but I don't want to continue doing it this way, in this style, and I'm not sure whether the Labour party will be the place for me now either, as some people begin to salivate at the prospect of a return to Blairite values.

How did we "beat" UKIP?

I would love to believe that our relentless campaigning, leafletting, stall running, stickering, etc. had beaten UKIP.  I don't want to take any glory from the people who worked so hard (harder than me probably), but this is why I think we beat UKIP - or rather, why Farage was not elected.   I don't have statistics and so on to back me up - but this is how I analyse the election result here.

In 2010 the Conservatives won 48% of the votes and had a 6,600 approx majority over Labour; UKIP came 4th. with 2,500 approx.  This was after a boundary change had made the constituency a far safer Tory seat than it had been previously.  Labour won it in the 1997 landslide - and Ladyman held on to it, with tiny majorities, partly due to the benefit of being the incumbent.

I have no doubt that Laura Sandys would have comfortably won it if she had run this year.  It is a Conservative seat.  In this election a large number of Tories defected to UKIP as did a roughly similar number of Labour voters, and apparently most of the Lib Dems....The Tories held onto their seat - the polls were wrong, Will Scobie (Labour) didn't in fact have a realistic chance, and we were lucky we didn't have to vote Tory to defeat Nigel.   Many Tories dislike UKIP even more than we do.  Laura Sandys' Hate not Hope letter to the constituency may have been helpful - or it may have been too late to make any difference.   Perhaps SUTU prevented even more Labour people from defecting to UKIP, and perhaps dislike of Farage galvanized more people to come out and vote against him, or perhaps love of Farage encouraged traditional non-voters to come out and vote for him.

People love novelty.  They  don't like change when it's thrust upon them - but they like feeling that they can bring about change.  By getting the only UKIP council in the UK they have got a change of their own making.  We are hoping the council will screw up big time, indeed we are expecting it.  However, our definition of screwing up and the voters' definition are two different things.   Local Kippers may be emboldened by their success and delighted by what the council does (privatised litter fines for example).

No more glad, confident [Friday] morning...

For all these reasons I couldn't share the delight in the great moment when Farage lost on Friday morning.  Of course I was relieved and pleased, but not triumphant: because frankly, with a Tory government, and now a UKIP council there's not much to rejoice about, and the combined evil of these forces rather overwhelms my pleasure at seeing Farage depart from Fannet South in a puff of purple smoke never to be seen again - oh, until Monday, when he returned as the newly-re-elected Party Leader.  But at least he won't be coming here for his next crack at Parliament - which is why I say: Long life and Good Health to our Tory MP  vivat McKinlay!

Athens - Christos Aneste!

We arrived in Athens on Easter Sunday - somewhat inauspiciously I came over all weak and feeble walking up the ramp out of the plane - and Mark had to carry my laptop bag, which felt as if I had filled it with leaden bricks.

I had spent most of the flight reassuring Finn - who is afeared of flying - that when the plane wobbles as it banks over Surrey, it is not planning to plummet down again, and I also warned him about likely turbulence over the Alps.  He was relieved about that; he had the good sense to buy us some mini-Chupa lollipops to deal with the pressure changes and was just generally a pretty good companion.  He hasn't moaned much yet, although he has been annoyed about the slightly odd wifi signal here.

The journey was in clear skies, mostly - sereno as the Italians say - so we were able to see everything - the Medway, Whitstable, Herne Bay, Pegwell Bay, Ramsgate Harbour - then a whisk across the sea and across Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, crossing the Austrian Alps - which were beautifully snowcapped - then down the Adriatic, with lots of rocky islands and beaches on the Croatian (?) Coast.  We crossed Greece, seeing the geography laid out below us - including a solitary, tall snow-capped mountain - Olympos? That was what I guessed, but it can't have been.  Soon we were flying over Attica and saw the great miles of Athenian sprawl beneath us.  I hoped we could make out the Acropolis (you can see the Colosseum when you fly over Rome), but instead I saw the harbours at Piraeus very clearly.   The long spine of Mount Hymettos separates Athens from the new airport.  It sounds such an evocative name, but I don't really have any connections with it.

Nice taxi driver - I tried my best Greek phrase on him,  "Then milo Hellenika... " but I have "ligo" in fact... after a while I realised "ligo" was derived from "oligos" - a familiar ancient Greek friend, but one's ancient Greek friends are dangerous - the pronounciation is incredibly different and the meanings have been updated..

The most beautiful thing was seeing motorways signs with  "Kale Pascha - Christos Aneste - "  couldn't read the 3rd line, but Happy Easter, Christ is Risen.... the idea one could see Christ is risen on any public place in UK is incredible.  I felt rather emotional at this public witness of faith.

We drove for ages through suburban Attica and finally arrived, turning a corner, the driver said "This Athens!"  Then we drove down wide boulevards lined with trees and vast 19thC neo-Classical buildings, and narrower, more modern streets with shutterd shops and "to let" signs.  Eventually we reached Omonia Square, and turned into some tiny narrow streets to Monastiraki, there was the modern hotel, with a manager who spoke excellent English and we went up to our room.   We do not have a view of the Acropolis from our room - but we can see the square below - the Mitropoulos Cathedral and in the distance the Lycabettos hill.  Which is quite enough.

That Camilla Long riposte in full.

Warning - this article is really only of interest to anyone who (a) lives in Thanet South, and (b) read Camilla Long's article in the Sunday Times last week    Her article is here http://www.thesundaytimes.co.uk/sto/news/focus/article1537512.ece   Mine didn't break the surly bonds of social media to soar into print, since needless to say no one on the Sunday Times was interested, and no one thought to offer it to the Thanet Gazette.

CAMILLA DIDN’T STAY LONG ENOUGH

No seaside town looks its best at the end of winter, and yes, Margate looked sad, but it’s not in Thanet South, so why did Camilla Long start her Sunday Times piece about Thanet South there? Genteel Sandwich is in the constituency too – and the trains to Margate stop at Ramsgate first, where she could have seen the heart of Stand up to UKIP’s (SUTU) fightback against the Farage menace, or she could have written about Broadstairs – parts of which are practically Wandsworth-on-Sea.

Those of us who have been living under the Farage Barrage for the last 8 months or so, are bloodied but unbowed: the struggle is hard, and we don’t need frankly snooty London journalists coming in and giving out a load of flippantly sloppy misinformation. Some of us have been London journalists ourselves, but we like to think we occasionally allow the facts to interfere with our blinkered prejudices. We see Thanet South in entirely different way.

A few dozen UKIP loyalists tottering to the Walpole Bay Hotel on a January evening does lively up the place no end. Most of the liveliness usually comes from SUTU’s banter with Farage’s vast security detail – whom we are assured are not armed. UKIP supporters at these faux-democratic “open” gatherings tend to be elderly; UKIP’s a nostalgia party, with (very bad) attitude. Their other supporters look frankly “well hard”. If Long is talking about the meeting at Walpole Bay Hotel in January this year, the attendance was around 40-60. She may be confusing it with the 500 who attended the Spring Conference at the Winter Gardens. Or is she referring to some secret mass meeting held long ago before Cllr Rozanne Duncan besmirched the “good name” of Thanet UKIP?
We’re not surprised Long had difficulty getting accurate information from UKIP. She should have asked us. Numbers aren’t UKIP’s strong point – they claim 500 as a matter of course – would that be the 500 who were photographed listening to the Dear Leader’s speech at Walpole Bay on a winter’s day? We counted 92 in the photograph. At the hustings Long refers to there were considerably more than 6 independent people, or does she think the audience was entirely composed of friends and relations of candidates? Thanet is small (140,000 population) and a lot of us are related to each other, but apart from Will Scobie, most of the election candidates are not Thanetians.

We know the correct immigration rate, the number on the council, and how many actually attend these UKIP meetings. At least 600 of us, mostly local people, marched against UKIP on 28th February. Not because we want to suppress their freedom of speech, but because we all want something better for Thanet than UKIP.

Yes, Thanet is poor – but worse than that, its education and skills levels are at the bottom for Kent. Education is skewing our demographics – grammar school kids go off to university and often don’t come back for years. Poor education, especially in economics, leaves a section of the population susceptible to UKIP’s “common sense” policies – which bear little resemblance what happens in the real world. Yes we were once an island, but we aren’t isolated: we’ve had higher rates of marriage to outsiders since the 17th century according to a recent academic article, more recently the USAF has made a few contributions to the genepool. Some of the most intransigent insularists are the first generation incomers, offspring of Londoners who came here after the war. In the last 5 to 10 years particularly, artists and professionals priced out of the London housing market have moved here, and Ramsgate is becoming renowned for its music scene, as well as the visual arts that flourish all over Thanet. Others have started small businesses, employing local people. Stand up to UKIP is a group which has united people from all backgrounds in Thanet – natives, returners, DFLs (Down from Londoners) and, yes, even immigrants!

We are a deprived area, but we have pockets of resistance, we have hope, and prospects. In the last few years weekend tourism has grown, people visit and then return, delighted by the beaches, the cliffs, the architecture, the glories of Ramsgate harbour, the bars and restaurants. And although Thanet has suffered a good deal from the decline of the coalmines in the 1980s and the removal of Pfizer’s industrial activities in the first decade of this century, there is the beginning of a growth in jobs, with the prospect of a new industrial development on the former airport site. We need jobs, inward investment, a proper university of our own, but we don’t need UKIP and a clear majority of us don’t want it.