Tom Dening

It is a typical English bank holiday weekend, raining and chilly, so I have been reading.

This novel, by Bernard MacLaverty, follows a retired couple through their weekend trip to Amsterdam. The novel is not specifically about dementia but, as Gerry the husband has some difficulty with his memory, it’s not completely out of our scope on this blogsite either.

I wrote about apathy for DDD in 2015* but the topic is still important and even featured in today’s Daily Mail!** This leads me to pick up the quill again:

We’re just getting going on a project about hearing loss, dementia and care homes. As research projects do, it has a short title, ORCHARD, which is a contraction of Optimising Hearing Related Communication for Residents with Dementia.

Kate Swaffer is phenomenal.

The American pianist Jenny Lin gave a recital at the Royal Concert Hall in Nottingham this morning (18th December 2016), as part of the series of Sunday recitals that take place there each month.

Both hearing loss and dementia become very common as people get older and it is therefore to be expected that a lot of people will have both problems eventually. As readers of this blog will probably know, there are about three-quarters of a million people living with dementia in the UK.

Last week I found myself onstage at Nottingham University’s Lakeside Theatre as part of an evening exploring Comedy and Mental Health.

Words are both beautiful and terrible things. Using words like ‘mellifluous’ or ‘Christmas cake’ brings to mind a whole set of associations and images. On the other hand, words are used to spin the web that is the stigma around dementia.

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