My life has been rather abruptly changed by an Alzheimer’s diagnosis. I have a complete set of Alzheimer’s folk on my father’s side – grandfather, father, his sister and brother – so I had for years been drumming my fingers waiting for it to turn up, with each year giving me the happy surprise of not getting it: but this strategy has failed in the end.
There was a week when I was diagnosed as simply having no vitamin B12, a memory-damaging lack, and I was merrily guzzling as many capsules as possible to fix this. But a few more tests disposed of that fantasy. This was my first normal week away from work, with no more farewells or drinks or upbeat commiseration cards to distract me. It is a great relief not to be at work and therefore to stop making mistakes – or rather move my forgetfulness to a purely domestic environment.
Reminiscence and resemblance
A trip to Salisbury to see my surviving aunt – the sister mentioned above. She lives in sheltered housing and happily reminisced about her life working in couture, emigrating to Australia, working in a pub, joining an evangelical church on the Isle of Wight.
Her tergiversations had long fuelled our entire family with happy anecdotes. She showed me photos of my father at the seaside in the late 1940s under the impression that these were photos of myself, but otherwise I felt reassured that, within her severe mental constraints, she was still the same entertaining and charming person I had always known. Whenever we meet, her face flashes at me variations of my now long-dead father.
The Maigret test
A good test for anyone worried about Alzheimer’s is to read some of Georges Simenon’s Maigret novels. When I was anxiously aware that my mind was starting to break up, I decided to work through a bunch of his books and see how I did. All the hospital tests were invaluable for working out what was wrong, but the most clear-cut test was that I could no longer follow Maigret’s logic. I had to write down character names to remember them, only to find I could not remember why I had written them down. Fortunately, I can reread without difficulty, so I am copying Tony Last’s fate in A Handful of Dust and working through all of Dickens in order.
O captains! My captains!
Digging around in a pile of stuff I found my 1976 Puffin Diary. Various moves and deaths have shed almost everything else from my childhood but somehow this has survived. Designed by the great Willy de Majo, filled with Jill McDonald’s cavorting puffins, earnestly introduced by Kaye Webb, it is a masterpiece of mid-1970s design let down by my actual diary entries.
I was only 12 and at a tiny, freezing prep school in East Kent but, still, the banality of what went on: “Cocoa and rissoles, An ordinary day, Get new belt, Doctor Who is not on any more, Mr Wilson resigns as prime minister of England, Get new anorak.”
The diary brought back happy memories of sports every afternoon, the results of which I carefully noted. The two team-captains – always chosen for being notionally clean-limbed straight arrows – would pick their squads turn by turn, and I would always be picked last. The captain lumbered with me would then frown, or curse under his breath, which even at the time struck me as pathetic, given that my actively ruinous and demoralising presence in his team was not a surprise, but simply a direct result of the earlier toss. There is one attractively Beckettian week of entries: “Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing, Nothing.”
Writing against the clock
I have been writing a book called Anglia for the last four years and am close to completing it, perhaps just in time. It has a much shorter time frame than my other books, as the level of cavalier generalisation acceptable to British readers when hearing about Alsace or Transylvania would not work for England. So I have started with the earliest family memory (a public hanging in Stafford in 1856) and end with Thatcher coming to power. Each bit seems quite enjoyable, but who knows really.
I was lucky to have done mountains of reading when I easily could do so, and the book has an odd cast of heroes (Georgette Heyer, Josephine Butler, Frank Buckland, Alan Garner, Nella Last, Molly Dineen, Sylvia Townsend Warner). I feel I am battling against the clock, but may just make it.
[Further reading: Donald Trump is making peace in Ukraine harder]
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This article appears in the 04 Dec 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Books of the Year