The joy of reading aloud
‘If we all read aloud each day, the world would be a better place,’ Philip Pullman has said. He’s preaching to the converted, as far as I am concerned: my 10 year-old and I studiously ignore the fact he can read perfectly well by himself in order to go on working happily through books together [...]
Music making intense experiences for people with dementia
On a day when it has been reported that if Alzheimer’s were a company, it would be bigger than Wal-Mart, I’ve been to Wigmore Hall to look at a scheme that seems to be improving the lives of people with dementia and those who care for them. Music for Life is hardly on a scale [...]
The secret of youth: flares and orange carpet
And lo, Liz arose from her wheelchair and walked, and it was all down to the swirly-patterned wallpaper. The BBC’s The Young Ones concluded last night with the housemates undergoing a series of tests which purported to show pretending you are living in 1975 can make you fitter, better at remembering things and generally more [...]
Falling apart, stylishly
‘I like being old at least as much as I liked being middle aged and a good deal more than I liked being young,’ Jane Miller writes on the first page of Crazy Age. It is an encouraging start, promising a thoughtful, individual and particular take on ageing. A former English teacher and professor at the [...]
In praise of aimless learning
I dreaded retiring from work in 1992. I felt there would be no structure to my week. Fine for a holiday, but I worried about waking on a Monday morning every day of the year wondering, “what can I do this week?” Being retired can be a burden. There is too often a feeling of [...]
The relentless stress and the joy of being a carer, by the wife of a diplomat
Donna Thomson is the wife of the Canadian High Commissioner in London and the mother of a son profoundly disabled with cerebral palsy. The Four Walls of my Freedom, the book she has written about the experience of being his carer, is both an account of looking after a child in pain and a meditation [...]
The precious gift economy of caring vs. box-ticking technocrats
The funding of care in England and Wales is a Byzantine structure of mysterious entitlements and clawbacks. The new government has wasted little time (rather like its predecessor in 1997) in announcing an investigation into this morass – and, with its Commission on the Funding of Care and Support due to report next summer, it’s [...]
Playing for grownups
The first seniors’ playground in London opened three months ago to quite a lot of hoopla and, yesterday, I went along to Hyde Park see how it’s going. The nearby tennis courts were full, a mother and adolescent son were playing mini golf through the rose bushes, there were queues for the table tennis at [...]
The small society
I met the redoubtable Dorothy Runnicles at a conference a couple of months ago and have just read the report she published in February this year on voluntary groups run by and for older people. Her findings are encouraging – suggesting that there is far more community involvement than anyone officially knows anything about – [...]
The Big Society is alive and well…in Kerala
David Cameron’s idea of the Big Society seems destined for a life as troubled as its long-lost older sibling the Third Way. At its worst, the Big Society could be a flimsy fig leaf designed to cover up some of the worst consequences of deep cuts in public services. Charity, local volunteering, philanthropy, at least [...]