Recently, there seem to have been a lot of news features on television about older men suffering from dementia. As I am now well entrenched in the ‘old age’ category of the population, becoming demented is something I think about now and then.
Quite how old I am was forced into my consciousness this afternoon when, completing a survey from The Stables, a nearby music venue, I was asked to indicate my age by putting a tick next to the right category.
How insensitive of them. I was given 14 rows to peruse with the first being 0-14 and the last was 75+. Why have groups of 5 and not 10 years?
36-45 would be much more sympathetic than 36-40 followed by 41-45. Then, I would have put my tick in the eighth row and not the fourteenth. It would still have been at the bottom of course, but at the bottom of a much smaller tower. It wouldn’t have made me feel and appear quite so ancient. Incidentally, the final age group on the NHS website is 91+. That’s more like it.
Every day for the past 20 years or so, I have completed a Sudoku puzzle rated “Super Fiendish”. At first, I did them because I enjoyed the challenge but recently, while doing one I keep thinking something like, “This must be helping to put off dementia.”
There is a timer on the screen ticking away as I do the puzzle. I don’t know why it’s there and I never used to pay any attention to the time it took me to complete a puzzle but nowadays, I do keep an eye on the clock. Today, it took me 37 minutes and that is worryingly slower than usual, especially as Caroline rattled it off in 9 minutes.
This brain damage business reminds me of something that happened ten years ago. We were in France on holiday with Caroline’s sister and her family. Oscar, Joanna’s elder son, who was 12 years old at the time, was playing around on the roof of a shed. He slipped and fell, landing on his head and was unconscious for a short time.
As soon as he came round, the questioning began to see if he was OK.
“Where are we?” asked his mother.
“Talais in France.”
“What day is it?” Caroline asked him.
“Thursday.”
“Say pi,” said Timo, Oscar’s ten-year-old brother.
“3.1415926535897” Oscar began.
“OK, that will do,” interrupted his Mum. “You’re fine.”
“93238462”
“Stop now.”
“64338327950288”
“Stop it!” bellowed his Mother.
“197, but I used to know the first five hundred,” Oscar mumbled, almost tearfully.
In 2008, when I was in Broward Hospital in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, recovering from my liver transplant, I was asked questions by a doctor I had never seen before to find out how my brain was coping after weeks in Intensive Care. I can still remember three of the questions I was asked.
“Who was the last left-handed President?”
“Sorry, I’ve no idea.”
“Who’s in charge of The Department of Education?”
“Ed Balls, I think.”
“What state are you in?”
“Very ill, I suppose.”
I don’t know if that doctor knew I was English and not American. If he didn’t, I expect he thought I was showing signs of dementia.
