dementia
Has my father’s BBC addiction peaked?
‘I want the stairlift to go faster!’ said my mother, as the machine she was sitting on whirred furiously while…
Cooking up a storm of memories – Bee Wilson’s kitchenalia
A baking tin, a toast rack and a soup tureen conjure poignant reminders of the past - while Wilson’s wedding ring is transformed into the world’s smallest pastry cutter
How is Arnold Wesker’s Roots, which resembles an Archers episode, considered a classic?
The Almeida wants to examine the ‘Angry Young Man’ phenomenon of the 1950s but the term ‘man’ seems to create…
Gone girl
Anthropology is a drama about artificial intelligence that starts as an ultra-gloomy soap opera. A suicidal lesbian, Merril, speaks on…
Two men and their dog
At the time Supernova went into production one headline read: ‘What did we do to deserve a love story starring…
Divine comedy
Godot Is a Woman opens with three tramps standing on a bare stage beneath a solitary upright. This isn’t Samuel…
Where is my mind?
The Father is an immensely powerful film about dementia starring Sir Anthony Hopkins, who was asleep in his bed in…
Low life
Sally (la Sal, the Salster) is part whippet, part Labrador and part dormouse. She is 16 years old, stone deaf,…
A masterpiece of modern manners
Of all the successful modern female writers documenting their search for love, none has been as endearing as Dolly Alderton.…
Tough-minded and tender-hearted
Nine cups of milky Nescafé Gold Blend a day; a low-tar cigarette smouldering; a hot-water-bottle always on her lap; the…
An age-old problem
‘I’m getting rather tired of me,’ begins Jan Morris in one of the diary entries in Thinking Again, almost certainly…
Letters: Should conservatives be worried that high-spending Boris has a majority?
My father’s imprisonment Sir: Harald Maass’s piece on the plight of Uyghurs in China (‘A cultural genocide’, December 14) captures…
Wisdom of the ages: we must keep listening to the elderly
My beloved grandmother died at 90, and my mother at 89, after having Alzheimer’s for 11 years. So I am…
A frank description of dementia is a searing, suffocating read
In Annie Ernaux’s The Years — her extraordinary act of collective autobiography —the ‘I’ disappears. Her memoir becomes the memoir…
Everything under the sun: The glory of garden centres
Don’t you just love garden centres? You have to be mad to go on a sunny Sunday morning in the…
The upsides of dementia: Forgetfulness can be a blessing
My 91-year-old father-in-law has always had a terror of hospitals. This dates from his time as a Royal Marine when,…
Train your brain: How to keep your mind young
‘Beep!’ This is one of the most maddening computer games I’ve ever played. I’m tracking a flock of birds, and…
I ended New Year’s Eve more sober than I started it
We were eight for dinner on New Year’s Eve: four men and four women with a combined age, I would…
We lost our elderly, dementing French charge
I entered the cave house carrying groceries and panting from the climb to find an old hippie woman displaying rugs…
Speed limit
Slow radio is popping up everywhere at the moment — programmes that have no outward form but just meander through…
Shaw thing
T.E. Lawrence is like the gap-year student from hell. He visits a country full of exotic barbarians and after a…
Letters
What might have been Sir: Harry Mount points out that Boris Johnson is two years older than David Cameron (Diary,…
Letters
Suicide and assisted dying Sir: As a mental health practitioner, I am grateful to Douglas Murray (‘Death watch’, 29 August)…
Sea sound
It’s often not visual images that stimulate memory but a smell, a taste, the sound of pebbles crashing on to…
Presence of mind
‘It’s hard to know how to tell this story,’ she said as she began. ‘Because it’s so loaded. It’s so…
