The Annual News Drift

Another minor avalanche of cards, letters and e mails this Christmas from friends and onetime colleagues. Everybody seems surprised that there is such a thing as ‘TIME ‘, which seems to flow by more speedily than perhaps when we were younger. ‘I cannot believe that the year has come round so quickly…’ is how many letters begin; our’s did! But we find ourselves saying the same as the weeks go by – ‘can it be Friday already?’ It would be more surprising if time stood still.

People’s news is all about holidays, health – or the lack of it – and most of all, about families. The delight of old age is the adoration of children and grandchildren.; perhaps its danger as well. The thought that the little bit of history that your partnership began, goes on and will continue to when you have gone, is a material fact but also a sort of metaphysical mystery. Wise not to over play the card and suppose the family to be more perfect than it is, the love between us is still a remarkable thing and it’s all the more sad when people are without it. So many of the letters we have had are full of praise (paraded sometimes with pride as well) for their children and their accomplishments. The penalty of being elderly is to look back regretfully on the wasted years and the mishandled opportunities. O.K. But we have been parents!! Hopefully, reasonably good ones as well. Struggling perhaps with limited pensions, we have however left behind a human legacy infinitely more valuable.

One of our dearest friends writes about the hard months of living without her husband, and her tiredness after two years of caring for him. They had four – or was it five? –children who married young and have had large families too, and they look after her as she does them. In their early forties, some of them are now grandparents! ‘We must go on’ she writes. There is this determination not to give up which characterises so many of the messages we have been sent. Perhaps it’s partly the generation and the protestant work ethic that is typical of many of us, but sadness, despair at the world situation and increasing immobility are hindrances to get over rather than surrender to.

But what is the future of our children and their children to be? The incredibly difficult attempt to create a world order based on the survival of the planet and therefore of all its human, animal and plant inhabitants, comes to its conclusion in Copenhagen as I write. The nuclear family is a parable and constituent of the family of humankind. The joy of the one can be a sacrament of the basic unity of the other. However difficult to achieve, may it be so.

Happy Christmas!

Bryan

Getting Older

The Guardian arranged a morning Conference on Ageing last week, chaired by their excellent columnist, Jackie Ashley. She writes about it in today’s edition. She cites familiar projections, such as that there are likely to be 2.9million people over the age of 85 in the U.K. in twenty years time. Today there are four working people for every retired person, but in forty five years time it may be as few as only two working people per aged person. ‘That’s impossible’, says Ashley, ‘it’s unsustainable. It won’t work’. Are we going to ‘import young African and Asian people to fill the workforce?', she asks. ‘Outlandish thoughts, perhaps: but where are the inlandish ones?’

This is an unfashionable cause. Unlike climate change, it isn’t media friendly or sexy – ‘no flaxen-haired young activists, no global summitry, no vast gimmicks, no galleries filled with ‘ageing art’, no rock star campaigners’. She looks forward to the government’s long awaited white paper on funding for provision for the elderly but argues that the situation deserves far more thought and urgency than the politicians are giving to it.

One aspect of the looming situation is the housing problem. Around 60% of the population in the U.K. live in the suburbs where nine-tenths of houses have three or four bedrooms. Whilst older people continue to live in them, younger families seek such houses with sufficient accommodation and gardens for their children to play in. Out of 175,000 houses built each year in this country, only 5,000 are especially designed for older people. Such homes need bright light views and the latest heating technology but don’t need to be big.

Loneliness can be a problem for older people and a recent report suggests that seven million people in the U.K. say they have a severe lack of social support. ‘Clustered’ housing that is part of the wider community is one solution of the sort that in Germany and the Netherlands is already being developed. The family is the best means of dealing with these changes; each of us trying within our means to balance children, grandchildren and grandparents in some sort of solidarity; but Ashley chastises politicians for their indifference to the situation. For all of us longevity will become the new way of life, and one which should not be wretched and lonely.

….And at the mercy of a nation state no longer fit for this twenty first century purpose and which demands a new methodology of governance.

Bryan

Singing for the Brain

Initiated by the Alzheimer’s Society, Singing for the Brain is something that people with dementia and similar conditions and their carers enjoy and which has proved to be amazingly therapeutic. There are some 25 groups around the country, of which Bristol is one and presently has 80 members. Devised by music specialists at Reading University, the groups are regarded as stimulating and challenging, involving gentle physical activity. People who seem lost to normal communication discover they can not only sing old familiar tunes but recall the words as well. A weekly event, they give support to people who care for their partners at home in situations which they may not complain about, but which can be very stressful and lonely.

Bristol's Singing for the Brain group was the subject of a moving BBC documentary which we saw last night. Music, said the organisers of the Bristol group, is one of the few things that everyone can do and enjoy together, however mentally distant some of them may seem to be. The programme showed how people whilst unable to speak coherently, were word and pitch perfect as they sang. The leader of the group says on the Bristol website "I think it's a range of things that make Singing for the Brain appealing – the companionship, the support and the love you see within the group. Within a couple of weeks of a new person joining they say that they feel an overwhelming sense of belonging. "It is brilliant for the carers to have someone else taking responsibility and lovely for people to be able to do something together." On the TV programme there were some remarkable sequences as, sitting in a great circle, people sang and then danced, without it being at all clear who were those suffering from dementia and those who were not.

Several carers and their partners who are part of the group were interviewed in their homes. It was astonishing the bond that remained between them and their determination to stay together despite such difficulties as people not knowing who their husband or wife are, and constantly saying ‘I want to go home’ ( a poignant phrase). One husband said their main connection was tactile – he had become more demonstrative as time went on because it was now the main means of communication between them.

It was a deeply moving programme, highlighting the darkness of Alzheimer’s, the fear of which ageing people as myself shrink from– there are one million who are affected by the condition in the U.K. – but full of light and hope and love as well.

Bryan