Sunday

A long day today. Not sure what caused the early start but we all woke at 4am and I was the only one who couldn’t get back to sleep. At 5am I decided to stop doom-scrolling, got dressed and went out to do some weeding. The front garden has got so bad now that even I’m embarrassed by it.

My excuse, if anybody passed comment, was always that it was kept slightly wild as cover for the local hedgehogs. There used to be lots round here. We’d put out food and I set up a trail camera so we could watch them. I even set up a YouTube channel for them. We had sightings every night, sometimes as many as four or five in frame at once. Now, I’m lucky if I see four or five in an entire year.

I don’t know why they stopped coming here. I blame Tesco. They changed the recipe for their dry kitten biscuits during the Pandemic and the hedgehogs turned their snouts up at the new version. We never found a substitute that they found palatable. I think the neighbours who take an interest still get hedgehog visitors though. Perhaps not so many but we we don’t get any visits anymore.

The disappearance of the hedgehogs means my excuse for an unkempt front garden has evaporated too.

After about an hour I heard a dog and its owner approaching. I raised my head out of the undergrowth.

“Morning Nessa!”

“Oh Christ!! You scared the shit out of me! What on earth are you doing?”

“A bit of weeding before it gets too hot.”

I don’t normally get to chat with other members of the dog-walking community. When we’re out and about I keep my distance so that Our Hound doesn’t get too upset. This was the first time I’d got to meet her Boxer properly. He’s not the only dog round here called Scooby. He’s big and solid, an absolute Unit, and he’s as daft as a brush.

By the time Lesley got up I’d filled one of those large bags that builders merchants deliver sand and gravel in and had cleared half the garden. Very satisfying but that was me done for the day. If I’d been sensible I’d have gone back to bed for a couple of hours after breakfast. But with The Dog needing her walk and a long list of chores to be done there wasn’t time for sensible.

Looking for something productive to do while in a sleep-deprived and physically worm-out state, I decided to spend a little time processing some of the wood I’ve collected now that I could actually get in the workshop. One of the bigger pieces was a section of willow that I’d picked up on my way home from visiting my Mum at The Home. It was the larger of two sections that I picked up that day and I’d already made some pleasing vases from the first piece. I only made a few cuts before the batteries on my electric chainsaw gave up and the results were disappointing. There’s a reason that trees get cut down – they’re past their best. While the first section was good solid wood, this piece was a lot more variable. Slightly soft in places and still surprisingly wet. It might be hard work getting anything out of this section. But that’s what you must expect when working with wood that’s been saved from a burn pile.

One of the chores we did get done was sorting out the CDs and DVDs that Lesley had brought back from her Dad’s house on Friday. None of them are our taste so we won’t be keeping them. None of the online sites that will buy CDs want them either. But what was interesting to me was the chance to play another round of the game I call When Did Dad’s Dementia Set In And Could We Have Noticed It Sooner. He’d bought himself a CD of easy listening music – not that I find it easy to listen to myself you understand – and had not even taken it out of the cellophane wrapper. That’s not unusual for him. His house is full of stuff that he’d bought because he thought he might enjoy it only to put it away when he got home and never look at it again. No issue there. I’m sure a lot of people do that. Except that in another stack of CDs from another pile in the same room as the first was another copy of the same CD. This one hadn’t been unwrapped either.

Were we looking at a man who had accumulated so much stuff that he’d lost track of what he’d got or was this a sign of something more serious? Had he remembered buying the CD but had found it easier to buy a new one when he’d been unable to find the first one or had he lost all recollection of buying the first one? Thinking of where he might have gone to buy such a CD and when he might have been physically fit enough to have got there under his own steam puts the most recent purchase maybe ten years ago and the first purchase around the time when Lesley’s mum was nearing the end so he could’ve been distracted when he bought it.

That’s the awful, scary thing about dementia. Individual events can all too easily be explained away. Who can really tell the difference between stress-induced forgetfulness and a genuine problem? The routines that sufferers can stick to can mask the extent to which dementia has progressed from family and by the time a professional has got involved to offer a diagnosis the dementia will already be well advanced.

Bloody hell.

Author’s Note

My Mum was in a nursing home in the Thames Valley for a year and a half until she passed away in December 2024. My Father-in-law went into the same home the following January. But Lesley’s sister didn’t approve and made the situation so awkward that he had to be moved. He passed away in March 2025. Names and locations have been changed or hidden to protect the identities of those involved.

Image Credit

Original Image by Nick Gilmore. June 2025.