BOOKS & ARTSchoices — exercise, diet, sleep, work and
so on — will prevent the onset of dementia,
but they did not in Mitchell’s case. And the
bleak fact is there is no cure. There are now
850,000 people with dementia in the UK,
with one in six over the age of 80 devel-
oping it. But there’s been no new drug to
treat it in the past 15 years. And the Ameri-
can pharmaceutical giant Pfizer announced
recently that it would stop work on new
drugs to fight Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s
because it believed that its research didn’t
make sense financially. Depressing.Raiders of the lost lands
Hugh Thomson
The Debatable Land: The Lost World
Between Scotland and England
by Graham Robb
Picador, £20, pp. 334Graham Robb, apart from being a distin-
guished historian, biographer and liter-
ary critic, is one of our most accomplished
travel writers. His The Discovery of France
remains a classic, made both engaging and
accessible by his very francophile obses-
sion with cycling. Indeed, his new book,
The Debatable Land, opens with a declara-
tion that ‘writing and cycling are insepara-
ble pursuits’.
The debatable land in question is the
thin wedge of territory between England
and Scotland on the west coast which, for a
period in the late Middle Ages, was official-
ly declared as lawless by the parliaments of
each country. The resulting piece of English
legislation contains a quite magnificent dis-
claimer:
All Englishmen and Scottishmen are and
shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder
and destroy, all and every such person and
persons, their bodies, property, goods and
livestock... without any redress to be made
for same.As Robb comments dryly, ‘by all accounts
they availed themselves of the privilege’.
Cattle raiders, or ‘reivers’ as they were
known locally, roamed the land, and for
obvious reasons the few human habitations
were strongly defended. Today it remains
relatively empty — a place where ‘it is quite
possible to spend a long day walking across
it without seeing another human being’.
Not even Rory Stewart.
It is to this desolate landscape that
Robb and his wife relocate from a com-
fortable college life in Oxford. Natural-
ly they arrive at their isolated farmhouse
by cycle.
Robb claims a trifle disingenuous-
ly (‘this book, which I had never expect-
ed to write’) that the idea of describing
his new adopted home only came to himA stranger to oneself
Elisabeth Anderson
Somebody I Used To Know
by Wendy Mitchell and Anna Wharton
Bloomsbury, £16.99, pp. 320
Wendy Mitchell was diagnosed with demen-
tia at the age of 58, three years ago. At the
time, she was a non-clinical team leader in
the NHS, managing rosters for hundreds of
nurses and keeping much of the information
stored in her head. She lived in York and had
brought up two much-loved daughters on
her own. She was clearly efficient, organised
and independent. Mitchell realised some-
thing was wrong when, after a series of falls,
she experienced a distinct lack of energy
(she had been a keen runner and walker): a
‘fog’ in her head. The diagnosis was slow —
her GP initially told this fit and able woman
that ‘there comes a time when we all have
to admit to ourselves that we’re just slowing
down’ — but it was confirmed after a series
of visits to a neurologist and various scans
and memory tests.
Somebody I Used to Know, written with
tales from abandoned boudoirs that they’d
have the Sex and the City mob clutching their
pearl necklaces in horror; and such flights of
surrealist fancy — Hitler turns up as a peep-
ing tom landlord; a single girl avoids party
bores by boasting that her boyfriend is the
late Soviet poet Vladimir Mayakovsky —
that it makes Girls look like the pedestrian
plod it always was.
I’m keen on things that aren’t what they
seem, and this book is a shining example;
it’s pleasing to think of it selling to young
women expecting a comforting dose of
chick-lit and then finding themselves hur-
tling headfirst into a surrealist extravagan-
za. It seems unlikely that the dolly blonde of
the jacket photo who writes a dating column
seems all set to become the heir to Hector
Hugh Munro, but as Emily Hill’s stories illus-
trate so beautifully, life is full of surprises.the help of the journalist Anna Wharton,
is Mitchell’s memoir of her life after diag-
nosis, a record of how she spends her days,
and her thoughts, emotions and fears. At
first, she felt abandoned by doctors:
I have heard nothing from any doctor since
my diagnosis three months ago, nothing but
one appointment at the memory clinic...
How can I help my daughters understand
my diagnosis if I can’t understand it myself?
That’s what I feel angry about. That’s why
I feel broken and abandoned, discarded by
an NHS that I have worked in for 20 years...Mitchell, however, was determined to
adapt to her changing circumstances, find-
ing ways round problems, being positive
and not letting dementia win. For example,
she lost the ability to follow plots of new
films, so she watched those she had seen
dozens of times before:
Not that I can remember what happens — it’s
always a surprise at the end — but I feel a
certain familiarity throughout, a sense of the
ending, even if I don’t remember the details.She switched from reading novels to read-
ing short stories and poetry. Clever.
Anyone who has lived with someone
with Alzheimer’s will recognise many of
the frustrations and fears that Mitchell
writes about: the stigma of a mental disease,
the terror of getting lost, doctors’ unhelp-
ful remarks (‘There’s nothing we can do,
I’m afraid,’ she was told when given her
diagnosis), so-called friends going to
ground, the steady decline in memory
and the increasing inability to speak to and
recognise people.
Wendy Mitchell’s lifeline came through
contact with the Alzheimer’s Society net-
work: she began to meet other people with
dementia, and became a Dementia Friends
Champion. She continues to speak at con-
ferences, writes a blog and has a Twitter
account. So despite this horrendous dis-
ease she has made something positive of
her new life with humour, truth and grace,
this book giving a unique insight into what
it’s like to live with Alzheimer’s.
One reads almost daily that lifestyleHow awfully considerate of Mrs Placid to go off and get herself massacred
Everyone must bow to the lovers. The terrorists,
even, conspire to promote their happiness,
finishing off the redundant wife, already wounded,
at the airport. The mirrored elephant shall blacken
on the bonfire, the first son banished to roam
the new motorway. The lovers remake the old world
wit h buttered paws a nd Sca ndinavia n f ur nit ure. Such
selfishness! Their minds blind as they do their stuff,
over and over, in the waltz of diminishing returns.
— Kate White