Suzy Webster is very special. She’s a mother, daughter, wife, and for many years carer to her mum, Barbara. In 2012, after Barbara developed dementia, she and Suzy’s dad, Gordon, came to live with Suzy and her family in Chepstow. When I first met Suzy over a decade ago, I was struck by her quiet determination, her love for her family and her wonderful way with words. I can still remember her telling a conference that her parents had moved in with her and her family so that they could have “the d...
Apr 10, 2024•1 hr 6 min•Season 1Ep. 57
Kitty Norton describes herself as a former “just about everything – from non-profits arts administrator to cabaret performer to post-production professional to crappiest daughter of the year award-winner for more than forty years”. She forfeited that last accolade when, six years after her mum was diagnosed with vascular dementia, and following the sudden death of her dad, she gave up her job with NBC in Los Angeles to move back to Oregon so that she and her sister could provide their mum with t...
Apr 03, 2024•48 min•Season 1Ep. 56
This episode is dedicated to Tony Husband, who appeared on my show not once, but twice – which, in itself, is testament to the man’s generosity of spirit and dedication to raising awareness of dementia. After Tony and I had recorded our first podcast, I said that, for me, Tony was all about creativity, humour and love, and I’d stand by that. “Life,” Tony once said, “is about laughing”. For the prolific cartoonist, that was absolutely true. He used his dark humour to investigate life’s paradoxes ...
Nov 08, 2023•34 min•Season 1Ep. 55
Wendy Mitchell is quite simply one of the most impressive people I have ever met. Diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease nine years ago at the age of 58, after an initial slump into depression, Wendy has since devoted her time and precious energy to raising awareness of dementia, frequently appearing on our broadcast media – she’s a familiar face on the Breakfast Time sofas – and speaking at major conferences. Wendy’s blog, Which Me Am I Today remains one of my favourite reads and, in writing it, sh...
Sep 13, 2023•46 min•Season 1Ep. 54
My two guests this week are passionate about improving life for people living with dementia, particularly through the education and training of those who support and care for them. Dr Keith Oliver is an expert by experience – 13 years’ experience, having been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s in 2010, aged just 55 and forced to retire after 33 years in teaching, latterly as a headteacher. Prof Claire Surr, Professor of Dementia Studies and Director of the Centre for Dementia Research at Leeds Beckett U...
Sep 06, 2023•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 53
I am sure that many people listening to my podcasts will be aware of two ground-breaking medical breakthroughs that have occurred in recent months. These are the immunotherapy drugs Lecanemab and Donanemab, which is shown to have slowed the decline in memory and cognition of people with early stage Alzheimer’s disease by up to 40pc. These drugs do not, like others before them, merely mask the symptoms of Alzheimer’s, which accounts for over 60pc of all dementia cases – they modify the disease it...
Aug 30, 2023•43 min•Season 1Ep. 52
In her native America, Lori La Bey has been recognised for her tireless work to improve the lives of those with dementia through creating, discovering and making accessible a wide range of resources. She has been hailed as a Health Hero by none other than Oprah Winfrey and championed as an Architect for Change by the former First Lady of California, Maria Shriver. Since walking away from a successful career in real estate in 2009, Lori has launched America’s first radio station dedicated to deme...
Apr 12, 2023•56 min•Season 1Ep. 51
In this podcast I talk to two women who, in their different yet linked ways, have grown to appreciate the importance of identity, purpose and togetherness. The common theme isn’t dementia but being the partners of military men – though never fear, dementia plays quite a part in our discussions as you will hear. Heather Sharp and her husband were both serving in the Army when, after having their two children, Heather made the difficult decision to leave. She didn’t know what to expect as a milita...
Apr 05, 2023•52 min•Season 1Ep. 50
Susie Singer Carter spent her childhood as a gymnast, an entrepreneur (selling her toys door-to-door), debate champion, party planner, flag twirler and cheerleader, while surviving her parents’ divorce and her father’s untimely death in a plane crash. While studying journalism at UCLA, she hosted a radio show, modelled and sang in a pop group produced by Chuck Lorre. After college, she opened a handmade jewellery store, acted in TV and film and then decided she wanted to create the projects. She...
Mar 29, 2023•58 min•Season 1Ep. 49
I first met professional cellist Dr Claire Garabedian at a wonderful musical evening where three internationally renowned opera singers performed a piece written for audiences of older people and those with dementia. She spoke then of the powerful communication – the dialogue, conversation, connection – between the performers and audience members. It seems to me that throughout her extraordinary life Dr Garabedian, who was born and raised in America, has been connecting and inspiring people thro...
Nov 30, 2022•46 min•Season 1Ep. 48
Kate Lee, the chief executive of the Alzheimer’s Society, describes herself as a good Yorkshire girl, “What you see is what you get”. I last interviewed her in the dark days of December 2020 as people living with dementia in care homes became virtual prisoners, their relatives only allowed to see them through windows. Most of those with dementia, who account for over 70pc of care home residents, had no idea what was happening, why their loved ones no longer came to see them, they felt abandoned,...
Nov 23, 2022•53 min•Season 1Ep. 47
Jean Lee is a retired American teacher from Ohio who, like me, is an Alzheimer’s Daughter. However, in Jean's case, both parents were diagnosed with dementia. And – and this is quite extraordinary – they were both diagnosed on the same day. Jean is also, like me, a writer, and after her parents died she penned a memoir of her mum and dad, of their deep, lifelong love for each other and how they and their unbreakable bond weathered the tumultuous storms of dementia. Called Alzheimer’s Daughter, t...
Nov 16, 2022•49 min•Season 1Ep. 46
My guests today are Chris Maddocks and Rachel Thompson, two women who both know a lot about Lewy Body Dementia. Chris was diagnosed with vascular dementia six years ago at the age of 60. At the time she viewed it as a death sentence, but the Alzheimer’s Society saved her and when she became one of their ambassadors, she discovered hope and a renewed sense of purpose. Rachel is an Admiral Nurse, a dementia nurse supported by the charity Dementia UK, and she specialises in Lewy Body dementia. Alth...
Nov 09, 2022•54 min•Season 1Ep. 45
I first interviewed Professor Sube Banerjee on my podcast in November 2020, when unbeknown to us, we were about to have our Christmas celebrations ambushed by Covid. Our chat was stimulating, thought-provoking, energetic and creative. It was also full of hope, just like him. In fact, I gave the podcast the title, The Professor of Hope, which many listeners loved. Sube Banerjee led the development of the UK’s first national dementia strategy in 2009. It constituted a huge step towards changing th...
Nov 02, 2022•29 min•Season 1Ep. 44
Sage House is a dementia hub in Tangmere, West Sussex. Said to be the first of its kind in the UK, the hub is located in a light, airy building of dementia-friendly coloured zones, wide passageways, Daisy’s café and numerous meeting rooms for everything from legal advice on drawing up wills and powers of attorney to hairdressing, from Citizens Advice Bureau sessions and dementia assessment clinics to Reiki. The hub provides a one-stop shop to give all the various services that someone diagnosed ...
Oct 26, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 43
When Dame Barbara Windsor died in the dark Covid days of December 2020 the nation mourned the loss of not just an immensely talented and likeable actress, but a friend. We felt we knew this pocket dynamo, through her countless appearances, from her early days in the Carry On films to her later role as Peggy Mitchell in Eastenders, which she played for 20 years. We didn’t really know her of course, not the real Babs. But one man did. Scott Mitchell was 26 years younger than the love of his life. ...
Oct 19, 2022•1 hr 1 min•Season 1Ep. 42
When I last interviewed today’s guest for this podcast it was the summer of 2020 and we were cautiously emerging from our first lockdown. Back then, in July 2020, I said that I admired this young mum from Chepstow for her understated determination, her strength of character and her obvious love for her family. Two difficult years on those words are truer than ever. Suzy Webster’s Covid experiences have been an intense, distilled version of many of ours. We’ve all had to adapt, to become used to ...
May 18, 2022•55 min•Season 1Ep. 41
Older people, says geriatrician Dr Lucy Pollock, are interesting. They are also boring, good-humoured, bad-tempered, serene, irritable, amusing, grouchy, selfish, generous, happy-go-lucky and nervy. “Older people are just all of us grown up”. Of course they are – so why can’t we all see that? It is in order to open up the conversation around old age, something we all reach if we are lucky enough and yet seem to shy away from, that Somerset-based Lucy has written her book, called – without duckin...
May 11, 2022•57 min•Season 1Ep. 40
This week I was delighted to welcome, not one, but four Well I Know Now guests. I thought it was important to talk to them all as they each play vital roles in a Folkestone-based company that works with older people and their families to improve their wellbeing. Plan with Care, launched in 2018, is the brainchild of Chris Gage, a social entrepreneur with a passion to improve quality in care, and his friend Nathan Harris, a chartered financial planner with over 20 years in his sector. The company...
May 04, 2022•54 min•Season 1Ep. 39
Matthew Seager’s play, In Other Words, distils dementia – what it is to have it, what it is to watch someone you love being lost to it – into just 75 minutes, pulling its audience into the emotional turmoil that unfailingly accompanies this cruel condition. Matthew told me that he’d been inspired to write it after visiting a dementia care home during his drama studies at Leeds university. For one module, students could decide which aspects of the performative process they wanted to focus on: Mat...
Apr 27, 2022•54 min•Season 1Ep. 38
“Change your life with an Open University qualification” boasts the OU website. And this week’s guest, author and dementia campaigner Gina Awad, did exactly that – though actually she changed not just her life but many hundreds, possibly thousands, of lives. For it was through a health and social care degree in 2011, at the age of 41, that she first became interested in dementia. Since then she’s gone on to win one of only 12 of the highly competitive places on a training retreat in America for ...
Apr 20, 2022•46 min•Season 1Ep. 37
Ian Kremer has worked for over 25 years on his country’s dementia policies. A member of both the Virginia State Bar and the American Bar Association, he was a director of the Alzheimer’s Association focussing on state and local policy in Virginia, Maryland and the district of Columbia for 16 years before moving to head up the Washington DC-based Lead Coalition in 2012 – LEAD, L-E-A-D, stands for Leaders Engaged on Alzheimer’s Disease. LEAD is a national coalition of over 200 member and allied or...
Apr 06, 2022•1 hr 2 min•Season 1Ep. 36
Niamh Condon has long believed that food is far more than fuel for the body. Coming from a large Irish family, she’s always loved to cook and has known from a young age that sitting down for a meal together brings people close, it connects them and warms them, it comforts them, it nurtures relationships and binds societies. Having worked in the catering industry for over 20 years, in 2014 Niamh began cooking for older people and encountered the challenges faced by those who find it difficult to ...
Mar 30, 2022•51 min•Season 1Ep. 35
Ifirst encountered Beth Britton in 2013 at the Independent Age Awards, where she was named Best Independent Voice on older people’s issues. I was one of those shortlisted alongside her and it was at the ceremony in central London that I first heard this young woman’s incredible story, of how her dairy farmer father had developed vascular dementia when she was 12 and how his condition, with which he lived for a further 19 years, came to dominate her teens and twenties as she willingly sacrificed ...
Mar 23, 2022•50 min•Season 1Ep. 34
Sir Tony Robinson is a highly regarded actor whose family come from the Eastend of London, he’s also a presenter, writer, author, historian, political activist and charity ambassador – often taking on roles that combine his many talents, and earning himself a Knighthood in the process. Not bad for a man best known for playing a witless fool forever coming up with cunning plans doomed to failure. He caught my eye recently as the star of a short film to raise awareness of dementia, written by the ...
Dec 15, 2021•45 min•Season 1Ep. 33
I first encountered Ian Donaghy, aka Big Ian, through his then 10-year-old daughter Annie. She was telling an audience of 800 about her grandma who developed Alzheimer’s at 58. Nana, she said, is still nana despite her condition – she still dances to the radio, ice-skates backwards and lets her watch TV programmes no matter how dreadful they are. “Nana forgets,” she said, “so I remember”. Annie’s nana died two years ago. Annie Donaghy, who must be in her late teens now, is a chip off the old blo...
Dec 08, 2021•49 min•Season 1Ep. 32
A few years ago I stumbled across a wonderful local project initiated by a group of church elders. Launched in the village of Debenham in Suffolk in 2009, its aim was simple: to care for older, vulnerable people in the community where they belonged, so as to avoid them having to leave their neighbourhood, their loved ones, all that was well-known and comforting, to go and live in a care home somewhere else – which is what just over half of these older residents were having to do. And my guest th...
Dec 01, 2021•36 min•Season 1Ep. 31
Carol Sargent is a pharmaceutical scientist turned social entrepreneur from Leicestershire. Holidays had always been important to her and her family, but when her mum was diagnosed with dementia in 2007 all that changed. Searching for holiday cottages that would be suitable for her Edinburgh-based parents she discovered that there weren’t any. Carol had already scaled back her work so that she could visit her mum and dad in Scotland, and her mother-in-law, who also had dementia, in Liverpool. An...
Nov 24, 2021•50 min•Season 1Ep. 30
Trevor Salomon knows first hand the difference that other people’s attitudes can make. When his wife was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s aged 56 she was working at Sainsbury’s. He says that if they’d fired her then he would have had to accept it. But they didn’t. They bent over backwards to keep her on, even when the disease robbed her of many everyday skills – the Sainsbury store in Harrow adapted her role, allowing her to continue with them for four and a half years after her diagnosis and providin...
Nov 17, 2021•53 min•Season 1Ep. 29
Grace Meadows knows the enormous power of music, not only for those with dementia but for children with autism, for women about to give birth and those who’ve just become mums, for adults with severe mental health conditions and youngsters with profound and multiple learning disabilities. A musician herself, she believes everyone is musical. “We all have a heartbeat,” so we all have a pulse and a sense of timing,” she says. “We all have our own style of movement so we all have rhythm; we each ha...
Nov 10, 2021•50 min•Season 1Ep. 28
