Frozen Chips In The Salad Drawer

Welcome!

Let me start by admitting that I have never written a blog, or indeed written anything that could end up making its way into the public domain. However, my friends, family and colleagues have repeatedly told me, with increasing frustration, that I am selling myself short, and that I have the ability, if not the courage or conviction, to write in an informative, humorous and engaging way for a wider audience. This blog represents my first tentative steps towards letting my words be read by a larger audience, prompted by a ‘significant life event’, which affects not only me but my family as well.

I am a 52 year old man, and I have been diagnosed with early onset dementia - specifically Alzheimer’s. There, that’s the plot given away at the beginning of the story (but it’s a technique that was good enough for Bertolt Brecht so it’s good enough for me). The illness is also terminal, although there is a significant margin of error involved, which can be seen as a source of comfort or anxiety dependent on my mood. Such emotional oscillation notwithstanding, being told that you have a disease that will ultimately kill you does focus the mind somewhat; and since a focussed mind is not a guarantee for the long or medium term, I suppose I should take pleasure in having one while I still can.

The title of this blog (“Frozen Chips in the Salad Drawer”) possibly needs some explanation and context before I go any further. I cannot claim any credit for its selection, however. All credit for its wry, pertinent, humorous take on my increasing quotidian forgetfulness and erratic decision making, which is an inexorable and insidious symptom of this illness, belongs to my wife. It is she who constantly cleans up after me mentally, and restores calmness and poise to our environment, both physically and mentally. It’s a sort of psychiatric feng shui. My original choice for the blog title was “Early Onset Thingummy Whatsitsname”, which highlights the same symptom but in a more abstruse and less personal way than my wife’s genius reduction of the symptoms.

I also wondered, prior to my wife’s sage interjection, whether to make a titular nod to pandemic literature, given the appalling virus that is currently sweeping the globe and wrecking lives; something in the same vein as “Love in the Time of Cholera” (Gabriel Garcia Marquez) or “The Plague” (Albert Camus). However, I don’t think “Social Distancing in the Time of COVID-19” fires the imagination in quite the same way, and it could also be regarded as being in slightly poor taste currently. It does however imply that my illness and ultimate demise is but one person’s misfortune in a much larger canvas of suffering, and I want to write in a way that consoles; sympathises; amuses; enlightens; reassures; condoles. In short I want it to be cathartic, both for me and perhaps for others as well.

And there are many positives still. I have a loving and caring network of family and friends (I’d never find the frozen chips otherwise). There are also aspects of Alzheimer’s that can make my surroundings, and my reactions to them, beautifully fresh, poignant and mindful. I continue to love my walks in wonderful Gloucestershire countryside that surrounds us: sometimes alone with only the dog for company; but also with my wife and sons. Being in the outdoors is both calming and enervating; and so many locations and views and memories dazzle as if minted in the forge of my senses and known eternally for the first time:

“This grand show is eternal. It is always sunrise somewhere; the dew is never all dried at once; a shower is forever falling; vapor is ever rising. Eternal sunrise, eternal sunset, eternal dawn and gloaming, on sea and continents and islands, each in its turn, as the round earth rolls.” (John Muir).

Even the simple and the small can resonate - mindfulness can be found by studying the smallest of leaves or the listening to the sound of the breeze in the trees, and I have have my love of classical music to fall back on. Music is a language that I hope will always have the power to communicate to me and to console.

So, to sign off my first ever foray into the world of of online authorship, I have the support, the need, and the subject. In the next communication, I want to go back in time slightly and explore the symptoms in slightly more chronological detail.

If you have enjoyed reading this blog, please send me your comments - I would be glad to hear from you.

Chris

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