Further Notes from Dementialand

Pub Landlord

Second week of the holiday. It started badly. We discovered our cottage was on a main road with barely a pavement separating the house from the road. Nowhere to park to unload our stuff, including shopping for the week. There is a pub opposite our house which everyone told us was great. So I parked in the pub car park to unload and started doing so. 

Pub landlord comes out and points to the painted sign on the tarmac ‘Pub patrons only”. I said yeah, I’m sorry - I’m just unloading as you can see and we’re here for the week - we’ll be in the pub later. 

If you haven’t got a pint on the table right now, move your car. 

I said I’ll be down your pub later. 

Then a lecture about holiday cottages spoiling the villages; hey, I get it. I agree with you. But can you not just…

No.

So I go to the hotel carpark, book the car in for a week, and shlep all the stuff 100m back and forth from the car to the cottage.

And after that I never went to his pub. That’s the deal.

Fight Club

I seem to be having particularly restless nights, waking numerous times, the duvet everywhere and some insane dreams, involving anyone and everyone in my past who I feel I have unfinished business with. People I worked with, old school friends, old school enemies and so forth. 

The dreams are sometimes quite extreme even by the standards of the horror/slasher genre. 

You know that every morning I wake up there is a nugget from my past, embedded in my consciousness. It’s usually something where I felt embarrassed, behaved selfishly or upset someone, or spoke or acted inappropriately. That kind of thing.

Inner me.

(I’ve come to realise I probably am on the spectrum: never knowing how to act or having the confidence to be myself. Always looking to emulate or even copy others to try to fit in and be socially accepted, and mask my social anxieties and hang-ups. Even my chosen profession of stonemasonry is all about copying, in this case the work and designs of people from the past.)

 

It plays on repeat in my mind, until I think I’ve rationalised the situation: what I said, what I should have said, what I could say to the person or people involved now, face-to-face. Should I apologise? Do they even remember? Should they apologise? And on it goes. 

And just when I think it’s all gone away it springs up again. It’s particularly hard at the moment. I shout out ‘Fuck off!’ for it to go away, sounding like I have Tourette’s or Schizophrenia.

I also feel more and more detached from everyone, and I think they realise that I am drifting away. I shouted impatiently at them the other day. 

I wouldn’t have done that the previous holiday.

Pass the SALT

Apparently I said a few sentences the other morning with all the meaningful stuff missing. I was trying to describe an angle grinder my mate bought from Aldi and nothing made any sense to anyone. That’s pretty worrying as it would indicate I need a Speech and Language Therapist (SALT). 

A big day of Neuropsychological tests on my return home. This will be an exhausting day but worth it. 

I hope.

Walks

Despite the negative bits it’s been quite nice so far, but the first week was especially good as we were in Keswick which just feels lovely to be in, and we were staying with J’s sister and husband who are great. 

This cottage is nicely furnished but the village is bleak, stark. There is no warmth here. 

We did a big walk yesterday and some good ones last week, but little Stan has hurt his paw 🐾 so I’m staying in with him and it also gives me an opportunity to write this. 

You’ll be pleased to know we did go for a little walk together locally and he did a massive 💩.