Dementia Awareness Week

This week is Dementia Awareness Week, though you'd be forgiven for not knowing. There hasn't been a lot of publicity. Dementia is not a very sexy disease.

To be perfectly honest, for me every week is Dementia Awareness Week. As it is I'm sure for anyone who is caring for someone with the disease, or who has lost someone to it.

According to Alzheimer's Australia, in Australia right now 200,000 people have dementia, with new cases diagnosed every day. When you add in all their family members and close friends that's an awful of of people carrying a tremendous burden. Dementia is an insidious but almost invisible plague that has spread into every neighbourhood in the country and around the globe.

There's an excellent article in the New York Times that describes the disease, its symptoms, causes, tests, treatment, prognosis, possible complications and prevention. It begins:

Dementia is a loss of brain function that occurs with certain diseases. Alzheimer's disease is one form of dementia that gradually gets worse over time. It affects memory, thinking, and behavior.

Memory impairment, as well as problems with language, decision-making ability, judgment, and personality, are necessary features for the diagnosis.

That second paragraph describes exactly the arc of my mother's Alzheimer's Disease.

It was an agonising progression for all of us, though lightened by the way in which my father cared for my mother. His loving devotion enabled her to retain some dignity until the end. Although she forgot everything else she never forgot that he was her beloved husband and she his cherished wife. I describe some of this in an article in the current Notebook magazine.

You can read the whole article, uploaded by my clever daughter M, on my website vivienneulman.com

My book, Alzheimer's: A Love Story, contains a full account of the sorrows this disease brought with it, but also of the joy we as a family managed to find in the situation. Although our experience of Alzheimer's was harrowing, and I'd have given anything for it not to have come along, it did bring with it many blessings. Watching my father care for my mother, growing closer as a family, and being able to give my mother a proper farewell were among these.

My advice to anyone who is embarking on this journey is to contact your local Alzheimer's Association, and my advice to governments is to spend more money on Alzheimer's research. The need is urgent.

To those of you currently caring for a loved one with dementia, I wish you strength and courage. You'll need it.

My heart is with you.

Happy Father's Day

Happy Father's Day to you dads, and to all you women and children who made them fathers.

It's funny, but even though I know that these Days are cynical marketing exercises, they still touch me. Especially I suppose as my own dad is now 92. Maybe it's pure sentimentality, but I do love to see families together, taking a moment to celebrate their parents.

This morning my older brother and his wife and I took my father out for brunch - a very Melbourne way to spend Father's Day. My father has a busy day ahead of him with the christening of a baby where he will be making a speech as a stand-in for the baby's late grandfather, and then dinner out with my younger brother and his family. My older brother will spend time later today with his children and baby grandson. Farmdoc's at home on the farm wrestling sheep, our children are scattered, and I am in the city wrestling with my novel, so he'll have to make do with phone calls.

I've recently been going through old family photos. The ones on this post are of my dad in the airforce. In the top one he's 21-years old and the middle one was taken on his wedding day in Melbourne when he was 24 but looking much older. The bottom one is undated.

What about you? Do you celebrate Fathers Day, do you give gifts, or do you ignore it, refusing to be manipulated by the advertising industry? However you spend it I hope you have a lovely day.

Room With a View

I've turned my desk around so that instead of facing this:

it now faces this:

I know. Crazy, eh. But the trouble with a passive solar house is that in winter the sun comes in the north-facing windows and I had to keep my blind pulled down all the time. So there was no point in having a view I couldn't see anyway.

I quite like this set up, with nothing to distract me. I'll see how it works. Maybe in summer, when the eaves shade the house, I might move the desk back to where it was.

Where do you work? Do you prefer a view, or do you find it distracting?

Most visual artists I know listen to music - sometimes quite loudly - while they work. When I'm at home I need silence but when I write in coffee shops I like the music and the buzz of sound. I find that somehow it helps me concentrate. Often I'll listen to something to get me in the mood and then turn it off. Or I'll listen to the same piece of music over and over again. What about you? What do you prefer, or doesn't it make any difference to you?

Casting the Vote

Yesterday, along with the rest of our fellow Australians, Farmdoc and I fulfilled our civic duty.

We walked down to our local polling booth at the Mole Creek Primary School, admiring the local sights as we went.

Though admittedly, some of the sights were more attractive

than others.

Top Five Books

I'm in big trouble. In late October I'm going to be speaking at the Brunswick library. That's not the problem; I love giving talks. I'm looking forward to it.

No, the problem is that they asked me to provide them with a list of my five favourite books. They'll display this somewhere in the library with the heading Author Top Reads. Now, I think that's a great idea. Anything to encourage reading and to introduce people to books they may not have heard of.

Unfortunately this request is having a disastrous effect on my brain. At first my mind went blank and I couldn't think of any book I ever liked. Then I began to think of books I've enjoyed that I've read in the last month.

The Book Thief by Markus Zusak. Isn't this amazing? It's already sold over a million copies but I've only just got to it. I read it a couple of weeks ago and thought it was beautifully and sensitively written.

Winter's Bone, by Daniel Woodrell. I watched trailers of the film and I was so impressed that I ordered the book from the fantastic Tasmanian library service. The story is dark but gripping, and Woodrell captures the closed world of the Ozarks so well with his densely poetic language.

On Chesil Beach, by Ian McEwan. I loved this. I found it quite haunting when I read it on our recent Cradle Mountain holiday.

There's a stack of books for kids that changed the way I see the world. There are books I read when I was young, or that I read when my kids were young, that have stayed with me ever since. I reread Robinson Crusoe so often I used to dream about it. Little Women kept me company for years. I loved Jane Gardam's Bilgewater.

I read My Side of the Mountain with my kids. Recently my daughter Meg told me she's been reading it with her stepson. She doesn't even remember it from when she was young, but she's loving it now and so is he.

One of my all-time favourite books would have be a small novel for children called Searching for Shona, by Margaret Anderson. I bought this for our oldest daughter when she was in primary school. I read it then and have never forgotten the story of two British schoolgirls swapping identities during World War Two. I have to admit that when my daughters carried off their old toys and books I kept this one; I still reread it every few years.

There are books about writing that I've reread countless times, including Annie Dillard's The Writing Life and Anne Lamott's indispensable Bird By Bird.

Then Farmdoc asked me, 'What about Wolf Hall?' And it's true, I loved that so much I couldn't put it down, and I ended up with a really sore neck from holding it up to read in bed.

And one of our visitors said she'd just read Life of Pi, so then I remembered all the Booker Prize winners I've adored over the years. My mother and I used to buy the winning book as soon as it was announced and discuss its merits over cups of tea at her kitchen table. I miss that so much now she's gone. Toni Morrison's Beloved was one of her favourite books and so was Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children.

That's when I started to feel queasy about this whole project.

In the end I think I'll go with the first five that came to me and I'm going to try to forget the whole thing before I go crazy remembering books I've loved at different times of my life. I've tried to work out why it's these five, and I'm not sure I know exactly. Taste in books, as in so much else, is personal. For me I think it's mostly about the power of the language and story. I like a sense of morality at play too. And I like to learn something.

Drown, Junot Diaz
Henderson the Rain King, Saul Bellow

The Thousand Acres, Jane Smiley

The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

How about you? What books are on your list?

The Simplest Things

Don't you hate it when cliches turn out to be true? The one I'm thinking about now is, 'The simplest things in life are best.' Maybe it's not always true, and I'll bet winning an Olympic gold medal backed by millions of taxpayers' dollars (therefore the opposite of simple) must feel pretty cool, but mostly the saying's spot on, I reckon.

Take yesterday for example, here at Onemilebridge. Sunday lunch with friends. What could be simpler - or nicer!

Lunch was pretty simple too. Lasagne cooked by me, bread baked by Farmdoc, and pavlova brought by our guests. Though lasagne's not exactly simple - it always seems to dirty every dish in my kitchen - it's not all that sophisticated either.

I base my recipe on Marcella Hazan's recipe in The Classic Italian Cookbook, a book I've been using for years.

I made the pasta using 100 grams of flour, 1 egg and some spinach leaves picked in the morning. First I washed the spinach thoroughly. (I'm always amazed by how much grit is hidden in spinach.) Then I cooked it in just the water that clung to the leaves for about fifteen minutes. When it was tender I wrung out all the water, chopped it finely, and kneaded it into the pasta dough. Then I rolled it out with my pasta machine and slipped four pieces at a time into boiling water for a couple of minutes.

I cooked up my normal bolognese recipe with our own lamb mince, and made Marcella's bechamel sauce. Then I assembled the dish, grated some parmesan on the top, put it in the oven, and washed the dozens of dishes I'd dirtied.

The proof of the pudding (or lasagne) as they say, is in the eating, and it really did melt in our mouths - that is when we weren't talking.

Finally the pièce de résistance - the pavlova. So to finish with another cliche - here's a picture that must be worth at least a thousand words:

Thanks, Janet and Annie, for a great afternoon. Sorry the weather was too cold for a picnic on the bridge. Next time, maybe.

New Voices

Writers' festivals are such a terrific opportunity to learn more about writers, books and writing and to meet other readers. I had a great time at the New Voices Festival in Eltham. There was quite a bit of excitement on the day because the short list for The Age Book of the Year was announced that morning, and two of the day's featured writers were on it but only found out once they'd arrived. Catherine Cole, who chaired the session I appeared in, was one of the judges, so that made it even more exciting.

Back in Mole Creek we have a new voice here too. It's Cafe Bozzey, which recently opened in the rural transaction centre at the eastern end of the village.

They serve light meals and cake and of course tea and coffee.

Farmdoc and Sharon, our share farmer, and I gave it a test run the other day.

I have to admit, coming from Melbourne, I'm a coffee snob, but Sharon enjoyed it. Try it yourself when you're passing and see what you think. It's nice to have a new presence in the village.