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Millions of us are going to be affected by varying degrees and forms of dementia.

The sufferers – that’s one thing.  Watching it, trying to care for it – is another.

Research goes on but the incidence of this affects many of us, mostly though not exclusively, older people, with great fear or with just as great a determination to die, rather than to live without memory.

There are wonderful efforts made by families and organisations.

But we know little about why this has come like a latter day plague, metamorphosing dotty senility into something much grimmer.

My sister has dementia.   To my lasting regret, I thought she was just being odd and difficult, not for the first time (we’re not close) – so I was slow to pick up the cues.

She had a stroke in 2005 and was told very firmly to give up a lifetime of smoking.  She has residual sight but was registered blind.   She wanted to continue to live in her flat so various friends helped her do that, though she became increasingly unreasonable in her demands of them.

Think of it.  Blind and demented.  No day, no night.

Eventually somebody rang me and we began a year of having her cared for at home which was a bad joke.

The carers came.  She was usually out, walking compulsively, a feature of her dementia.  The carers put her pills on the table with a note she couldn’t see.  Sometimes, she found them.  Sometimes not.

Nobody cleaned the kitchen.

Nobody cleaned the bathroom.

Nobody threw out stale food she could not see and could not remember that she had bought.

At last, through a small private bureau which helped find different places suited to different people local to where she lived and a social worker who was reasonable even when we didn’t agree, a home was found for her where she was happy, regularly visited, for a couple of years.

When she began to deteriorate physically, the owners of the home shoved her into hospital, said she couldn’t come back to them, her needs were too great but made no effort to tell me that as long her effects remained with them, they could charge for her.  Another good soul told me that, whipped her possessions out and found her another place where she is content and contained, warm, fed, clean and not alone.  It is all that can be done unless you have a calling and I don’t.  She doesn’t recall the flat which had to be sold to fund her care, though she remembers that long ago, she was a meteorologist.

My biggest single fear was always blindness but now dementia ties with it.

A dear friend remembers all sorts of things but not proper names so we have these odd conversations where we try to communicate by the background she gives me to the person we are trying to discuss and what I guess.  She says she has never been any good at names.  If I forget a name – and I do – I see the shadow of mental disintegration like Nosferatu behind me on the wall.

I have learned that, if you fixate on a name or a detail, far from coming into focus – it recedes.  And I have sat up out of sleep at 3.00 am and said triumphantly “Charles Coburn!” I have learned that the mind can project a scenario which is believable but isn’t true.   Most of us have moments when we forget a word or why we walked into the supermarket with such decision.  Or put something down and can’t find it.  You get shaken by this.

Recently I lost an apple, quite large, a Bramley, very green.   I had five when I left the greengrocer round the corner.  I have four now.  I have been through pocket and bags, looked inside and outside the house, tried thinking creatively about where I might have put it?   Did the advent of the neighbour from down the road, asking for her spare key, the boiler had died and the man needed a key because she would be out tomorrow sever a thought process?   Were my mother alive she would comment that I had probably put it in “a safe place”.   Terrible challenge, safe places.   Very hard to find.

I don’t do this often but every time I do, I feel threatened.

Where did I put that apple?

When I moved from family house into small flat (not that small said my son) I thought I would work again but regretfully, I haven’t much which is why this burst of discussing being sixty years old as the new forties and opining how much better it would be if we worked till we were 70 annoys me like prickly heat.

I’d love to work.   Tell me, where do I find this employment?

The working world I was part of is under enormous pressure from changing technology, differing expectations, a savage lack of funds and very much pro-action.

Just as well among the things the Great British Public taught me over many years of prints and microphone is that poverty is a relative term, individual in perception: mine is not yours, yours is not mine.   I can eat and pay my bills though heating will become an issue as I get holder – it costs more and I need more (see “earlier annalog “wood woe”).  My stomach, feet and teeth still work.  I thank heaven for eyesight and the many things that still give me pleasure – just as well – because as you get older, how you felt about life is there for all to see.  You have the face you deserve.

Everything in the flat is cherished because it is the first place I ever owned alone.   It is not an ours, it is a mine.  And I made as few compromises as I possibly could in the realisation of it over time, aided and abetted by wonderful friends.   Having been married to a man with a carpet fixation, I have none and many of the floorboards date from the original (1900).   I have never liked curtains – I have shutters at the front and a French style muslin affair (not frilly) in the bedroom.   And learning slowly that because a plant pleases my eye, it doesn’t follow that it will flourish in my short on sun garden, I have a small terrace full of wonderful trees and shrubs, some in beds, some in pots.

The builders who did the essentials when I moved in were perfectly pleasant one to one but the gaffer was horrid, a mixture of Jack the Lad and a bully, though he did listen (eventually) in the matter of the bathroom.   Understandably there are people for whom the bathroom is just the loo and the shower but I am not one of them.  The bathroom is a room in which I am as interested as any other which is funny because it is small, probably why the charmless builder wouldn’t make a mess of it.   I have collected shells for years (in one great glass jar) and stones (mostly from Crete) in another.   There are two pictures, a lump of white coral, some flowers, and the cotton wool is in a French lab jar from the 1950s.

And for ages I bought pairs of mats from Habitat, one for the bedroom by the French doors leading into the cherished garden, and one for the bathroom.  I wore these till they faltered, dumped them and bought fresh.  It was economically viable, decoratively and hygienically acceptable.  Until Habitat didn’t carry them any more.

I didn’t know what to do.  I wanted something – as I quite often do – that wasn’t around any more.  I wanted something I had had, what met my needs and I could afford.

And then on my way to somewhere else I saw a small rug, folded up, in the window of a shop selling artefacts from the Middle and Far East – and it was as ever, the colours that drew me.   And it was dramatically reduced.  Entering the shop, I asked to see it.  We measured it and I went home to see if it would fit.  It did and I could just afford it by which I mean real money, not plastic.    So I bought it on the understanding to myself that I would take care of it and that, if I did, it might live up to its dramatically reduced cost, four times the price (therefore four times the life span) of a pair of mats I couldn’t get any more.

Very quickly it became one of my pleasures.   (You may sniff “little things please little minds” but if the little things keep you going, what the hell.)   It is the only piece of Persian carpet I have ever owned, a Sumac, handmade in dull yellow, warm gold, a particular dead leaf brown, a mellowing green, a vegetable bisque and I smile at the floor.

A magic carpet.

The email read “What is she wearing? She looks like a failed pot noodle.”

Thus Tessa Jowell in a vivid and unflattering multi coloured top.

TV is spectator sport for all of course but this is the second time Wal the interior decorator has communicated with me in terms of outrage about what women over 50 wear.   His mother, the only woman he ever loved, was famously and amusingly feisty.

She had a proper job at Columbia Pictures and she was dressed, coiffed and shod all her life.  His father invested in couture for her when she got the job and she spent her own money on it as soon as she had it.

Wal doesn’t do well with women who can’t dress.   He is not disagreeable for the sake of it, he’s not a snob about his own or anyone else’s clothes but, man or woman, they have to do something for you, and if they don’t, he wants to know why you are wearing them?

This started a year ago when he rang and said without preamble “What is that woman wearing?”   As we watch different things, I had to find out to whom he referred but once we had run it down to Kirsty Wark, I told him that if he watched Newsnight,

He got what he deserved.  We are supposed to have our minds on higher things …

“But look at it” he insisted.  So I did.  And it was terrible, featuring a sort of ruffle round the neck usually reserved for lamb chops atop an unattractive skirt.

“Why?” he asked.   So I tried to explain.

You either take the position that there is no such thing as bad taste – one is just expressing oneself.

Or else – facing up to the fact that within 50 years, we have gone from elegant to sexy as fashion’s adjective of choice, illustrated through racks of rubbish in a massive market obsessed with cheap at one end and looking cheap at the other, the obsession with youth and fear of wearing anything other than what youth wears being seen as the beginning of admitting to age.  And obviously the dread if ratcheted up if you are in the public eye.

We have few wardrobe securities.  Women of a  certain age whose images are permitted to us are either actresses or performers (dedicated to the illusion of youth in order to keep working), royalty (circumscribed through another kind of image building) or occasionally women of achievement who though we admire them, often have access of money the rest of us don’t have  or they just don’t care – which may be personally liberating  (sculptor Louise Bourgeois, hooray: the lovely Joanna Lumley – er, yes).

What is missing is the Lagrange solution, embodied by Christine of the name, head of the International Monetary Fund who wears the kind of plain clothes that have to be well cut (expensive and are thus becoming (one of the fashion words we no longer use), wonderful handbags, shoes for feet not fetish, and a nice line in scarves.  Her jewellery doesn’t often appeal to me but her husband gives it to her, so you can see why she wears it.

There was a time when I would  have sighed “Oh well, she’s French” but such is the universality of dreck in clothing stores that there are nearly as many appallingly dressed French as British women – same lines, same stores, same old – though we are burdened with that “girly” thing which is so much less workable and so much more unkind than anybody seems to want to recognise.  And we have nobody in our public life any longer who just wears clothes.   They are all in costume.

I want to smack the Roayl milliners for putting Majesty in the hard lines of many of those hats.

I am tired of being told that Kate Cambridge dresses in the high street as does the PM’s wife, as if this were somehow exemplary.   If those clothes work (see Miriam Clegg) they look better than high street and if they don’t, I don’t understand why they are wearing them.   Cheap is only a recommendation when it works and it rarely works for either of them.

It isn’t just me.  I recently spent a day with 10 women – youngest 46, oldest 78 .  We couldn’t have been more different one from another but among the many and far ranging things we touched on, we all found finding clothes and shoes difficult.

There are more units than ever and less choice.  And this extraordinary conformity, so that the pressure to wear what is on offer is heavy duty. Less variety than at any time for 50 years.   Looking at practically permanent sales, does retail have a death wish?

Seems so.  Keep what you have going as long as you can: haunt the charity and secondhand shops: find a dressmaker:  look up Ari Seth Cohen on line and read Eric Newby’s Something Wholesale for laughs.

I was late leaving, I pushed my hair off my face, up in a big clip.  It was colder than expected so I put on a raincoat and a scarf over clothes I had had to add and raced off for the bus.

It was backed up in traffic lights, a short distance away and without thinking, I did what irritates me when other people – particularly other women – do: I made an abbreviated ineffectual gesture with my left hand, a sort of half hearted wave.   I don’t know why I did it, I can never see the point.  You want to stop the bus or the taxi?   Do that thing.  Having learned how to put up my hand at school, the course was completed hailing taxis in New York a couple of years later.   If you don’t make an assertive gesture, you are likely to be ignored.  So when the bus started again, I repeated the wave I usually make and grinned.   The driver pulled up, an Asian man in his forties with glasses and a wedding ring.

“I’d stop for that smile” he said.  Me?

“That smile lit up the street” he went on, grinning himself.

So I said thank you and began to think.

I remember Linda coming back from visiting her home city where she had met a former swain who said he recognised her by her teeth – which wouldn’t have shown if she weren’t smiling.

And once upon a time, a very much younger Queen came to Teeside where my father (commandant of Special Constabulary) was on duty.  Majesty emerged from the Town Hall, Pop was on her eyeline.  He saluted with the full flourish of an old soldier and she released on him the full wattage of the Elizabeth Windsor Beam, a smile we have seen down the years, when she is pleased or tickled, the first drink of the evening is a bit nearer… or when her horse wins.

It is a smashing smile.

The school song at Whinney Banks Junior was called Smile, words as follows:

“You can smile

When you can’t say a word

You can smile

When you cannot be heard

You can smile when it’s cloudy or grey

You can smile any time, any day.”

Pollyanna?  You bet.

The first comic I ever took (“Girl”) explained that a frown used 150 muscles, smiling only 15.

Though a smile can lock you out as well as bring you in.  There is the guilt smile which means “I don’t like you, don’t ask me I want to be out of here.”

There is the misinterpreted smile as in younger person smiles at older rake of either sex and is immediately thought to be in some way available.

Or the nervous smile as in “Oh dear, I don’t know what to do – help!”   This is less a real smile than a showing of teeth, an animal grimace meaning “don’t be afraid of me.”   And there is the rictus, the frozen grin which means “I don’t understand, I feel terrible but this is the least charged gesture I can make.”

Smiling is out of fashion.  It suggests connection and lots of people prefer their connections through a technological colander.   For many, a smile is something you only offer in a defined context and I am weary of women of the ages of 40 and on, well heeled, fashionably dressed, apparently with men, children, cars, holidays, jewellery and health – and not a smile to bless themselves with.   Oh, they will look you straight in the face – but you haven’t been introduced, they reason, so why should they smile?   Just such a one moved in up the road.  I passed her as she was unloading from the car and smiled – all purpose good nature.

Six weeks later I saw her again and smiled again.

“Do I know you?” she enquired, shades of those ladies of the manor portrayed with horrid accuracy by Penelope Keith.

“I don’t think so” I said “but it’s only a smile.  It’s free.”

Of course I don’t know what is happening in the lives of other people.  Yes indeed, they may just have been told of deep unpleasantness and my smile may be inopportune or worse, read as superiority in their time of trouble – but there are entirely too many people for whom a smile has to have a reason – winning a contract, making an impression, beginning a social dance – whereas I think of it as a reason in and of itself.   Almost everybody looks better when they smile and in a world often both meteorologically and economically grey, it’s a cheap fix, without obligation, so far untaxed.

Do it more.

Time was when men and women customarily wore hats.   My father used to get very fond of his dark brown trilby and evade buying another, so my mother would get it for him.

But then he’d shy away from breaking it in, he’d say the older one was more comfortable, she’d say it was shabby and they’d disagree.

On one occasion that disharmony was part of something else – probably my mother wanting to arrive with five minutes to catch the train, while my father preferred to have us all lined up with the luggage and an hour in hand.   Anyway, we’d got through that.  We were on the train, settling into seats when – as the train gathered speed – my mother leapt out of her seat, wrenched opened the window (I remember the arc of her body) and pushed my father’s old hat out.  Gone.

There was a moment – now what? – and then they both began to laugh.

I have passed hats on but never thrown one away.

At a sale in milliner Gabriella Ligenza, I bought a treasured ponyskin slouch, the brim topstitched taupe satin which I gave to a beloved friend when her hair fell out from cancer drugs.  She was very tall and looked wonderful in it.  I remember her stroking it, murmuring “my little pony”.

And though as the money changed hands, I thought I bought the black velvet Joan Crawford special for myself, once I got it home, I knew it was Nikki’s Christmas present.  She has long blonde hair and looks great in black, which sadly I don’t any more.

Tucked into my hatbox there is a pastiche of a 1940s silk shell with just the right amount of flowers, feathers and ribbons, made by Jane Smith who makes for films.  Bought for the bat-mitzvah of a friend’s daughter, it was as they say “a bit of a statement” so I snuck it off as soon as I could, only to spend the whole afternoon with men saying “Please put your hat back on – my wife would never wear anything like that – isn’t it lovely?”  and women saying “Please put your hat back on, I’d never dare wear that, I don’t know what my husband would say – it’s so pretty.”

Such is the power of the hat.

It’s 20 years since I bought it and it still makes me smile when I try it on and play dress up.

Imagine too a small hat, apostrophe shaped from every angle, made entirely of quails’ feathers, brown, grey and cream, and that’s what I wore to my second bar-mitzvah, where I sat, arrested by the mixture of formality and passion – and the food that followed !  Hollywood dream catering, loads of it and absolutely peerless.

When five years later the same hat took me to a Buckingham Palace garden party with Cookie my best ever radio producer (her mother couldn’t make it) I was so charmed to think that with a different dress, bag and shoes, the hat was still smiling away – that I wrote to the designer Nerida Fraiman to tell her what it meant to me to have that kind of sartorial security.

And then there is the leopard.

Now, before you rise up in wrath, it’s been dead for most of my life.

And yes, I have seen a leopard in the flesh so to speak and I have no desire to separate the cat from its covering.  The hat was a gift from a friend of a friend to whom I rendered a small service and the hat was my “tip”.   I wore it this winter with a lacquer red coat and high heels – all very old but the right shapes for glamour – and got hit on by a green eyed Italian Lebanese half my age – which was very cheering and put a spring in the step.

There are sadly a lot of bad hats – silly, frilly, over trimmed, the wrong shape, the wrong size, totally unfascinating fascinators and I am only so glad Princess Eugenie sold hers after the Royal Wedding, though it was an act of charity to buy it.

There are people who hate hats, people who have difficulty with hats and those who make affectation out of it.

The right hat is becoming.  It says the wearer isn’t afraid to take him or herself or their notions seriously, for example my friend Wal in his pre revolutionary Russian mink or Ellie Haddington as Hilda Pierce in the most recent run of Foyle’s War – cold intelligence in a classy felt.

The slogan used to be “if you want to get ahead, get a hat.”

And now, apart from wearing one because you have to, the occasion demands – people who wouldn’t dream of wearing one love to see somebody else making a millinery statement.

It pains me to think that I should agree with George Osborne about anything – he’s the Chancellor of the Exchequer, a chill conservative – but he recently referred to the green lobby as “Taliban” and I have just experienced firewood fundamentalism.

I live in Battersea.

One of the reasons for moving here was because I could afford it but, apart from a tiny garden and a greengrocer round the corner,

I wanted and got an open fire.

And as a fire sign (Aries), it’s the cheapest therapy I know.

I found tree fellers whose side-line is selling firewood and a nicer echo of times gone by you would be hard pressed to find.  Two brothers inherited their father’s business, somebody’s wife takes the telephone orders, and one son helps with deliveries.  They hump it in, I arrange the woodpile on a palette, they bringing kindling and they introduced me to pimps, revealed by the Dictionary of Historical Slang to be “a small faggot used for lighting the fire, London and south counties from 1720”.

Later on I had the great pleasure of making an American visitor choke when I told him that in my house, we burn pimps and yes, I do realise that this remark is deeply politically incorrect but as we are currently reviewing 40 years of the exploitation of young people and the disabled, cries for help ignored by public bodies (see Savile, the BBC, hospitals, police etc.), maybe I’ll get away with it.

Once I had faced down the horrid builder (a bully not a cowboy) and found a sweep, the fire became a lifeline.  As energy costs go up and I get older and colder, I lit a fire.

My friends collected corks (wonderful firelighters) and cones, the greengrocer gave me Christmas tree bottoms.  It got me through the coldest winter.   The sounds of it cheered me.   The smells reminded me of childhood.   I loved to watch the pictures in it.   It’s no good grimacing over the mess – I have gloves, brushes, the wood ash goes on the garden, you want a fire, you clean it up.

There seemed to be a vogue for wood burning stoves, I could perfectly understand that, and I thought this form of warmth and entertainment was one of the great good points about my cherished flat.

A neighbour told me that, as of 4 November 2012, wood burning is forbidden in the fireplace, subject to a £1,000 fine.

Had I looked at the council magazine?   I usually do but I hadn’t got round to it.  I did.  I rang the number indicated and spoke to a pleasant man who told me who to write to, though he was plainly taken aback.

Air purification is a wholly praiseworthy aim.

I wrote and pointed out that I hadn’t heard of the proposed ban, where had it been publicised?

What about the money I spent on fuel?

What about energy costs and living on a pension?

I got back the party line, a comprehensive list of media exposition – all of which I missed, no word of sympathy, moral rectitude and the offer of smokeless fuel familiarisation which pushes smokeless fuel, a smoke free fireplace and so on, all at more cost.

If you say smokeless fuel to me, I think of those lumps of sullen pretend coal that never really lit.  And margarine.

After years of lecturing us about butter and fortunes made of ersatz spread, we come back to cutting your butter consumption down but not out, and accept no manufactured substitute.

Wood is wood.  Even the council admit that the percentage of air affected by domestic wood burning on a cold day is well under 20 per cent.

So, what now?

Another neighbour says he has just built a wood store and he doesn’t believe they can police the ban.   So he will carry on burning wood.

But he has the means, and probably the luck.

I burned as much as I could through the last days of its legality, feeling disappointed.

I bought a bag of smokeless fule I could carry – three hours for just under £7.00

If I buy more cheaply there is a minimum amount delivered, it will crowd the garden and it’s not slightly.

Opting for a fire like opting for smoking.  Every person their own poison.

Mine is just denied.

Dammit.

A Labour Party activist came to the door collecting signatures to keep the local fire station open.

“You don’t vote for us” he said.

I told him about the ordinance forbidding me to have a fire.

He thought for a minute.

“It’s unenforceable” he said.  “You burn your fire.  If you get into difficulties, I will help you – and you will vote for us.”

Fire sale?

I first heard the word “prosthesis” when I was secretary to a plastic surgeon 40 years ago.

Most recently I heard it in a Channel Five programme called Making Faces.

I don’t like being invited to eyeball misery and deformity from the comfort of my living room so I approached this warily but I was fascinated by the care and skills of the people who make individual prostheses.

Are they artists or engineers or a bit of both?   And I was struck all over again with what people have to bear.

There is a current cancer campaign, aimed at everyone eventually surviving it.

But surviving cancer in the first segment of Making Faces involved removing the eye of a child so a tumour could be eradicated.  The child is now sixteen, loved, supported and highly realised but still, facing life with one eye – and the decision to remove half the face of Diana, who is now in her late sixties.

One of the things I learned on problem pages is not to weigh one person’s suffering against another’s.

Pain is.

But for some reason, probably selfish – she is nearer my age – Diana grabbed me.

A violinist, the possessor of long, lean aquiline good looks, she has survived, walking around behind the personal equivalent of a train wreck.

In the programme, she talked about having no choice.  If she hadn’t agreed, she would have died but after the operation, she didn’t leave the house for two years.

Eventually she went back to playing in the orchestra and seeing her friends with a dressing over the facial hole.

One of her orchestral colleagues commented “It’s not what she looks like – it’s what she is”.   Indeed.

That Diana loved beauty was evidenced in her every move, the choice and care of her clothes, the way she carried herself, even the movements of her remaining face.  But her voice was affected too and I fear that she has had her share of unkindness and disappointment.   Getting used to deformity means accepting change is unlikely.  You may change – it won’t.  If it’s your face that is compromised, it strikes at the heart of your self-image.  There must be mornings when she falters though it was clear from the programme that, if her face is diminished, her personality was not.

And although she respected the man who built her prosthesis, she didn’t like it.

It was the wrong colour.

He tried and tried – the likeness, the modelling round the eye was wonderfully realised – but she didn’t like it.  It was the wrong colour.

She was filmed leaving the hospital wearing it though I felt this was probably for the sake of the production.

She might be down to one eye but she could still see colour.  She trusted her own judgement.

The maker said he hoped she would wear it, she’d get used to it, it could make such a difference to her – but you can’t insist.

I felt for her.

There is a Turkish proverb “a heart in love with beauty can never grow old” but beauty itself can die and to be witness to the death of your own beauty is surely to die a bit yourself.

Living in London, you may see the famous – Oprah Winfrey window-shopping, Julian Fellowes (Mr. Downton) in the chemists, Michael Caine in the grocers.

I have just met Diana.

I was going home, saw her in the crowd, reached out, touched her arm, begged her pardon for interrupting and thanked her for making the programme.

She responded with that aplomb that makes her so appealing.

“I hope you didn’t think I was being difficult about the prosthesis” she said.  “It just wasn’t the right colour.”   I agreed, it wasn’t.  “The colour wasn’t right, my friends agreed.”

“Yes” I said “but I was so grateful to you.”

“Why?”

My heart stopped.  I could only tell such a woman the truth so I said she must forgive me, I could only speak plainly.

She nodded.

“You were beautiful” I said “and to lose that, must have been to lose some part of yourself.  But you are still you.  I found that moving.”

“Did you get all that from television?” she said.  “How wonderful. You’ve made my day.”

“And you, mine.”

There are nine or ten million people in London and I never get over who you see or who you meet, or how or where, and it certainly isn’t from hitting the party circuit.