Who We Are

My mother who was born in 1930 was 40 when I was born, so for her generation, she really was quite an elderly first time mother. Now of course, in this age of professional women, IVF, yummy mummies, that's not unusual - in 1970 it was. I am an only child.

So now I am nearly 40 myself, we are the classic dislocated family - I live and work in the south of England, my mother lives by herself (my father died in 2002) in the north where I am from but where I have not lived since I set off to university aged 18.

So we don't fit the typical media and social image of the ‘carer’ and the ‘dementia sufferer’ with perhaps a rather older daughter or a spouse looking after their relative at home. Importantly, not just for us but for a wider audience, we are more like the predicted demographic for dementia in the coming 10-20 years when the current reliance on informal care will not be as prevalent due to working families and families living apart from each other.

And as a result we need to focus NOW on the ticking time-bomb that is our collective lack of understanding of, or provision for, the real needs of people with dementia – with numbers estimated to go from 750,000 currently to over 1.4million within the next 30 years.