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Good morning.

Dame Barbara Windsor, who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease back in 2014, had a birthday yesterday – she was 82 – and she used her birthday to urge support for an open letter from the Alzheimer’s Society, due to be delivered to Downing Street in September. The letter asks the Government to establish a dementia fund to address the needs of the increasing number of people with the condition – likely to be close to a million by 2021.

The Alzheimer’s Society itself has a birthday this year, but it is merely a 40th one – which rather serves to remind us how new, relatively speaking, is the challenge of dementia. It is only in the second half of the life-time of many of those now facing the disease that the increasing prevalence of dementia has come to loom over our expectations of a longer and healthier old age as a veritable spectre at the feast. Old age, of course, has very often entailed losses or renunciations – of physical strength and vitality, of loved ones and friends, perhaps of a sense of usefulness, and quite likely too, a loss of economic and other sorts of independence. But to this said litany dementia adds the threat of the loss of our self-possession – of our ability to be our selves, possessed of the memories and self-awareness which seem to make us who we are.

Amongst the best sellers of the late middle ages, were books on how to die well – and these books often contained a remark which is probably about as humorous as it was thought proper to be in a book on such grave matters: that members of religious orders should never be seen to run, except to a dying brother or sister, or in case of a fire.

It seems to me that Alzheimer’s makes the same sort of urgent claim on a community as do the dying – or a fire. The sting of death can certainly be mitigated by sympathy and solidarity – and so too the blow which a diagnosis of dementia surely is. But just as importantly, the very course of dementia can be crucially affected by the support which sufferers receive. The patient with dementia, struggling to maintain a sense of themselves and of their place in the world and to carry out the simple tasks of daily living is a bit like any one of us when we can’t remember a tune or a name – without a gentle prompt or a reminder from someone else, we will be at a loss.

In the annals of world history, Alzheimer’s is a young disease. One day, so we hope, it will be an old disease, just in the sense it will have been ameliorated by new and as yet undiscovered drugs – here and now, however, it will it seems, be ameliorated by good old fashioned social care, without which contemporary sufferers will be left at a loss.

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