A Happier Ending

Happy New Year & My Hopes for 2012

2012-01-02T07:26:00.000-08:00

A Very Happy New Year. It certainly came around rather more swiftly than I had been expecting! We moved into our lovely new house at the beginning of December and I seem to have been emptying long-lost cardboard boxes ever since. How ever do we accumulate so much darn stuff? One of my resolutions for 2012 is to live a little more minimally, wherever possible.

Like many of us in these straitened times, I have also been extremely busy workwise. As a freelance, it is difficult to say no to any offers of work, coming through whichever channels and in September, after quite a lot of thought, I accepted an offer to blog regularly for the Mail Online website. You can find out what I have been writing about lately here.

It has been a fascinating experience, not least because it is probably the widest audience I have every written for. The site reached an astounding 79 million unique browsers in November 2011. As I explained to many of my Mail-phobic friends (and I do understand completely why it is not their paper of choice…), this was a platform I simply did not feel I could turn down.

I write for the debate/political side of the site, not the fatuous celebrity news pages, and I never write a word I don’t truly feel or believe. They simply never ask me to, as they know there is no point asking me to give a particular “Daily Mail” style steer to a piece.

To be honest, I think my masters at the Mail would prefer me to be rather more ranty and right-wing but, as they give me many of the more “society” type pieces, I have ended up with a fantastic opportunity to put my 10p worth of what I hope is good sense out into the ether, twice or three times a week.

True, I don’t get to write for my personal blogs quite as often as I would like but the huge increase in audience for the causes I try to champion has been more than worth it. The piece I wrote in November - on the need for more funds for dementia research - received a huge and moving response.

Obviously, the response isn’t always moving or, indeed, measured. When I suggested that the Duchess of Cornwall had earned public respect with her dignified support of Prince Charles, most of the commenters went crazy. Some American readers (at whom the site is very targeted) honestly seemed to believe that Camilla, alongside Prince Philip, of course, had been driving the Fiat Uno which caused Diana’s fatal crash in Paris….

I was thrilled when they chose to run my choice for Man of the Year who was my father-in-law, Charles Kirkman, who sadly lost a protracted battle with prostate cancer, after a dignified and doughty fight in July this year, aged 78.

His death may not have started any revolutions and he didn’t invent any equally revolutionary computer gadgets of which I am aware. Nevertheless, Charles lived an exemplary, perhaps somewhat traditional life, and, for me, his quiet achievements are equally significant and worthy of respect.

I was particularly grateful that Charles’ final months, though riven with the usual indignities of terminal cancer, were as comfortable and pain-free as it is possible for this ordeal to be. He had exemplary medical care and sustained support from the family and from the state, particularly at Oakhaven Hospice in Lymington, where he was able to go regularly to give my mother-in-law much-needed respite and where he died peacefully and with due dignity.

Not all of us can expect to have such a dignified death after a life equally well-lived. Last year was also marked by scores of news stories, highlighting widespread abuse and neglect of the frail and elderly, in hospitals, in care homes and horrifically, by people in whom they have placed their trust.

I started this blog in 2009 as a way of raising awareness of elder abuse and of somehow trying to ensure that more of us had a happier ending to their lives than my own father, Fred, did a few years ago.

In 2012, we hope to be launching “A Happier Ending” charity. The plan is to work, initially in primary schools, with a series of volunteer presentations, getting the kids to talk about their own grandparents and elderly relatives, in a way that helps reinforce respect for the older generation and hopefully get them to see that elder abuse is wrong - in every single way.

As you might imagine, for a new not-for-profit, hoping to work with both children and the elderly, the red tape is simply endless and there is an awful long way to go. So wish us well. I’ll keep you posted on here (and via Facebook and Twitter) but in the meantime, do have a look what I have been up to on the Mail? All the very best for a happy and healthy 2012.

Remember the Fallen but Spare a Thought for the Survivors, for the Ones whose Wounds We Cannot See

2011-11-11T10:05:00.001-08:00

I think we all get a bit glum and gloomy around this time of year, don’t we? Our days are truncated, more or less overnight, the very last of autumn’s leaves tumble from the trees and there is no more denying that dull, dank winter is here. Somehow it seems an especially poignant and fitting season to set aside time to remember the fallen.

It is always a particularly sad time of the year for me. Fourteen years ago, on a dark Friday evening in early November, my husband Peter closed his eyes for the final time, at the end of an angry combative, but thankfully brief, battle with cancer.

He had been ill for months but it still came as a shock. We had enjoyed the most marvellous Indian summer and I began to hope against hope that the doctors were wrong. But then the clocks went back. He didn’t even last a week.

Peter died on November 7th and we held his funeral a week later. So, for me, Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday always come at a pensive and rather wistful time. That said, I welcome and even enjoy this season: the solemn ceremonies, the unspoken solidarity between poppy wearers, the stirring, yet heart-breaking, first bars of The Last Post.

Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday have taken on rather more resonance over the last few years. The unending stream of caskets containing the mortal remains of British troops paying the ultimate sacrifice in Afghanistan has kept the role of the armed forces, their dedication and their courage, in the public eye, if not always in the headlines of the news.

A total of 375 British servicemen have lost their lives since the Afghan operation started in 2001. The latest casualty, Pte Matthew Thornton of 4th Battalion, the Yorkshire Regiment, was killed by an IED in Helmand only two days ago. He was 28. In the prime of his life.

A few years ago, to be honest, Afghanistan barely crossed my mind. I certainly did not condone our involvement but I didn’t even know how to find it on a map. But then three members of my extended family were posted to the country and what went on in Kabul and in Camp Bastion suddenly took on an entirely new, and deeper, significance for me.

Since then, I have made it my business to find out a bit more about what is happening on the ground out there, about how dangerous it is for our boys, about whether or not our presence is making any difference whatsoever. I am not sure I am any the wiser but for me, the planned withdrawal cannot come a moment too soon.

My feelings were crystallised when we lived, for a few years, in the heart of rural Oxfordshire. Our old barn was a mile or two from the A420, the main Oxford-Swindon trunk road, the route taken from RAF Lyneham and Wootton Bassett by the military cortèges transporting the bodies of fallen soldiers to the John Radcliffe Hospital.

I will never forget pulling over, one day in July 2009, getting out of the car, to stand, head-bowed in sorrow and disbelief , as eight hearses, bearing eight Union Flag-covered coffins rolled slowly by.

Sadly, there is very little else we can do for those eight men and boys, nor for Private Thornton nor for the hundreds of others who gave their lives for their country. We can support their families and we can honour their sacrifice.

In their memory, however, we need to uphold a duty of care to the British troops who have seen combat, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, over the past decade. Of these estimated 200,000 servicemen and women, it is thought that around one in four will return from the theatre of war with mental health problems, ranging from alcohol dependency to full-blown post-traumatic stress. Unsurprisingly, ex-servicemen make up around 20 per cent of the homeless population.

Unlike those returning with physical injuries, those with hidden wounds are often too proud to get help, suffering years of psychological torment before seeking treatment. Since 2005, charity Combat Stress has seen a 72 per cent increase in demand for their specialist services, caring for the mental health of veterans. Last year, they had more than 1,400 new referrals, giving a current caseload of nearly 5,000 individuals.

Not every injury sustained in battle is a visible one. Yet psychological wounds can be just as painful, devastating, life-changing and difficult to treat as physical ones, requiring months and years of careful rehabilitation.

As long as our troops are still risking their lives in remote and distant foreign fields, we need to ensure that they receive as much support as they need, whether social, financial or emotional. not only while they are on the front line but perhaps more importantly, when they return home, to families and friends who have scant comprehension of the horrors they have seen.

So let us take time, in this sombre season, to think of the fallen and to give thanks. But spare a thought too, for the survivors, for the ones who did come home and for those whose sacrifice may be well be rather more significant than we suspect.

In Praise of Unexpected Friends - In Memoriam: Charles Chevalier Kirkman

2011-07-26T06:55:00.000-07:00

Charles & my father, Fred, at our Wedding - 1998

Awkward. Well, it can be, can't it? The first time you ever tell the other person that you love them? Especially when you've been wanting to tell them for ages, but never had the opportunity, or the courage?

Anyhow, last weekend, I finally managed to whisper the three words in question. I gave him a little kiss, just on the cheek, as well. I'm pretty certain I saw him smile back at me. Then again, it could well have been a trick of the sunlight, which was pouring in through the window of the room in the hospice.

My father-in-law, Charles, passed away on Tuesday, 12 months after we were told that nothing more could be done to cure the cancer that first reared its head the year he and I first met, in 1998. The last weeks were particularly rough, with the myriad indignities cancer will inflict. Charles bore it all with his usual dignity and patience, with his overriding concern for everyone else, everyone but himself.

Relationships with in-laws can be a mixed blessing. I should know: I've been twice blessed. But my relationship with Charles was most definitely a blessing. Charles was not just my father-in-law; he was my friend.

During his first brush with prostate cancer, Charles stayed with us in London where he was being zapped daily at the Royal Marsden Hospital in Chelsea. He and I walked Chippie and Cara on Clapham Common and had long chats where we discovered we had far more in common than our love for (and occasional exasperation with...) Tim, whom I was about to marry.

Charles and I bonded over many shared enthusiasms: for Second World War history, for the quirkier pieces which appeared on the Telegraph obituaries page and for properly chilled Provençal Rosé. I was very proud when he agreed to read my favourite passage from the Bible - Romans 12:9-18 - at our wedding. It was the beginning of a fulfilling, mutually affectionate, utterly uncomplicated relationship, sadly truncated this week. I will miss him immeasurably.

I'm hugely comforted by the knowledge that Charles had a wonderful life, well-lived, evident in the tributes flooding in this week from family and from his many other friends. He, like my own Dad, was one of those proper 20th century chaps who lived by an unspoken but, in its own way rather rigid, moral code. You could never imagine Charles even telling the whitest of lies, let alone hacking a phone.

In the last few months, he and I have had great fun, digging through boxes of family photographs and archives, where I learned more about Charles' quite extraordinary childhood. His father was General Sir Sydney Chevalier Kirkman GCB, KBE, MC (1895–1982), Montgomery's right-hand man at El Alamein and one of the towering military figures of his generation.

Chev, as he was known in the family, cannot have been the easiest of fathers, but Charles always spoke of him with due respect. His mother, Lady Erskine was clearly an extraordinary woman too - one of the first women to study medicine at Oxford and practice as a doctor.

Charles followed his father into the army and rose to the rank of Major in the Royal Artillery. However, I suspect that for Charles, life really did begin at 40, when he left the army behind, moved to Lymington on the Solent, where he was able to combine his passion for sailing with a job in a specialist yacht engineering company. He was the navigator and technician on a series of famous ocean racing yachts and took part in scores of international regattas, competing in nine classic Fastnet races across the Irish Sea.

One of the best things about my relationship with Charles was how rather unexpected our great friendship was? Somebody you might, ordinarily, never have met, or with whom you initially appear to have little in common? Someone with whom you may be rather thrown together, out of necessity, rather than choice?

You may not have that many, but I bet you've got a couple of unexpected friends. I know I've got a fair few and I have been thinking lately a lot about Patrick, my late brother Rory's partner, now sadly also passed on. Against all possible odds, we, too, became very close and when he died in 2009, I was quite heartbroken.

So, if the universe has thrown you an unexpected friend or two, don't forget to be thankful for them, to cherish them and to find quality time to spend with each other. And don't forget to tell them that you love them - before it is too late.

Charles Chevalier Kirkman 1933-2011 requiescat in pace +

When Buster bumped into Baroness Thatcher. A few Thoughts on World Elder Abuse Awareness Day

2011-06-13T01:43:00.000-07:00

Photograph: copyright PA
Some Senior Citizens receive the care and respect they deserve. Baroness Thatcher meets a group of Chelsea Pensioners at the Royal Hospital in London

I saw Mrs Thatcher last week. I didn’t ask for an appointment so didn’t experience the ignominy of being turned down, like Sarah Palin. It was an utterly unexpected encounter and to be honest, it took me a full few minutes before I realised who she was. If it hadn’t been for the heavy-booted security detail, complete with ear piece, walking a few paces behind, I might not have recognised her at all.

It was one of those glorious early summer afternoons we’ve been enjoying so often lately. The psycho-spaniels and I were just enjoying the last few yards of our daily constitutional in a central London park when our elderly American Cocker, Buster, cantered blindly into the ankles of a smartly dressed, middle-aged lady, who was slowly accompanying a rather older one, along the path leading to the bandstand.

“I’m so sorry,” I garbled. “I’m afraid, he is getting on now and he’s losing his sight”. No harm had been done and both ladies bent down, to pat the offending hound and declare what a lovely looking dog he was. The older lady had a particularly beatific smile. I put him back on the lead and wished them both good afternoon. As I turned to go, the policewoman – I could now see the radio attached to her belt – shot me a knowing look, as if letting me into some huge secret. No wonder the old lady had looked so familiar.

I’m not quite sure why, but the whole four minutes left me strangely moved. I like to think that I am too young to have strong views on what Mrs T. achieved – or not – as prime minister (1979-1990), but I was touched to see that the former Iron Lady, who suffers from dementia, was immaculately turned out for her 85 years and was patently cherished and being extremely well-cared for in the autumn of her years.

Sadly, this is far from the case for so many other elderly and vulnerable adults, as we in the UK saw earlier this week with a truly shocking piece of investigative journalism for the BBC’s Panorama current affairs programme. An undercover reporter filmed scenes of physical and verbal abuse of patients with autism and learning difficulties at a private hospital near Bristol.

I didn’t watch the entire programme. I’m afraid I just couldn’t. It was all too familiar. On more than one occasion, I had to rescue my late father from an unfamiliar care home, where he had been temporarily dumped and where, invariably, most of the staff were simply too over-worked or too unfamiliar with the specifics of Dad’s condition to care for him properly. This meant that all too frequently he was left horribly upset, in pain and discomfort and without a vestige of his once considerable dignity.

I complained, of course, but in my own distress and outrage, my best journalistic instincts went out of the window. I quite forgot to switch on the secret video, as Panorama reporter Joe Casey did at Winterbourne View. I was too preoccupied with changing Dad’s faeces-full trousers, calming him down and cleaning him up, to whip out my smart phone camera and document the damning evidence. When Wakefield Social Services called me a liar, I had nothing - on film - to prove that, sadly, my allegations were all too true.

In the noisy aftermath of the Panorama show, many people asked why it took a covert investigation to bring this abuse to the attention of a suitably horrified public. A former senior nurse at the unit, Terry Bryan, had reported his fears to the regulator, the Care Quality Commission, three times before he went, in desperation, to the BBC. Read a thoughtful response by Action on Elder Abuse CEO Gary FitzGerald here.

There has also been the predictably hollow cacophony of stable doors slamming, with Care Minister Paul Burstow pledging to strengthen existing safeguards for vulnerable adults. Here I quote from Mr Burstow himself, who told the BBC: "It comes as a surprise to people that the statutory basis for the safeguarding of vulnerable adults in this country is much weaker than that which exists for children”.

That’s right. The elderly and other vulnerable adults in this country have far, far fewer legal safeguards against abuse than children, than most domestic pets. The innocent cat dumped into a wheelie bin by YouTube villainess Mary Bale had more statutory protection than the patients at Winterbourne View. A goldfish or a budgie enjoys more legal redress than my father had in his final years, ravaged by dementia, living in terror of people who claimed to be caring for him, individuals he should have been able to trust.

It’s a bit late for Dad now but I am still leading a rousing three cheers for Panorama, for doing what it is that good journalism is supposed to do: shining a bright light into a very dark corner indeed.

Why is it that the abuse of our senior citizens and other vulnerable adults should be so ignored, so swept under the carpet, that we need to see it, with our own eyes, on the television, on the i-Player, on YouTube, to believe, to be convinced, that it goes on?

Why was everyone so surprised, as the minister himself acknowledged, that so many of our most defenceless citizens still have no legally enshrined protection? Even our closest neighbours, the French have a law against the “abuse of the weakness of elderly people ” (abus de faiblesse sur personnes agées).

It may also be a surprise to you that this Wednesday, 15th June, is World Elder Abuse Awareness Day. I’m not usually a big fan of singling out particular days to promote individual causes but in this case, as I hope I’ve shown above, we desperately need to raise awareness. Elder abuse is already widespread and it is rising fast, in tandem with the ageing population, increased rates of dementia and burgeoning prosperity.

If you were shocked by the Panorama broadcast or, more pertinently, if you have a much-loved, frail or otherwise vulnerable family member or friend, why not do your own small bit to help raise awareness? After all, if you do nothing, then nothing gets done.

It doesn’t have to be a grand gesture. Perhaps you might mention the day to a friend or a colleague? Maybe you could wear something purple and, if anyone asks you why, explain. It would be absolutely brilliant if you could sign up here or even share an appropriate link or two, via Facebook or Twitter. Just google “elder abuse” - but do beware: many of the results which pop up can be shocking.

As Baroness Thatcher and her companions sat down on a south-facing bench by the cricket nets, to enjoy the last few rays of the afternoon sun, she gave us the tiniest of waves and another slightly expectant, utterly radiant smile. She reminded me for all the world of my own Nana Jackson, who wasn’t entirely sure who I was, on the last few occasions that I saw her. Yet both these little old ladies somehow knew that I was friend and not foe; they knew that they had nothing whatsoever to fear. If only it were so for every single one of our senior citizens, all of whom deserve our respect and our protection.

My Dangerous Dog Dilemma & How I Resolved It (I think…)

2011-03-11T08:41:00.000-08:00

Buster & Harley - many moons before they became the victims of a dangerous dog attack

I am sure you will be relieved to hear that I did my little bit of civic duty this week. I spent much of Thursday afternoon in Southwark Police Station in south London, where I had been summoned to an ID parade, in the hope I could recognize the owner of the two dogs who attacked Buster & Harley – and me - a couple of weeks ago.

The man arrested denied all knowledge of the attack; ergo, it was down to me to pick him out from a line-up. The story of the attack and my response is here. Do feel free to scroll down, past the mushy bit, to get to the meat of the story – so to speak.

I have clearly been watching far too many glamorous American cop shows on the telly. Southwark nick was about as far from Miami Dade PD HQ as you can imagine. No dappled sunbeams shooting through glass doors, no hunky CSIs striding down corridors, urgently taking samples to trace, not even Horatio to reassure me, with that oh-so-familiar, swift whip-off of his shades.

I did, though, have a charming young PC from our local Safer Neighbourhoods Team, to chaperone me through a maze of double doors and corridors to the portakabin temporarily serving as the ID suite. I didn’t even get the excitement of the two-way mirror and a live parade of usual suspects. I sat nervously in front of a tiny monitor, as a gruff sergeant tapped on a laptop and asked me a series of fairly inane questions.

Nine images are played, twice through on a loop, before you get the chance to see them together on a grid, or to pick out an individual frame to freeze. It was even trickier than I had been anticipating. The nine men on the video all looked very similar; I have not been told whether my superficially confident spot was correct. I signed my declaration and escaped as quickly as I could, relieved it was over but with my conscience still slightly uneasy.

Why? Well, it turns out that the dogs’ owner is not some big Eastern European mafia gang boss, using his scary animals to help mark out his turf as he battles for control of the drug trade in southwest London. He is actually quite a mousy type, a skinny guy in his mid-20s, who does not seem to have a job to go to and who may or may not have his own addiction problems. He lives in a small Housing Association property with his dogs, who are healthy, well-groomed and magnificently turned out, in their studded leather harnesses.

He walks them daily on the little patch of the Common where we fell foul of them. He is still there most days now, with the dogs rarely muzzled and not always on the lead. Another spaniel, Romeo, remarkably similar in size and colouring to Buster, was set upon by them last week. Perhaps mindful that he was out on bail for an identical attack, he readily identified himself to Romeo’s owner and willingly gave his details. That is about the sum of what I know about this guy; that and the fact that he clearly loves his dogs.

Cara, the blind American Cocker Spaniel who saved my life (1993-2009)

I love my dogs. Don’t we all? I too well understand how a dog can feel like your one, true friend and comfort. During the months after I was, not unexpectedly but horribly prematurely, widowed, there were days upon days when I did not even feel like getting out of bed, let alone leaving the house.

However, I shared the house with two lively spaniels who needed to pee and were rather more interested in their breakfast than in the tiresome details of my depression and grief. Chippie and Cara needed me – the latter all the more so, given she had recently gone blind. There was no way I was to be allowed to wallow – or god forbid, do anything more drastic. Hand on heart, I can honestly say that Chip & Cara saved my life.

Lately when I have expressed this kind of reservation about the dogs which attacked us being destroyed, I have been roundly shouted down. What if the next target is a child? The dogs do live right next to a large primary school and there are scores and scores of babies and toddlers in our particular warren of roads.

Google “fatal dog attack” and in every single story, you will read that the police had already been alerted to the dangerous dog in question.

What if Buster and Romeo had been killed? Another excellent point and one with a very sobering coda: there is as yet no effective dog-on-dog legislation in England and Wales. Both spaniels could have been ripped to shreds in front of our eyes and the police would have been powerless to prosecute. If the second dog had not taken a huge chunk out of my ankle, there would no statutory grounds on which to pursue this owner and, as the young PC dealing with our case wearily explained, nothing whatsoever they could do.

Unsurprisingly, I’ve become a bit of an expert on dog legislation since the attack in February and it is clear that, as a broad coalition of animal and veterinary charities has been flagging for some time, the existing Dangerous Dogs Act is simply not fit for current purpose. There has actually been some good news lately in that the Dog Control Bill, a Private Members Bill introduced by Lord Redesdale, passed the committee stage in the Lords on Friday 4th March and will now hopefully make it to the Commons.

There is still time to sign a petition to repeal and replace the inadequate legislation – check it out here.

Meantime, I’ll keep you posted as to what happens with our case. Uneasy as I am about any dogs being destroyed – or even about a clearly needy individual losing his best friends – I simply do not want anyone, man, woman, child or dog – to go through what we have endured.

The Big Society, The Good Samaritan & The Dangerous Dogs

2011-02-18T02:51:00.000-08:00

It was the card that did it. Until then, I hadn’t shed a single tear, despite the often excruciating pain and the sheer, life-flashing-before-your-eyes, terror of the memories.

At first, I presumed it was yet another pizza-kebab-curry flyer when it came through the letter box. In fact, I almost missed it, in the growing pile of junk mail. But then I saw it was addressed to “Dominique & Family”. The illustration above barely does it justice. It is hand made and the pattern on the Scottie Dog is an intricate, inlaid collage. One of the neighbours, Carole, whom I know just a bit from walking our dogs, made it, especially for me, and when I read the message she had written, the tears started and they didn’t stop.

On Tuesday morning, coming back from our regular morning stroll on Wandsworth Common, Harley and Buster were set upon by two huge “Staffie”-type dogs wearing studded leather harnesses. I had seen both dogs a few times before. They had snarled more than once in our direction but were then firmly on the lead.

This time, we had no chance. One dog picked Buster up in his jaws, worrying him as if he were a rat or a squeaky toy. The other set about Harley who was nimble enough to escape and shoot back to our rented house. The owner stood by & watched as I – possibly foolishly – tried to extricate Buster. The second dog then joined in, snapping at my flapping elbows & then seizing my ankle. The neighbours, alerted by my screams, later told me the dog did not let go until I was struggling across the road with Buster in my arms.

In the parable, the Good Samaritan does not walk past the man set upon by thieves. He tends to his wounds, gets him to the inn and leaves two silver pieces for his care. If you have a Bible handy, I’ll remind you that it is from Luke’s Gospel (10: 25-37) and that the epithet is now shorthand for anyone who helps a stranger.

In the next 72 hours, I was repeatedly rendered speechless by the kindness of strangers and not only that of the neighbours who called the ambulance & the police as I stood gibbering. There was the lady jogging past who located Harley, calmed her and made sure she was safe. There was the chatty, tactile girl in the waiting room of the hospital who gave me a much-needed hug. There was the young vet who operated all afternoon to reattach skin to muscle around Buster’s neck and ears. There was the steady stream of emails from local residents, none of whom I knew, but all of whom took time to express their sympathy, outrage and support. And of course, there was Carole, Bob and their dog, Ash, who made a card for me and came to drop it off.

Via the magic of the worldwide intrawebs, I have also been the recipient of cyber-support from not quite so strange friends and acquaintances, doggy and otherwise, from New Zealand to Nova Scotia, quite literally. If you are reading this, you probably already know where I stand on the authenticity and utility of online communities. I can absolutely assure you that every single Facebook comment, Twitter DM or simple click of the “Like” button under uploaded pictures of the brave but heavily bandaged Buster helped.

It helped me to realise that for every insecure young man who stands by while his patently dangerous dogs attack much-loved pets and innocent passers-by, there are scores and scores of fundamentally good people who will not stand by but rather stand up, with compassion, for their neighbour, whether known to them or not, and for the common good.

The “Big Society” doesn’t necessarily need a Westminster campaign and a huge chunk of taxpayers’ money to get it off the ground. As far as I can tell, and this whole experience has reinforced my conviction: the “Big Society” is alive and well; at least it is in my small corner of South London.

On a more prosaic note, my new local friends and I are now hoping to identify the owner of the dogs. Obviously, being the sad, mad dog woman that you all know I am, I would far rather that they were not destroyed. It is not the dogs themselves who are at fault here. It is their owner who cannot control them and who may even be encouraging their aggression.

However, as yet another of my new e-mail pals pointed out, what if their next victim were a child?

Your Father smelled of Elderberries. When Name Calling turns Nasty

2011-02-07T08:15:00.000-08:00

Apologies. There are no prizes for identifying the source of the quote in the post title above. Any super-annuated school boy of a certain age knows that it is from the justly notorious French taunting scene in Monty Python & the Holy Grail, the 1975 film triumphantly transferred to the stage as Spamalot. If your mother was a hamster, click here to watch the full clip.

I feared the scene might have aged but it remains stubbornly hilarious. Yet as a rule, I abhor this kind of puerile name-calling. It tends to be the last desperate weapon at the bottom of a depleted arsenal and it carries more than a whiff of the playground. I don’t suppose I have been subjected to any sustained name-calling since I left school myself. But that was until I started to engage with Wakefield Family Services; last week I was shocked and saddened to find out quite how rampant their verbal abuse of me has been.

It is quite one thing to be labelled as “posh” or “Southern” – although I am not sure either adjective is especially accurate in my case. I took particular umbrage when I was branded a liar after one shocking episode with my father. I was also referred to as “that deranged woman” (I paraphrase, but you get the gist) in yet another inadvertently forwarded e-mail. The incompetence would have amused if the insult had not been so appalling.

Last week, via an official data protection request, I saw another e-mail exchange – coincidentally between the same matey pair of WFS colleagues – which implied that I was a violent individual, who habitually went round physically attacking the frail and elderly. This is not just name-calling. It is malicious defamation and, by any criteria, libel of the most serious nature.

Not long after Dad’s dementia symptoms first began to cause real problems and I had serious concerns about his welfare, I did manage to have a face-to-face meeting with a member of the relevant Social Work team and with the authority’s Adult Protection Officer himself. They openly acknowledged to me that I was seen as “posh” and “Southern”.

At the time, I was living near Oxford which is certainly south of Yorkshire; so I suppose that sort of made me “Southern” – it’s certainly not an epithet to which you can seriously object. However, the very idea that I was “posh” was hilarious. We concluded that my use of the Queen’s English/received pronunciation might not have done me any favours. Again, only an overly sensitive individual would construe “posh” as particularly defamatory.

I did, however, object vociferously, and in writing, to being labelled a liar. Lying is simply not in my nature. If anything, I have often sacrificed tact for the truth. WFS accused me of falsifying an account of finding Dad alone in his room in a respite home outside Doncaster on a steaming hot July afternoon the summer before he died.

I rushed up north after Dad called one night, in huge distress: he did not know where the hell he was, he was having embarrassing problems with his bowels. Could I come and get him? WFS would not tell me where he was; I was not considered next of kin. Nevertheless, I eventually managed to locate him – via a helpful uncle and Google Earth.

I smelled him before I saw him and the scent was not of elderberries. I found Dad sitting in an airless room, up to his waist in his own faeces. He had been suffering from the vivid hallucinations which came with his Lewy Body Dementia diagnosis and he didn’t feel he knew any of the care home staff well enough to ask for help getting to the loo in time.

The staff at the care home “disputed […my] version of events”. I didn’t press my case too hard. I knew myself full well how long it had taken me to clean Dad up and change his pyjama trousers and his incontinence pants. The sights and smells of that afternoon stayed with me for months. However, someone at the care home might well have lost their job over the incident and that is the last thing I would have wanted.

The latest developments are in another league however. As I write, I am awaiting a response from Wakefield to this latest piece of evidence that I was regularly and casually libelled in written communications between very senior Wakefield personnel. I have also submitted another Data Subject Access Request. Sincere thanks to all of you who have so warmly supported and encouraged me not to give up. You know who you are.

As I wrote to Wakefield’s Head of Legal and Democratic Services last week: “The saddest element of this entire saga is that, rather than use my father’s experiences as a real opportunity to examine its adult protection policies, Wakefield chose instead to “shoot the messenger”. Vulnerable adult abuse is rising as the population ages and dementia rates soar. What a pity Wakefield has no interest in improving the protection of the many frail and elderly council tax payers to whom it owes a duty of care”.

A Few New Year Thoughts. My Main Hope for 2011? Fair Treatment - finally - from Wakefield Council

2011-01-05T04:02:00.000-08:00

The Psycho Spaniels, Harley & Buster, on Wandworth Common in the snow, December 2010

It’s that time of year again, isn’t it? When we think about our hopes and dreams for the coming 12 months and make some resolutions and set ourselves some goals?

For 2011, I have one single hope: that I will finally get justice, or at the very least fair treatment, from Wakefield City Council. Or, if that is just too much to ask, maybe they could start by spelling my name correctly? After all, we have been corresponding for nearly five years now...

To cut an extremely long and tedious story short, here are the headlines:
In April 2009, five months after his undignified and unnecessarily protracted death, I was asked by Wakefield Family Services to cooperate with an investigation into their dealings with my late father, Fred. Naturally, I did so, willingly and courteously, even travelling to Yorkshire at my own expense.

In October 2009, I received a copy of the investigators’ report, which, sadly and inexplicably, contained several material errors concerning key events and more seriously, several highly defamatory references to my own probity and good name. I am an independent freelancer and my entire livelihood naturally depends upon my reputation and upon perceptions of my character.

In November 2009, on the advice of my solicitors, I sent a detailed response to the report, asking, respectfully, for the corrections and clarifications contained therein to be made to the report forthwith. The following e-mail is typical of the responses I subsequently received from Wakefield:

I was finally informed that the two retired social workers who conducted the “independent” investigation refused outright to amend the report to reflect any of our concerns, thus leaving a shockingly defamatory and materially erroneous document in the public domain.

Since then, a series of polite approaches to Wakefield, attempting to resolve matters amicably, have also failed. Wakefield Chief Executive Joanne Roney OBE (annual salary £222,172.00) refuses to meet me. Yvette Cooper, my late father’s MP and regular correspondent, has also elegantly side-stepped all attempts to attract her support for our cause.

I have now been advised that my only recourse is a bound-to-be costly legal action against Wakefield. However, my solicitors will – quite sensibly- not allow me to proceed until I have proved to them that I have amassed a fighting fund of several thousand pounds - which I should also be prepared to lose.

After all, Wakefield is a publicly funded local authority, with its own in-house legal team, all underwritten by the tax payer. I am simply a private individual; one who has been libelled and maliciously defamed in a report which was clearly designed to exonerate Wakefield Family Services from any hint of negligence or complicity in the sustained abuse of my father, a frail and only intermittently lucid, extraordinarily vulnerable old man.

Perhaps I was naïve? When Wakefield told me they were commissioning this report, I sincerely believed that they were taking a real interest in this clear instance of sad and cruel vulnerable adult abuse, that they intended to examine their approach to Dad’s case, in an effort to see whether they might amend their protocols – if only to protect future victims – and there is bound to be thousands of them – from undergoing the trials Dad endured.

With glorious 20-20 hindsight, I now see how naïve I was. The odds were stacked against me, from the start of my Dad’s ordeal in September 2006. As early as 2007, when I finally managed to arrange a face-to-face meeting with one of Dad’s key social workers and Wakefield’s Adult Protection Officer, they openly acknowledged that my intervention was considered “problematic”. That I was seen as “posh” and “Southern”.

Neither of these adjectives is particularly defamatory, I suppose, although I did take exception when an e-mail (between the “Corporate Director, Family Services” and the Customer Services Manager which was inadvertently forwarded to my in-box), described me - more or less - as “that deranged woman”. As I hope you will appreciate, I have to be a bit circumspect in what I disclose now, should I eventually be obliged to take my case to court.

To add insult to injury, a simple query for clarification on Wakefield’s Adult Protection Policy prompted the “Press & PR Manager” to contact the national newspaper for which I was writing an Elder Abuse Awareness day piece. She proceeded to roundly discredit me and my intentions. Sadly, the piece did not get published. Thus, not content with libelling me in a report which was supposed to focus on Wakefield’s interactions with my father, the Council’s employees continue to wage a sustained and underhand campaign of malicious defamation against me. As we say #Twitter: *sighs*

Perhaps I should just give up? The report itself is, by any criteria, a curious document, based entirely on the extraordinary premise that my father retained full mental capacity until his death in December 2008. He didn’t seem particularly lucid to me during his last few weeks, which he spent barely conscious in Monument House Care Unit in Pontefract, tube up both ends, being turned every four hours by the palliative team.

I am not sure either that I would say that someone who was often chased by talking fire engines and who chatted almost daily to my dead brother was entirely compos mentis? Dad’s vivid hallucinations, the distinguishing symptom of Dementia with Lewy Bodies, started in 2006, more than two years before his death and continued throughout the entire period of Wakefield Family Services’ dealings with him. The WFS report seems to think that he suffered from Lewes Bodies, which would be almost charming, if it weren’t a perfect example of the myriad careless errors of fact, syntax, orthography and punctuation which litter the investigators’ report. Clearly, nobody felt it was a significant enough document to bother to proof read?

As I write, I am awaiting the response to a series of requests I have made under the 1998 Data Protection Act and 2000 Freedom of Information Act before proceeding any further. I’ll keep you posted. Meantime, comments – and any advice – more than welcome as ever. Thanks for reading.

Louis Who? You don't have to be mad to have LBD but...

2010-11-08T08:10:00.000-08:00

My father, Fred Jackson, receives the Imperial Service Order from His Excellency Sir Edward Youde, Governor of Hong Kong

This week is Lewy Body Dementia Awareness Week in the UK and about time too. Very few people have even heard of LBD. As a result, the terminal condition is often misdiagnosed, compounding the already myriad frustrations of sufferers, their families & friends. The slogan of the UK's Lewy Body Society is: "The more people who know, the fewer people who suffer".

If you'd like to learn a bit more about LBD and its consequences, please read on - and thank you for your time.

“Is that Dominick?” The woman was not merely anxious. Something akin to terror in her voice forced me awake. I peered at my watch. It was ten past five in the morning.

“It’s your father. Can you get yourself down here, quick as you like? No, not exactly. We’re in the car park. Off of Friarwood Lane.”

I spotted them immediately: Dad stood shivering, shaking his head vigorously on the pavement outside the hospital, propped up against a low wall. He wore only a grubby pair of regulation hospital issue pyjamas, which stopped a good six inches above his ankles. On his feet, I spied his old leather brogues, perfectly laced up over a pair of paisley socks.

It was clear that the three nurses in attendance were having no luck persuading him to return to the ward. Personally, I didn’t blame him. The very thought of a talking fire engine under the bed would have sent me scarpering down the fire escape and out, into the relative safety of the car park, too. He did, though, make sure he was properly shod. Well, as he later explained to me earnestly, he wasn’t going to get far, wearing just his slippers.

That was in September 2006. It was the first time that Dad experienced one of the vivid hallucinations which are the hallmark of Lewy Body Dementia, although it would be several months before he received this diagnosis. In a way, he was lucky. Some LBD victims never receive the correct diagnosis or, if they do, it is late in the day when anti-psychotic drugs routinely used for other forms of dementia may already have been prescribed; these can lead to serious side effects and, in some cases, death.

LBD – sometimes called DLB - is a form of dementia which shares symptons with both Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s Diseases. It is named after Alois Alzheimer’s colleague, Frederick Lewy (1885-1950) who, in 1912, identified the eponymous ‘bodies’ or abnormal protein deposits in the brain which disrupt normal function. LBD was virtually unknown until around a decade ago, when scientists in the United Kingdom, Japan and the U.S. collaborated on the pioneering research which finally established LBD as a distinct condition.

A major problem with diagnosis is that every sufferer is different and manifests different degrees of the characteristic symptoms. Some show no signs of certain features, especially in the early stages. Symptoms may fluctuate as much as moment-to-moment, hour-to-hour or day-to-day.

The main characteristics include general mental decline and lowered attention span. Dad’s diagnosis was ultimately confirmed by vivid hallucinations just like the one described above. He would often return to his navy days, quite literally reliving his D-Day experiences on Juno Beach as he unloaded the tanks of the 3rd Canadian Infantry. He was frequently adamant he was back in Hong Kong, where he served as a distinguished officer in the territory’s Fire Brigade for more than 30 years.

Most days, he was visited by my late brother who apparently sat chatting, at the end of his bed. I was relieved to hear that Rory, who died after a long illness in 1995, was back in rude health and as irreverent and infectiously hilarious as ever.

Possibly the strangest phenomenon was the imaginary cup of tea he often sat nursing all day, complete with extended pinkie finger. Now, if he had said that it was a glass of Bacardi & Coke that only he could see, perhaps more of us would have believed him...

I jest, but smiles are few and far between with LBD. My father was also intermittently, but severely, depressed for the first time in eight decades, during which he had had to bury both his wife and his son. He also began to suffer terribly from distressing fluctuations in autonomic processes, such as blood pressure, bowel and bladder function and body temperature.

Mini-strokes made him fall face-first through the front door of the bungalow, onto the concrete drive. Sheer shame prevented him from asking unfamiliar nursing staff for help, when his bowels failed more than once in the care homes where my stepmother would frequently send him for respite. Unsteady on his feet, he fell again and broke his arm late one night, when she had shoved him, just a tad too hard, in exhausted frustration.

According to the Alzheimer’s Research Trust, 820,000 people in the UK are currently living with dementia with LBD thought to account for up to five per cent of this total. Yet LBD remains perversely little known and still barely understood.

Despite his 2007 diagnosis, Wakefield Family Services who had regular and frequent responsibility for my father during the last three years of his life continue to insist that my father was 100 per cent compos mentis and remained entirely lucid until the day he died in December 2008. This is a central tenet of the WFS report into their dealings with my father. My fight to get Wakefield to correct this report's many material errors of fact and to expunge the serial and serious libellous and defamatory references contained therein continues. Watch this space.

This stubborn insistence is based, I presume, on the fact that Dad, a man who, in his middle age, taught himself to read, write and speak Chinese, despite a truncated formal education, routinely scored 18 out of 20 in the regular mini mental tests for which he assiduously prepared. You know the type of thing. "What's your address, Fred? Do you know the name of the Prime Minister? Can you remember your date of birth? Who's a clever boy then!"

Strangely, Clare, his favourite mental health nurse, never actually visited Dad at the same time as my dead brother did. Funny that, when you come to think of it.

The Lewy Body Society has a Facebook page here. In the United States, the LBDA does a similar, sterling job of raising awareness.

He ain't Heavy.... Happy Birthday RPJ!

2010-09-26T09:53:00.001-07:00

Rory Patrick Jackson
Hong Kong 26 September 1964- London 16th May 1994

Honestly, I could have killed him. My brother, that is. How many times over the years did I have cause (and a just one at that) to utter the self-same threat? If you knew my brother (and I suspect many of you reading this will remember him well), you would seriously sympathise...& with me, of course…

This time, it was different. I really could have killed him and I very nearly did. For a start, it would have been so easy and besides, I had been up all night and frankly, I had had enough. My rib cage was cranking in on the squishy bits inside, my pelvis was no longer connected and the mother of all hangovers was starting to pulse in the base of my skull. But that, as they say, is quite another story, (although it is one I will try and come back to a little bit later).

“Do you have any siblings?” It’s a reasonable enough question; tends to come in the top ten at a dinner party, somewhere below “What do you do?” but usually ahead of “New Labour or Old Tory?”.

Well, funnily enough, I do. I have a brother. Just because he is a dead brother doesn’t mean he is not my brother any more. He’s not my ex-brother, or even my former brother. The evidence is there: in a thousand childhood photos, in that unmistakeably identical nose. I have a brother and just because he’s a dead brother doesn’t mean that today is somehow no longer his birthday.

Just because Rory has shuffled off this mortal coil, it doesn’t mean I won’t be raising a Bacardi Coke or two to him. Obviously it is a pity he’s not here to pay for a few rounds of birthday drinks. But then again, when did Rory ever pay? For his own drinks, let alone anyone else’s!

I can’t pretend it’s not often awkward: having a dead brother, that is. There’s simply no word for the sibling-less. Rory’s death did not make me an orphan or a widow – although, perhaps quite carelessly – I am now both the latter and the former.

“I’m so sorry to hear that,” is the usual polite, if embarrassed, response, “What was he like, your brother?” I’m aware I tend to respond with the wriest of smiles. You mates of his will understand my predicament. How to describe Rory? I usually resort to a now oft-repeated, slightly trite formula.

“Well, if you can imagine Robbie Williams crossed with Graham Norton, then you might get a teeny tiny idea of what my brother was like?” Charming, vulnerable, handsome, talented, creative, funny, camp, bitchy, outrageous, needy, irresistible – need I go on? But I digress. One of my main incentives for writing this post was the number of Rory’s friends to whom I owe an overdue and protracted e-mail.

IMHO, you gotta love the worldwide intrawebs and social media - which I passionately do. I am now, extremely gratefully, in touch with scores of old friends, including childhood playmates from Hong Kong, many of whom were trying to get back in touch with Rory & only found me: the scary, bespectacled big sister, back from boarding school. Where is he? Can I have his e-mail? What happened? How? When?

You’ll forgive me if I keep to the bare bones? In my (sadly too broad) experience, the brain really tends to box up & seal the stuff which is just too painful to dredge up on a regular basis…. Rory came back to the UK from Hong Kong in about 1982, having achieved no academic success but having scored widespread and popular notoriety at King George V School. My fault again, I guess, why bother to clock up any exam results when your boring big sis already had more than sufficient for one family?

He made a desultory attempt to take a few more exams but then finally found his métier in hairdressing (stands to reason: creative, adventurous, gift of the gab et al..) For a while, the future looked bright & Rory, being Rory, was having a huge amount of fun – (tbh? I was never quite sure about the hair salon/pet shop combo idea – particularly as I was supposed to be the main investor…)

In the late 1980s, Rory was diagnosed with something called HTLV-III – the first official designation for what we now know as HIV-Aids. At that time – though it is difficult to cast our minds back quite so far to such a dark age – it was thought they had only a few months to live. Rory, and his partner Patrick, decided that they would enjoy whatever time they had left and whoever succumbed first would be cared for by the one who – hopefully – remained healthy.

And that is exactly what happened – although Rory managed to stay perfectly well for far, far longer than any of us had originally expected. At my 1992 wedding, he was frail but handsome as ever in his morning suit, full of acerbic observation, graciously holding court.

By 1994, he seemed bored. His increasing frailty meant he was increasingly housebound: he and I had to give up our weekly cinema trips, our rendezvous in hidden-away pubs. He seemed, more than ever, to be awaiting a reunion with our mother, who had reluctantly left us, a combative victim of breast cancer, in 1975.

I could go on. If you’d like to read my 1996 memoir of Mum & Rory (“I went as a Zebra – and won 1st prize”) I am planning to transcribe it to the web in a form which will be available to download in the next couple of weeks. If you have questions I haven’t answered above, please don’t hesitate to contact me directly via this e-mail address - dominiquej@atlas.co.uk.

In the meantime, if you are able, please raise a glass – Bacardi Coke or similar would be most fitting – to Rory Patrick Jackson – 26/09/64-16/05/94). Thanks, as ever, for reading.

If Dementia Care were a Country.....Guess how Big it would Be? (& then Guess again...)

2010-09-21T07:15:00.000-07:00

Uncle Fred & Uncle Ted in 2006 (a few months before Dad's Dementia with Lewy Bodies was correctly diagnosed)

Today is World Alzheimer's Day. Or did you forget? Boom Boom!!

Personally, I tend to be against singling out one day of 365 to remind us of any particular cause. I am rather more for a constant, even if low level, general awareness of the problem in focus.

However, in our 24/7 global, increasingly trivialised, news cycle, perhaps these annual events do serve some sort of purpose? I wasn't even aware it was World Alzheimer's Day, until I woke up this morning to the gently hectoring tones of the Today Programme on BBC Radio 4, discussing a new report on the global costs of dementia care. The statistics were so scary, I immediately marshalled my attention.

According to the report, commissioned by Alzheimer's Disease International (ADI), the worldwide costs of dementia will reach US$604 billion in 2010, which represents more than one per cent of global GDP. If the latter figure means nothing to you, look at it this way: if dementia care were a country, it would be the 18th largest world economy, ranking between Turkey and Indonesia. If dementia care were a company, it would be the largest, by revenue, in the world; bigger than Wal-Mart, bigger than Exxon-Mobil.

As populations continue to age, ADI also predicts that dementia cases will almost double every 20 years - to around 66 million in 2030 and 115 million in 2050 - with much of the rise in poorer nations. Low-income nations currently account for under one per cent of total worldwide costs, the report said, but have 14 per cent of the cases of dementia, while middle-income nations account for 10 per cent of the costs and 40 per cent of the prevalence.

Scary stuff, isn't it? Ageing populations and soaring rates of dementia have huge economic and social implications and the sheer scale of the problem means that most of us will be affected - in one way or another.

Sadly, rising rates of dementia also mean rising rates of vulnerable adult abuse. It is already relatively easy to take advantage of a frail and vulnerable old person.

It is exponentially easier to take advantage of one who may not be entirely in the here and now. This is exactly what happened so frequently with my father, whose LBD hallucinations took him back to Hong Kong, to his Navy days and D-Day in particular and also to happier times, when my brother Rory was alive, on a regular basis.

Dad & Rory in London's Fleet Street (both very much alive...)

I was all set to write an article for a national newspaper to mark Elder Abuse Awareness Day last June. Sadly, and mainly for legal reasons, it was not published. Once these legal restrictions have been resolved, I sincerely hope I am able to finally tell my father's story - as it deserves to be told. Until then, please keep reading.

Text Us All Your £$@#-ing Money! New Media make Donating a Doddle. So Why is it still so Hard to DO good?

2010-04-19T10:32:00.000-07:00

Is it really nearly 25 years since Mr Robert Frederick Zenon Geldof urged; “Just give us your £$@#*&-ing money!” from the Live Aid stage? At the risk of revealing my age, I will admit I went straight down to the post office on the following Monday, filled out the requisite form and donated the few shillings I could then afford.

Since then – and thank goodness – giving to charity has become exponentially easier. Thanks to the marvels of the worldwide intrawebs and social media in particular, we can now set up our very own fundraising pages to cajole our mates into coughing up. Today’s telethons only have to flash up a text number and a few dreary T&Cs and you can salve your conscience with a simple SMS. Yet, if only it were quite so simple to give something other than money?

Don’t misunderstand me. I’m all for donating hard cash, especially if time is in short supply. It is now easier than ever thanks to sites like Justgiving.com, “Fundraising made easy!” (Other fundraising sites are available). Only this week, I’ve been able to divest myself of a few tenners with a few simple clicks. Once for a very old friend – amazing feat at your age, Niall – and once for a relatively new one – great job, Jude! Both ran marathons, Paris and Brighton respectively, both for excellent causes that I just don’t have the time or the funds to support regularly. (I do, however, have slightly less sympathy for people on extended exotic jaunts who need “a minimum £5K to cover my expedition costs…")

I’ve seen the power of JG and social media in action myself, when my own last attempt at raising a few charity squids featured on their blog. I soon exceeded my original £500 target and ended up raising nearly £3K for the Royal Marsden where my brother-in-law was successfully treated for cancer.

The magic of mobile, in the form of text-to-give, now plays an increasingly vital role, particularly for one-off campaigns & disaster appeals. Millions of dollars were texted to the U.S. Red Cross within 48 hours of January's Haiti earthquake. Last month’s UK Sport Relief saw more than 10 per cent of its total £31.6m come via text.

So far, so great for charities. But what if you’re still feeling slightly credit-crunched or your pockets simply aren’t that deep? Between charming chuggers and old mates running for heartbreaking causes, we all have a lot of call on our spare cash these days. What if you would just like to DO something good for a change? Change the world with a random act of kindness? Be a good neighbour? A mentor? One of Dave’s shiny new citizens? In the last 13 years, it has become practically impossible.

I’ve already written on this forum about the tragic case of Derrick and Jean Randall, found dead in their bungalow before Christmas. Neighbours had tried to alert the relevant authorities, only to be told it was “none of their business”. I was told the same thing several times during the last months of my father’s life; Social Services refused to tell me where he had been sent for respite – I was not next-of-kin, thus, the whereabouts of my frail, confused, often incontinent father was “none of my business”.

The same Social Services department asked last year if I would cooperate with an investigation into their dealings with my father. I readily agreed, hoping the exercise might help raise awareness of the vulnerable adult abuse to which he was subjected. Sadly, their eventual report contained several material errors of fact and scores of libellous references to myself, my uncle and the distinguished solicitor who tried her best to help my father while he was still alive.

Despite repeated requests, the local authority in question refuses to correct even the factual errors while their chief executive (annual salary c.£200K) refuses to meet with me. I’m now saving for formal libel action – to correct a report with which I fully cooperated! There is obviously more I'd like to write about the above. However, as much is still sub judice, I am advised that this blog itself (sole aim: to raise awareness of elder abuse and of Lewy Body Dementia) could be jeopardised if I do. As we say in 140 chars: *sighs*

In other news, the mentoring/careers advice network I have been trying to set up with some old college friends has also been held up – not exactly by the now ubiquitious CRB checks for anyone suggesting direct contact with young people but, sadly, by the machinations of good old office politics at the old college itself. Is it any wonder that I am reduced to the far simpler gesture of doling out dosh?

I am far from the only one frustrated. One of the great "Endeavours" slots at LikeMinds in Exeter in February was by Malcolm Scovill, who was so frustrated at how difficult it was to volunteer, he ended up founding LeapAnywhere. Read his inspiring story here. Another NFP approaching volunteering in a practical and constructive way is Timebank.

I am also really heartened that so many of my friends, particularly the younger ones, have taken the Facebook Page campaign so much to heart? Even it is for Feel Your Boobies or should that be especially if it is for campaigns like Feel Your Boobies?! Raising awareness is the first step for any campaign, any cause and that is why I remain determined to keep this blog going and to widen the scope, just as soon as I get the green light....

Very best of luck to all the mad London Marathon lot btw!

Tangerines at No 10? Why do Bullies Bully and How One Office Bully ended my Fleet Street Career

2010-02-25T01:15:00.000-08:00

The saga of bullying in Downing Street rumbles on and becomes increasingly complex and arcane, as tends to happen, when the salacious details contained in the original allegations dry up. Mrs Brown tells us how “strong” her husband is. The Chancellor of the Exchequer refers coyly to “robust exchanges”.

Nevertheless, the story itself has the uncomfortable ring of truth about it. Andrew Rawnsley is one of the most respected political commentators of his generation, far too canny – at this juncture of his career - to go into print without being confident that his sources are indeed: “24-carat”.

The story is also extremely plausible: almost all of us has first-hand experience of bullying, whether it was just the lunky guy on the school bus, hassling for your dinner money, or the frustrated colleague, using abuse and coercion because he has rage management issues and has run out of civilised options with which to get his own way.

Trade unions have been quick to exploit the story: according to Unison, more than 30 per cent of workers say they have been bullied in the workplace in the last six months – at huge cost to the economy. Job insecurity, increased workloads and cost cutting due to the current recession are likely to see office bullying on the rise.

Savvy companies now realise it is in their interest to take a firm stance on bullying. Allegations which go to tribunal (200,000 last year, up one third since 2006) can be costly while the concomitant effects on workplace morale and productivity are equally damaging.

I was the victim of an office bully in the mid-1990s, sadly long before the problem was openly acknowledged, let alone tackled sensibly. A new boss, a recovering alcoholic recently returned from an overseas posting, decided he needed to appropriate the tiny enclave of foreign news coverage I was editing at the time.

He was a regular Jekyll and Hyde; one day it would be: “Remind me exactly how much we pay you and what it is you actually do to earn that amount?” The next would be: “Your husband is in Sussex and my wife is in Oxfordshire, so why won’t you come for a drink with me?” This was not, however, sexual harassment. It was naked, unnecessary aggression. I still have no idea what I might have done to attract quite so much cruel opprobrium from one individual. His reaction when I returned to work after the death of my younger brother, Rory, does not bear repetition.

Sadly, I was also caught in the interregnum between two editors, neither of whom seemed particularly willing to involve themselves in my plight. It was not until the NUJ became involved that they woke up. I eventually – and reluctantly – left with a cheque for a year’s money, on the understanding that I did not discuss the exact circumstances of my departure. The bully himself is still at the newspaper, writing a regular column, no less.

The Downing Street saga has prompted a rash of thumb-sucking columns about bullies and bullying. Why do they do it? Feelings of inadequacy on the part of the bully appear to figure highly.

Bullying is also a key element of elder abuse. As older people become more physically frail, they are no longer able to stand up to bullying or defend themselves if physically assaulted. They may also be mentally and emotionally frail, making them literally defenceless against bullying in the many forms it can take. It may not be an excuse but I can now see that one of my father’s key abusers resorted to bullying due to frustration, exhaustion and inability to cope with an infirm, incontinent and not always fully lucid 13-stone man. However, not all of the individuals who conspired to make my father's final months so tortuous had anything like such an excuse.

Haïti Thoughts #1 – Firemen don’t just fight Fires

2010-01-22T05:41:00.001-08:00

This image copyright BBC News

The sheer scale of the loss of life and devastation in Haïti is far beyond the comprehension of most horrified First World viewers. We sit comfortably among soft furnishings on sofas, in warm, solid and impermeable houses, watching the crisis unfold on our over-sized television screens. Haïti has certainly kicked early January’s grumblings about the UK snow into rather sharper perspective.

The bereavement and misery beaming across the Atlantic is so shocking that, unsurprisingly, news organisations on the ground are constantly on the look out for stories with some sort of happy ending – no matter how qualified that happiness might be.

I cannot believe I was the only viewer weeping, when a team of UK firefighters located and rescued two-year old Mia, who had been trapped under the ruins of her nursery in Port-au-Prince for more than 72 hours. Mia was reportedly initially located by Echo, an Urban Search and Rescue dog with the team of volunteers from Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue who flew out to Haïti last week.

More than 60 firefighters, from services in Manchester, Lancashire, West Sussex, Kent, the West Midlands, Lincolnshire, Hampshire and mid and west Wales, have been helping out in Haïti. Many of them were deployed by Rapid UK, a UK-based NGO, specialising in the relief of human suffering and distress in the aftermath of disasters, anywhere in the world.

Watching the British firefighters working tirelessly in Haïti reminded me of just how versatile these men have to be. Firemen do not just fight fires; far from it. These men and women are the members of the original emergency service, dedicated to protecting life, property and the environment – whether they are assisting at a fire, a car crash, or as in this case, a natural disaster. They are also invariably the first on the scene at unnatural disasters: 343 members of the New York Fire Department perished in the ruins of the Twin Towers on 9/11.

When my father, Fred Jackson, joined the Fire Brigade in Doncaster in 1947, his initial weekly salary was £4-10/- (four pounds & ten shillings - £4.50, in today’s money; about US$7.25). Fortunately, salaries have moved on somewhat since then, as have the technology, the engineering and associated fire appliances. This progress has helped to reduce disaster mortality rates, if only in developed countries.

Growing up in Hong Kong, my brother, Rory, and I were acutely aware that my father had a very important job, something that had to do with saving lives. He always had to remain in 24-hour radio or telephone contact with HQ; his weekends were often truncated and our free time with him was always overshadowed by the baleful presence of “Control”.

On a brief family break on the offshore island of Lantau in the early 1970s, Dad was spirited away one morning before breakfast. He did not return until early evening, covered in blood, soot and oil. He was also very quiet – a familiar sign that he had been at a fire or incident with fatalities. Next day, Mum told us that a minibus had crashed into a ravine. Dad had supervised the rescue operation and had personally freed half a dozen of the 23 survivors; 17 other passengers died.

Dad was also in charge in June 1972, when a steep hillside on Hong Kong Island collapsed, following days of unprecedented heavy rains, sweeping away a 13-storey apartment block on Kotewall Road. The incident itself was vividly, and terrifyingly, fictionalised by Rhodesian-born writer John Gordon-Davis in his 1978 novel Typhoon. In real life, 67 people perished. The half a dozen survivors whom my father was responsible for digging out remained in contact with him until his death in 2008.

That firefighters who already have such dangerous day jobs should volunteer to help out at disasters such as the crisis currently playing out in Haïti is extraordinarily humbling. We have all heard about Médecins sans Frontières; yet who knew that MSF had a sister organisation? Firemen without Borders.

This image copyright Greater Manchester Fire & Rescue Service

Rapid UK may be best known for search and rescue in the aftermath of sudden onset disasters, yet two-thirds of their efforts go into overseas training. They return to countries where they have previously deployed in an emergency, to provide training to expand capacity and thus mitigate the effects of future disasters. They also help to facilitate the donation of redundant UK emergency vehicles, such as ambulances and fire engines, to countries in need.

Rapid UK is entirely funded by donations and does not receive any funds from the UK Government, from the Disasters Emergency Committee or any other generic fund raising organisations or charities. Click here to find out more about their work.

Echo, and his furry friend back in Manchester, fire investigations dog Cracker, also have their own blog here - although it has been said that Crew Commander Mike Dewar helps them out from time to time.

“They told us it was none of our business…” – How Data Protection may have done for Derrick & Jean Randall

2010-01-13T08:43:00.001-08:00

Dad, determined to be "useful" - on one of his last visits to Bedlam

The unimaginably sad end of elderly couple, Derrick and Jean Randall, found dead in their Northamptonshire bungalow last week, has triggered a predictable round of: “What is society coming to?” headlines, with an equally noisy backdrop of slamming stable doors and suitably sorrowful sound bites from the relevant authorities.

There is never anything pleasant or easy about the end of anybody’s life, no matter how old, how frail or how ill. Yet even my dear old Dad spent his last three weeks, in a comfortable room, in a slightly scruffy but clean and bright care home, being ministered to by a team of kindly nurses and palliative carers whose professionalism and dedication to their delicate tasks we never doubted for a second. The briefest trip to the dismal parallel universe of geriatric care would convince the hardest cynic that “society” is still alive and very much kicking – and caring.

There are clearly several complex issues surrounding the Randalls’ case but I agree with their MP, Sally Keeble, who raised the tragedy in the Commons earlier this week: “People say: 'Oh, they were reclusive', but I don't really accept that argument”.

What chilled me most about the reports of the Randalls’ death were the interviews with many of the couple’s neighbours, who insisted they had tried to contact both local social services and relevant charities:

“When I said, no, I wasn’t related to the Randalls, they said that it was none of our business. There was nothing they – or we – could do...”

The reason one concerned neighbour, Heather Footitt, and others were unable to get the relevant authorities to take their concerns about the Randalls seriously, or to act on them, is down to the now extremely stringent rules and regulations surrounding data protection in this country.

In this era of cyber-bullying, financial hackery and identity theft, it certainly makes sense to have some sort of data protection in force. Yet the act itself has now become highly complex and social workers and other local authority employees are now in terror of breaching its increasingly convoluted proscriptions. Consequently, there is now no scope whatsoever for the latter individuals to apply a reasonable dose of logic and common sense to individual cases. Surely Mrs Footitt did not have to be next-of-kin to have her very real concerns about the Randalls’ welfare taken seriously? It appears that she did.

I speak from experience. As many of you know, I am unable to go into detail about events during my father’s final months, many of which remain sub judice. So I won’t, for now, be identifying the local authority whose Family Services Department refused, on scores of occasions, to tell me anything at all about the welfare, well-being and often the physical location of my own father, even as his dementia progressed.

Late one Sunday night at the end of July 2008, my mobile went. I saw it was my father, calling from the cell phone we had given him, and answered immediately.

“They are sending me away again, Doh. I don’t know where to. I don’t know when. Tonight or tomorrow. I don’t know when I am coming home. Or if I am coming home. Will you come and get me? Please?”

By this stage, Dad was in the latter stages of Dementia with Lewy Bodies which often made him confused, with vivid, debilitating hallucinations. The DLB had also begun to affect many of his autonomic systems, leading to bouts of bowel and bladder incontinence, which particularly assaulted his natural dignity.

Next morning I called the Social Work team with whom I had been in regular contact regarding our very serious concerns about Dad. I explained about the upsetting phone call, my father’s audible distress and fear and asked if they might let me know to which of their care homes my father had been sent?

“Sorry, Ms Jackson, but we can’t tell you where your father is - as you are not next-of-kin”.

As data protection stands, despite being Dad’s sole, surviving, child, I simply had no rights whatsoever - to be informed about his location, health or indeed survival. Dad’s official next of kin, his spouse, my step-mother, who had left unexpectedly for an unspecified location and an unspecified period of respite – something we never begrudged her – had popped him into an ambulance, with a few pairs of pyjamas and a list of his medication. But the social worker was not going to tell me where my Dad was, or far more importantly, whether he was alright. She was not even prepared to leave a message with the care home, asking Dad to get in touch with us.

“If I told you where Fred was, Ms Jackson, I could well lose my job…”

My mobile rang again; it was my Dad, in tears: “Can you come and get me? I’ve had a few problems with my waterworks and that? I don’t know anybody here and I don’t want to ask them for this kind of help…”

I did finally locate Dad, thanks to Google Earth and to some well-remembered directions from his brother-in-law. In what state I found him is another story which I will definitely be relating, once it is, of course, legally safe to do so…

I would never have wanted that social worker to jeopardise her job; yet how I wish someone in her department might have lifted their eyes from the box-ticking, the protocols and the pathways to see that I was not a serial killer, trying to find out where my next victim was hiding. I was just a loyal daughter, responding to a pitiful and heart-rendingly desperate plea from my sole surviving, frail and ailing parent.

Likewise, if just one person at Northampton Social Services had been able - or indeed brave enough - to join the dots between all the anxious calls about the Randalls from Heather Footitt and other neighbours, perhaps Jean and Derrick would have received the support they clearly so desperately needed – before it was so tragically too late?

World Aids Day: Me, Carla, Complacency & my pal, Patrick

2009-12-01T10:06:00.000-08:00

Well, I never. Me & Carla? Who would have thought it? I can see that you may not believe it - you have all seen my - more or less - non-airbrushed avatar, after all. However, it IS true. I do have something in common with Mme Bruni-Sarkozy, super chic, erstwhile super-model, surviving Stones-ex, presidential consort, tricksy lyrical Franco-Italian chanteuse. Until today, I had no idea that Carla, like me, had also lost her beloved brother to HIV/Aids.

“Because of my brother, of course I am very sensitive to the issue of Aids…”

It could be me talking but, in fact, it is the the supermodel-turned singer, speaking to Elle magazine. Carla’s photographer brother, Virginio, died of an AIDS-related illness in 2006. The title of her third album "Comme si de rien n'etait" (As If Nothing Happened) is named after one of Virginio's photographs. He was 46.

My own brother Rory died, aged 29 in 1995. My World Aids Day post last year - which explains a bit more about him - is here. In it, I tried my best to explain my fury and my frustration at the prejudice and ignorance which surrounded HIV/Aids in the early 1990s. Things have, thankfully, moved on somewhat since then and mortality patterns have changed dramatically. In developed countries, such as the US or the UK, where HAART (highly active anti-retroviral therapy) is now widely available, an HIV diagnosis is no longer the terminal sentence it was two decades ago.

Nevertheless, the number of people, globally, living with HIV has risen, from around 8 million in 1990 to 33 million today, and is still growing. Around 67% of people living with HIV are now in sub-Saharan Africa. We cannot afford, to quote NBF Carla, to be complacent.

We all suffer from degrees of complacency – in all aspects of our lives. Earlier this year, I realised that I had been horribly complacent about my relationship with Rory’s partner, Patrick, who unexpectedly died in March this year.

When Rory was ill, he made me promise more than once, that should he “not get better” than I would faithfully “keep an eye” on Pat, his partner in crime and probably much else for more than a decade. I assented several times, (mainly in order to move the conversation onto less morbid subjects). But blow me, my little “Bother” did die on me, leaving me with the then unenviable task of keeping to my word. Patrick was a quiet, only occasionally camp, casualty of a misjudged 1960s marriage, a highly intelligent and sensitive auto-didact, with a passion for art and architecture, and a zest for life and experience that the straitened circumstances of his childhood and adolescence had effectively denied him.

My brother was dead; his ashes interred in my mother’s grave. What could I possibly have in common with this shy bloke, whose relationship with my sibling I had never fully understood? There is no space here to go into the details of my own 20-odd year relationship with Patrick. That story would need a novel to do it justice.

However, we eventually became dear, dear friends and when he died, aged only 49, I was utterly and debilitatingly devastated. Pat did not die of HIV/Aids – (although, succumbing to pressure from friends such as myself, he had finally taken the test and, for the last few years, he had been receiving the latest anti-retroviral therapies from an extraordinary medical team at UCH in London). In the end, he succumbed to a primary cancer, horribly, but mercifully swiftly and more courageously and stoically than I can adequately explain. He thus joined the First World statistics of boys (yes, they are mainly) who are HIV positive but who do not, and will not, ultimately have Aids on their death certificates.

You no doubt will be acquainted with somebody who is HIV positive – whether you are consciously aware of that fact or not. New and ever better drugs mean that our siblings, cousins and friends have been able to continue living under the shadow of this once terminal diagnosis for the best part of two decades. It does not, however, mean that any of us should be in any way complacent about the fact that they are – for the moment – still here with us.

From Flanders Fields to Fallujah, Alemain to Afghanistan. Have Tweeting troops and Milbloggers brought us any nearer to Peace in our Time?

2009-11-11T03:04:00.000-08:00

(This image - copyright Steven Danby)

It may be just me getting older, but the 11th Day of the 11th Month seems to come around again each year faster than the last. It is now more than 90 years since the Allies signed the Armistice with Germany, ending the Great War, in a railway carriage parked up in the forest of Compiègne in 1918.

The last swift 12 months also saw the sad passing of Britain’s last fighting Tommies, World War One veterans: Henry Allingham, Harry Patch and Bill Stone. Nobody who watched the 112-year old Allingham try, try again and finally fail, to lay his wreath at last year’s Cenotaph service can have any doubt as to the character of this man and of his generation.

My own father, Fred Jackson ISO, QFSM, CPM, a veteran of the D-Day Normandy Landings, also passed away last December, so this is the first year that I will watch today’s services of Remembrance alone, without Dad’s informed and emotional running commentary.

Many Great War survivors never spoke of the horrors they witnessed. Most extant documentary is limited to scrawled missives, somehow delivered home from the Trenches and, perhaps more affecting, some of the most powerful English poetry ever written, from such as Wilfred Owen and John MacRae.

Today, arguably, we know more about the theatre of war than we might honestly wish to know. Photographers and film crews embedded with US and British forces in Iraq and Afghanistan may operate under official restrictions, but they are still able to give us a far more comprehensive picture of life on the frontline than we have ever seen before.

At the same time, the explosion in on-line self publishing, the rise of the Milblog and a recent profusion of frontline forces using Social Media tools, such as Twitter, has given anyone who chooses to tune in, a far more candid, soldier’s eye, view of what it is really like, day-to-day, defending Queen and Country. The Americans are already worried about the impact of these new, almost impossible to police, channels although they have yet to be banned.

But has this new, if still slightly tentative, source of grass roots information, and the supposed transparency it heralds, done anything at all to alter public opinion about the legitimacy of what is being prosecuted in the world’s most visible war zones?

I have already posted about Stars-and-Stripes draped caskets on my photojournalism blog and about whether or not the powers that be have legitimate cause to fear the widespread dissemination of these eloquent images. Here in Britain, we have seen a plethora of similar images over the last 48 hours, with the sobering total of six corpses repatriated only yesterday – five men, the victim of a single Afghan police assassin; one of them, Jimmy Major, 48 hours short of his 18th birthday.

Over the same news cycle, Prime Minister Gordon Brown has come under fire for his perceived callous treatment of grieving mother Jacqui Janes. If the blanket coverage of Mrs Janes’ grievances and of the silent tributes as cortège after cortège trundles through the town of Wootton Bassett is anything to go by, the Mainstream Media are now closely tracking a groundswell of public animus against the War in Afghanistan.

A total of 232 British forces personnel have died in Afghanistan since 2001. I used to keep a tally of the fallen on my Babel@Bedlam blog but scrapped the widget months ago. It was simply too depressing. A recent poll for the Independent newspaper showed that 46 per cent of voters believe the continued presence of British troops is compounding security anxieties back home.

I haven’t been down to Wootton Bassett myself. I don’t need to. The hearses carrying the coffins of the latest broken boys drive practically past my front door, along the A420 trunk road from RAF Lyneham, en route to the John Radcliffe Hospital in Oxford. In July, I practically crashed the car returning home, as the chilling sight of not one, not two, but five Union Flag draped coffins filed slowly past on the other carriageway.

Only last month, I was held up by a stern police motorcycle outrider, as I attempted to join the main road, on my way home from walking the dogs along the Thames tow path at Radcot. This time, only one hearse went past, with an escort more usually seen in London, accompanying some visiting dignitary’s motorcade.

Yet one coffin was more than enough for me. I burst into hot, angry tears and wept so noisily, and for so long, that Harley, our young springer spaniel bitch, squeezed through the mesh of the dog guard and jumped onto my lap, to find out what on earth could possibly be so wrong.

Requiescat in Pacem.

Elder Abuse: How much longer can "the hidden problem" stay hidden - as Dementia Rates continue to rise?

2009-09-21T03:02:00.000-07:00

DR. ALOIS ALZHEIMER (1864-1915)

More gloomy statistics have just emerged about the inexorable rise of dementia across the globe. Experts from King’s College London predict that more than 115 million people will succumb to senile dementia by 2050. Dementia victims are patently more vulnerable to elder abuse than their lucid contemporaries – as I saw with my own father who was exploited exponentially, as his Lewy Body Dementia progressed.

This incontrovertible fact is being played out in the headlines which continue to emerge from New York where 85-year old Anthony Marshall is on trial for Grand Larceny for allegedly attempting to defraud his wealthy socialite mother, Brooke Astor, of millions of dollars, as she languished in poor physical and mental health over the last few years of her life. This week, prosecutors told the court that Mrs Astor’s Alzheimer’s had progressed so far by the early years of this century that she no longer knew where she lived and was convinced by her son that she did not have sufficient funds to buy herself a new dress.

The King’s research is part of the 2009 World Alzheimer’s Report and sees the number of dementia sufferers set to double every 20 years, to more than 65 million by 2030. The report highlights the economic impact of our ever-ageing world, as advances in healthcare and nutrition see the grey population continuing to grow.

Report contributor, Professor Martin Prince made a heartfelt plea for increased awareness: “Current investment in research, treatment and care is quite disproportionate to the overall impact of the disease on people with dementa, the carers, on health and social care systems, and on society".

Only a few weeks ago, leading geriatricians in the United Kingdom warned that the ageing population, coupled with this rise in dementia could break Britain's National Health Service. In a plea for more research investment, 11 specialists predicted that the economic burden of dementia would reach £35 billion within 20 years.

Professor Roy Weller makes an eloquent plea for more research funding here:

Mrs Astor in her Park Avenue penthouse, days before her 100th birthday in 2002.

Back in NYC, the Brooke Astor trial, which has limped on and on, since April, finally heard closing arguments last week. I hope to use this forum to post on the verdict as soon as it is announced.

Elderly Abuse? "The next social Explosion"

2009-08-30T09:40:00.001-07:00

The day after I set up this blog, Britain’s respected Telegraph newspaper carried an interview with a senior policewoman, Barbara Wilding. I was slightly surprised to see it as the “splash” or lead story on Page One. But then I read the headline: “Assisted suicide could be excuse to kill burdensome elderly, says police chief.”

Incendiary stuff indeed, but not undeserving of consideration, particularly when voiced by such an experienced police officer with more than 40 years’ experience on the front line and a long-documented interest in fundamental socio-economic issues.

Personally, I am not (yet) sure how I feel about assisted suicide. The Netherlands’ initial move towards legalising euthanasia was practically my very first “scoop”. At the time, I was a rookie journalist, posted to Amsterdam and charged with reading the normally deathly dull Government chronicle to improve my Dutch.

“Euthanasie” I could just about grasp and, with my trusty dictionary to hand, I worked out that the dry announcement regarding the following day’s parliamentary debate contained a potentially explosive story. I hope to return to this problematic issue again in this forum. Yet I was more interested in other points raised in Ms Wilding’s interview.

“Elderly abuse is something that we have yet to really grasp,” she said. “It is one of the things that I think will be the next social explosion.”

She drew comparisons with the first discovery of widespread child abuse in Britain in the 1970s and said that abuse of the elderly was “the same sort of social issue; it can be covered up and the victims do not have a voice.”

Ms Wilding suggested that inter-generational tensions will be exacerbated by the ageing population. Figures released this week from the Office for National Statistics revealed that there are a record 1.3 million people over 85 in Britain, making up two per cent of the total.

Asked to define what she described as a potential explosion of elderly abuse, she said: “It can range from the violent through to the psychological - not providing the medical care at the right time, looking after people to their needs and recognising that they are valuable members of society".

To read the rest of the interview please click here:

Signed: Elizabeth R

2009-08-28T02:51:00.000-07:00

My Dad - 12/06/23-18/12/08 - Requiescat

The rumours are, I am afraid, all true. I was once an avid collector of autographs. Long, long before these our days of celebrity culture, I was an over-keen, gangly pre-teen, hanging around the stage door, never without my leather-backed notebook and lucky ball-point pen. I can still see the first three pages with their hurried yet clearly legible marks: Cliff Richard; Frankie Vaughan; Gilbert O’Sullivan!!!

The notebook is long gone, of course. Into some trunk, into some attic, gnawed on by rodents or consumed on some bonfire. I still have a few prized signatures, however; many of them just visible in the corners of the paintings & lithographs I started to collect when autographs per se started to pall. I’ve even got the Queen. Her bold Elizabeth R, in a rather beautiful frame, hangs on the wall above the sink (signed Philippe Starck) in our downstairs WC.

I didn’t actually wangle an invite to Buckingham Palace and whip out a scrap of paper and a fountain pen at a likely juncture. I didn’t need to. Her Majesty made her mark upon the royal warrant conferring the Imperial Service Order upon my father – making him Fred Jackson, ISO, QFSM, CPM. Every time I wash my hands, I now have a mental picture of the Queen, perched at a huge desk in Sandringham or Balmoral, spectacles on, looking as serious as Helen Mirren in that movie, working her way through a ream of parchment warrants, scratching out Elizabeth R again & again & again.

The ISO was established in 1902 by Edward VII. It is a limited order, awarded to a select group of civil servants “for long and meritorious service of the British Empire”. It was seriously limited in 1993, when it was quietly dropped in favour of the Imperial Service Medal; stands to reason – we haven’t really got an Empire any more.

Dad himself was quietly but hugely proud, not just of his ISO, but of his many awards. Myself, I was proudest when I went, in my Sunday best, to Government House to see Sir David Trench present Dad with The Governor of Hong Kong Lanyard – awarded for outstanding gallantry during the 1967 Communist uprising and riots. Self-effacing, modest & often surprisingly shy, the most he would ever say was: “not that bad for a boy from Askern, is it?”

A few years ago, Dad started to write his own memoirs. Alas, they stop abruptly in 1968 – when my mother, Tina, was first diagnosed with breast cancer. He has a charming, candid and quietly comic voice and I hope to do something with them at some stage. For now, I am afraid, the following will have to temporarily suffice:

Fred was born in 1923 in a tiny hamlet on the edge of the South Yorkshire coalfield. My grandfather, Cecil, was still a dairyman then but the pit at Askern would soon dominate the local economy. My grandmother, Violet, née Spink, went on to have another 10 children: Sidney; Charles, William Arthur; Anne Cecilia; Eric; Cecil; Stuart; Violet; Michael and Norma – the latter and her brother Eric both died as infants of pneumonia. At time of writing, both of Dad’s sisters and his brothers Bill and Michael survive him.

My grandfather went on to tend to the pit ponies and Dad’s bi-annual trip underground to bring them out for their brief respite in the fresh air convinced him that a miner’s life was not for him. Despite fierce paternal opposition, he escaped the pit by joining the Navy and swiftly, despite a truncated formal education, became a commissioned officer.

In 1944, he found himself accompanying the Canadian tanks across to Juno Beach on D-Day & celebrated his 21st birthday, not as I did, with champagne and canapés under an elegant 18th century colonnade, but on a battered landing craft, negotiating the choppy Channel waters on his way back to England. My mother clearly fell for this wind-burnished chap in uniform and they were married in October 1946.

Dad then joined the Fire Brigade in Doncaster and in 1956, he and my mother left for an initial three year contract in Hong Kong, a move rather braver than any gap year student with a mobile phone and laptop might now be able to fully comprehend.

My parents both loved the colonial lifestyle and tropical weather and my father endeared himself to his men by learning to speak fluent Cantonese (albeit retaining his distinctive Yorkshire accent). Dad was an exemplary officer and was decorated several times for gallantry. He was instrumental in preparing HKFS for the eventual localisation of senior ranks ahead of the 1997 handover and, by the time he retired in 1985, he was the Deputy Director of the Brigade.

Alas, in 1975, we lost my mother, Tina, to breast cancer and were doubly devastated less than 20 years later when my brother Rory became an early and ludicrously young victim of HIV/Aids. Dad himself enjoyed nearly 20 years of healthy retirement back home in Yorkshire until 2006, when on-going heart and vascular problems prompted his cardiologist to give him a pacemaker. This operation coincided with a diagnosis of a fairly rare condition: Dementia with Lewy Bodies, which, although not yet fully understood, seems to combine the worst elements of both Parkinsons and Alzheimers.

Difficult as it is to watch someone you love & who was once so very vital, thus cruelly diminished, I found it comforting that Dad’s vivid hallucinations – a key symptom of DLB – usually took him back to Hong Kong or to his Navy days and that very often he clearly saw my late brother, Rory, sitting amiably at the foot of his bed.

Otherwise, Dad’s final months were not as dignified as I, or indeed anyone who loved him (and we are many), would have wished. During this sadly protracted ordeal, myself and myriad close friends and family were forced to watch from the sidelines, more or less impotent and increasingly frustrated. We were effectively prevented from helping him by a combination of his particular personal circumstances, by a still unexplained reluctance to intervene by the appropriate authorities, compounded by some frankly risible, if superficially well-meaning, legislation.

Since his death, I have learned a lot. Not just about DLB and other forms of dementia, but about the swiftly rising tide of vulnerable adult and elderly abuse in this country, in the United States and throughout many other seemingly sophisticated European countries.

Child abuse is a heinous crime and deserves every headline, no matter how lurid, it receives. And yet; there is no financial incentive to abuse a child. A frail, not always 100 per cent lucid, elderly or disabled person is just as defenceless as a small child. The fact that the older victim may be in receipt of an attractive pension or live in a mortgage-free home makes them even more vulnerable - particularly in the current economic climate.

My hope for this blog is relatively modest: to raise awareness of the growing problem of vulnerable adult abuse and who knows, maybe even start to tackle the problem in a more concrete way? We shall see. Thank you for reading.