Times may have changed, but there are some things that are always with us - loneliness is one of them.
I have a magpie mind, by which I mean I see and hear little things - photos, fragments of conversation - and store them away for future use.
None of us wants to be reminded that dementia is random, relentless, and frighteningly common.
Dementia is quite unlike cancer or heart disease or any of those other conditions where you bargain with God for a cure or even just a bit more time.
Sundown is often the worst time of day for people with dementia. They can become restless and difficult.
People invade your space and offend your sensibilities because, to be plain, they couldn't care less about you.
I'd like to see my grandchildren climb trees, not stand under them. I'd like to see them learn to make bread and brown it over a fire using my toasting fork.
My parents never told me I was beautiful, and for one very good reason. I wasn't. When your child is a tubby, bespectacled little oddity, as I was, it's important not to give them false expectations.
With Alzheimer's, recent memory is affected first. At the start, you count the memory loss in days, then hours - then in minutes. But there's also an insidious backward creep of deterioration.
There is something very easy about women's friendships that you don't see as often with men. We all know examples of this, when women will just call each other up or drop a line, not with anything specific to say.
The terror dementia sufferers must feel is unimaginable, but the techniques they use to hide their difficulties - the ducking and diving and keeping the world laughing - are perfectly understandable.
Being eye candy always was a short-term career, and here's the reason. The world finds young women more attractive than old women because youthfulness signals fertility.
I love working fictional characters into a piece of history. It plays to my strengths, which are characterization and dialogue, and assists me in my admitted weakness, plot.
My husband is leaving me. No dramas, no slammed doors - well, OK, a few slammed doors - and no suitcase in the hall, but there is another woman involved. Her name is Dementia.
I've been lucky enough to travel widely. When you're based in Europe, it's very easy to go to Madrid or Budapest for the weekend. I also lived in Italy for ten years and now live in Ireland.
Not so very long ago, certainly well into the Thirties, a lady companion was a normal feature of life for widows or lone spinsters.
I have an idea for a story, and if the idea is going to work, then one of the characters steps forward, and I hear her voice telling the story. This is what has happened with all the books I've written in the first person.
My husband is stricken with dementia, and it's a trick of his condition that events and people from his past are more real to him than what happened five minutes ago.
As well as writing novels and doing short-order journalism, I am also the full-time carer of my husband, who has Alzheimer's. Each day feels like a race that must be run.
I've never minded solitude. For a writer, it's a natural condition. But caring for a dementia sufferer leads to a peculiar kind of loneliness.
