Dear Readers, I am now home for eighteen whole days, which is my longest stay in East Finchley for at least a year. But before I tell you about London, I want to give you an update from my latest visit to Dad’s nursing home in Dorchester. Dad was chatting away to a new chap  when I arrived at the home. P had been in the forces and had lived abroad extensively, and, as Dad travelled a fair bit when he was a gin distiller, they were gently ‘one-upping’ one another with tales of jaunts abroad. I have learned that while people with dementia don’t always get their facts in perfect order, there is normally a kernel of truth in what they say however confused they are, and I have no doubt that P had lived in the Far East, and had learned Japanese.  P had a postcard from his daughter which he was showing to everyone who came in. Dad had been planning to write a letter to me, my brother and Mum, and had started to write it on one of the handkerchiefs that I bought him, but when I asked him about it he’d forgotten what he wanted to write. I was surprised both that he could still spell my name, and that he could still write. I’ve left him with a pad and some pens in case the urge to write strikes him again.

Dad’s face absolutely lights up when I walk in, and it’s one of the greatest joys of my life. I tell him when I’m going to visit him, but he always forgets. This time, he grabbed my hand and kissed it.

‘I didn’t know you were going to come in’, he said, and cried.

Dementia has made Dad more emotional, gentler. He has developed a taste for Portuguese custard tarts and ‘frothy coffee’, and it touches me how much he enjoys both of them. I thought that maybe he would be upset by the unusual behaviour of some of the other residents, but he seems completely at ease with them, and sometimes tries to help if someone has ‘lost’ something or seems particularly distressed.

One lady asked if I’d seen her daughter, and I told her that I hadn’t seen her today, but I was sure she’d  be in soon (she visits her Mum very regularly).

‘She’s the best girl in the world’, said the lady, and I had to go outside because that was what Mum always said about me.

One of the guys, B, used to be a London taxi driver and hasn’t lost any of the repartee. One of the carers asked him if he liked children.

‘I like children but I couldn’t eat a whole one’, he said.

When I popped in on Wednesday to have breakfast with Dad and to say goodbye, he was all geared up to ‘walk into town and have a look at a secondhand car’. I know that Dad misses driving, but while I’m sure he could do the mechanics of driving, he wouldn’t know where he was going. Fortunately, the home had organised a trip to the local market, and Dad was going to help choose some plants for the garden.

‘We’ll have a look at the cars if we can find any’, said the carer.

Initially I was really disconcerted at the degree to which I needed to lie to Dad about what was going to happen, and yet the alternative is so much more distressing and painful for him. No one is going to tell him that he will never own a car or drive again, and so the constant promise of it in the future keeps him calm and happy. There was a positive spring in his step as he headed off with his zimmer frame to get his jacket on, and I know that once he’s in the market he’ll be distracted by all the minutiae of tomato varieties and which geraniums are best.

As I waved goodbye, all the other residents waved as well. It really is a little family.

And yet when I got back to London, I was having a coffee and got into a chat with a lady who had a little dog. We talked about pets for a bit, and then I mentioned that I was just back from visiting with my Dad who has dementia. She sympathised, and then, as she was getting up to go, she turned and said

‘Oh, I do hope it doesn’t drag on too long for you’.

And yet again I was lost for words. I know that dementia is a terminal and progressive disease, but really? I think not just about my dad, but about all the people in the home that I’m getting to know, and I know that not only do they have a quality of life that makes it worth living, but that they are still valuable, loving human beings. This is the fourth time in the past six months that someone has suggested that my Dad and his friends would be better off dead, and that I must be hoping for such a speedy outcome. What does it say about our society that we can wish the oldest and most vulnerable people in it dead? My Dad is teaching me lessons about compassion and patience and understanding every single day.

And so, I really needed the solace of the garden when I got home, and all kinds of things were going on.

Take the fabulous cabbage palm (Cordyline australis) next door, for example. This year it is carrying three whole spikes full of flowers which are constantly abuzz with honeybees. I went outside to take a photograph and realised how sweet-smelling it is. No wonder the bees love it.

Outside the back door, I notice that everything is hideously overgrown, and that the pond is turning into a bog as fast as I can pull things out. However, some yellow flag irises are flowering for the first time this year. I can’t even remember planting them, so maybe they came with something else. This will certainly be something for the dragonfly larvae to climb up, and I check every day just in case.

And I love the way that the sunlight touches the water. The pond is absolutely full of frogs of all sizes this year, from adults to tiny new froglets the size of my fingernail. They are hanging around a lot later this year too, so maybe being so overgrown isn’t such an absolutely bad thing.

My white foxgloves are flowering, and the Bowles Mauve perennial wallflower is covered in bumblebees.

And so is the mock orange, which is just finishing but which is still headily-scented.

But there has been one disaster. The box moth caterpillars have been particularly vigorous this year – last year I managed to trim the bush back in the spring and get rid of most of the damage, but this year they have killed the bushes completely. I shall be cutting them back, digging them out and planting something else. I even spotted one of the caterpillars walking nonchalantly across the path a few days ago, probably en route from one bush to another. This is a pest that has marched through the  country over the past ten years, although the adult moth is rather lovely. I spotted the first one I’d ever seen at the Barbican Centre in London in 2015, but it was noticed in private gardens in 2011. It has probably arrived in imported box plants (the moth comes originally from East Asia) and while it can be treated with nematodes if caught in the early stages, the advice from RHS Wisley is to plant something else. Climate change is making the environment much more pleasant for the moth, and I suspect that we are going to have to adapt too. Privet, anyone?

And, in more exciting news, we are going to get our external decorations done. It’s been more than ten years, and the paintwork is, shall we say, a bit on the dodgy side. The scaffolding is up, but the best news is that I have bought this.

Sparrows like to nest communally, and so I have this little terrace of nestboxes that I have persuaded the decorator to put up for me while he’s on the scaffolding. Sparrows have already been investigating the eaves but have never stayed, so I am very hopeful that maybe next year they’ll take up residence. And if they don’t, maybe somebody else will. And once that’s done, I shall be looking into getting the garden back into some kind of order. I need to move my centre of gravity back east from Dorset, and start getting back into my own life. It will be interesting to see how that works out.