George thinks ZOOM is best used for fun. Just don’t ask him to tell a joke.

Hello it`s George again from Shropshire,

I`m having a bit of a walk but I won’t tire you out as it has been suggested people get tired just listening to me when I`m recording on a walk. However, just had a really interesting and entertaining, as ever, Dementia Diarist ZOOM meeting and I have come out into the garden (having a walk around) and I thought why not have a Dementia Diarists Zoom picnic?

There are limitations in terms of 3G/4G Huawei and anything else but as long as we can stay reasonably connected we just go in our back gardens, have a sandwich, have a cup of tea and do it outside. Just for a bit of fun.

One of the reasons why I thought this is because one of our diarists (I think his name is Dacy, Davey something like that) lives in Ireland and, great person, good fun. But during our diarists ZOOM today he actually took his, I suppose smart phone, and attached it to some sort of walking thing, walking aid I think, and went for a walk with his mask on (chuckle, laughter) walked down the hill to the town and back and during the hour and a half he actually went and walked one or two kilometres, which I thought was quite entertaining and interesting.

Maybe we`ll have a ZOOM when people maybe actually do their shopping, mind you I doubt many want to do any shopping at the moment, and it wouldn’t be much fun having a ZOOM online about doing shopping on line. Anyway just a thought.

It`s good to get together meet, talk, have a bit of fun. That`s the thing I discovered really more than anything else about the last four months, just using ZOOM for fun. (chuckle) I mean, OK, maybe it comes more naturally to me than some to take the piss and just generally muck around, and I enjoy playing around with words and language and making silly jokes. I can’t tell a joke for toffee but I can make comments that are usually reasonably funny, to some people at least.

Yeah I can’t tell jokes, I have never be able to sort of get from beginning to end in the right style. I know some people who can tell them really well. (inaudible) there`s a guy in our Shropshire ZOOM group called Harry who is completely convincing and then he gets to the end of it and you realise you have been completely done, completely taken in. What was the one he told the other day?

`There were two kids in the local park doing things they shouldn’t be doing, one was drinking battery acid and another one was flashing fireworks. So the police turned up and one was charged and the other one was fired. Anyway there you go, I can’t tell jokes, people can do that far better than I can. In fact I have difficulty in remembering what I was going to say, as you can probably tell.

So enough of me wittering, this dementia diary is living proof, recorded proof in fact, that people living with dementia can A. use a sound or voice recording app. B. walk around a little bit while doing a recording. C. er what was I going to say? Ah yeah get to the end of a sentence and D. (long hesitation) er don’t know.

Bye for now