Larry talks about his experience of Personal Assistants.
Hello, this is Larry Gardiner. And I’m calling, it’s a very long time since I’ve done a diary, and I’m calling – there are a few things I wanted to talk about, but I’ve already just recorded one diary, and I’m going to talk about something different this time.
So quite a lot of people involved in Dementia Diaries know me well, and they know that since being diagnosed, and because I lived alone, I was assessed by a social worker as having a high level of need, and because of that I got direct payments, and because of that I was able to employ personal assistants. And my first personal assistant was a young man called Jessie, in his thirties – I think he was 33 when I met him. And he came to live in with me in student accommodation, at Ruskin College, in Oxford. And he was with me for several years, and then he moved on to work for Dementia Adventure. After that, my next PA was somebody called Annie, and Annie worked for me for I think about two years. She eventually came and lived in, in my accommodation in a sheltered housing project called Meadowbrook in Oxford. When she left, I had another PA called Ildiko, and a very remarkable thing happened. Ildiko, a young woman who comes from Hungary, and it’s not very usual that someone employing a PA eventually marries the person who is the PA. And what happened here was that I had to leave the country and go from England to the Netherlands, and Ildiko said she would come with me. And what happened then was she asked me if we could be married. Which is what we did. So on 4th October 2019 in Almelo, in the Netherlands, Ildiko Popka and Larry Gardiner got married.
It’s been a wonderful experience. It’s going very well. I was quite shy about talking about it, but lots of people have discovered what has happened and have given us their expressions of good wishes and delight, that at the age of I’m now 58, and Ilriko is now 38, so there’s a huge age difference. I think the message from this diary is that very unusual things can happen and I think in some instances, very unusual things should happen. And I think what we didn’t expect is that we would both be stranded in the Netherlands because of Coronavirus. Probably we’re making our home here, and it’s very likely we won’t come back to live in England, but we will continue to be involved in the Dementia Diaries project, and I’m very glad that Steve Milton keeps being in touch and connected with other diarists through his meetings.
