A stimulating, interesting and challenging week

It’s Keith here, Saturday morning, and looking back over the past week about this connection between being busy and being well. Each person’s different, and for me it’s doing projects which are stimulating, interesting, challenging, but where I am also very well supported. And this week, I feel is an excellent example.

Looking back over the last four days. So on Tuesday I went to Bromley to deliver a talk at their DAA annual meeting. It was a really, really good event. What was a bonus for me was I was able to sell the seventeen copies of ‘Walk the Walk’ that I took with me. My talk seemed to go very well, and I followed an extremely emotional, very, very thought-provoking talk by a carer. Then from there I went on to London to meet with the publisher, Jessica Kingsley, with the support of Nicky, and signed the contract and went through final details with them. That was very constructive and useful.

On Wednesday, Rosemary, Liz Jennings and I went to the Hackney cinema, for the launch of the Alzheimer’s Society’s ‘Dementia Friendly Screenings: A Guide for Cinemas’. This was supported by the British Film Institute, and was a really good opportunity to network, and to express their thoughts about the cinema project that we ran about twenty months ago, and to talk about the new project that we’re doing at the moment, which I’ll come to next.

Because Thursday we were involved in our writing workshop, the fourth session of ten, led very very ably by Liz Jennings, and it was a superb session where people were able to write, and talk, and meet, and discuss, really, really good once again, and they’re developing some really good ideas. And in the afternoon, Reinhardt came round and we prepared a conference presentation which we’ll take to an event in November in Cornwall.

Then yesterday, Rosemary and I were in London again, and we attended the Angela project, which is a really good young onset focused project funded by the Alzheimer’s Society, looking at diagnosis for young people, and then just as importantly, post-diagnostic support. After that, Philly, Rachel Hutchen from the Alzheimer’s Society, Rosemary and myself met with two senior civil servants from the Office for Disability Issues where we discussed the UN presentations and the United Kingdom government’s response to that, and the think tank document that we presented to the UN and to the government, and we managed to make some gains around a number of issues which they’re taking away with them to their various ministries and we’ll be able to report back on that later.

So all in all, a really good week because it was stimulating, interesting, challenging, and where I was really well supported and consequently felt well.

Signing off now, thank you.