About Us

Lena & Alan Miles

April 2025

A sheet of paper fell out of a book I took down from the shelf today. There was a printout of a poem on it. I don’t remember seeing it before, but as I read it … wait … the writer was clearly me. I’d written a love sonnet — a slightly saucy little thing — to Lena. When? It was undated, but the title gave me the answer. It was 2005, 24 years after we met. We were living in Bahrain, but now our kids were young adults, it was time to start thinking about the next phase of our lives.

Here’s the poem:

TWENTY-FOUR YEARS

They’ve concreted that Abu Dhabi beach,
The where-we-fell-in-love’s a shopping mall,
We email special friends to keep them just in reach:
‘Our war on terror terrifies us all’.
The world’s a different place and so are we —
Less time, more wrinkles, struggling to exist,
A time of broken glasses, a misplaced key,
Far from the sun-drenched day when we first kissed.
And yet in darker times, our future’s gold
No-one can pave our feelings, make us fear;
We two can never weary or grow old
While magnetic love grows stronger, year by year.
With you is where I am and want to be —
Oh — and I’m wearing Ed’s pink knickers — like to see?

Memories flood back as I read these fourteen forgotten lines. In a few words I’d somehow managed to distill the essence of our relationship. Romance. Physicality. Humour. Trust. Optimism. No matter what the world threw at us, we were lovers and that made us invincible.

Little did I know in 2005 that dementia was lurking just around the corner. Maybe its shadow was there already — with the broken glasses and the misplaced key. Less than three years later, as we moved back from the Mid-East to the UK, there was no mistaking the signs — not to me anyway. And finally in 2013, doctors finally confirmed my suspicions.

That’s where my book The Marathon Years starts. And without giving too many spoilers away, let me tell you that our love stories and adventures continued long after the diagnosis. And although eventually, dementia was bound to win, you’ll see that we put up a pretty good fight, right till the end.

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I’ve noticed that when Lena’s friends talk about her, they always mention how good she was at bringing people together — her friends became their friends. The Care Combine, my initiative to re-imagine dementia care, is all about bringing people together too. I want to make this Lena’s lasting legacy.

If The Care Combine had existed 10 years ago, Lena and I would have jumped at the opportunity to be involved. It would have transformed both our lives. Our grown-up children would also have breathed a sigh of relief to see us both, patient and carer, getting the help we needed.

So how will this initiative work? And how will our doctors, hospitals and governments benefit as well? Follow my weekly articles in the Care Combine section to find out more.

Alan Miles