February 2015

For a while, Lena’s been asking.

— Where’s Mamma?

Her mother died in the late 1990s. I pass it off.

— You’re the Mamma.

— But where is she?

— Whose Mamma? Mine or yours?

I’m pretty sure she’s forgotten mine, who died just five years ago. Hers is still very much in her mind. ‘This reminds me of my Mamma’s kitchen’, she’s always saying as I’m preparing food. But it isn’t her Mamma she’s looking for now.

— No, the one who lives upstairs.

— That’s you. You’re the Mamma.

She shrugs, not really believing me, but not ready to pursue it.

— Oh. OK then.

But today Alzheimer’s came up with a new question.

— Where did that man go?

— Which man?

— The one who was here this morning.

— I don’t think there was anyone here this morning.

— No, you know. The man who was here.

— The window-cleaner, you mean? He was here yesterday.

— No not him. The other one. The one you know.

— Edwin, you mean? Or Mike?

Son and daughter’s partner, respectively. 

— No, not them.

— What does he look like?

— He’s … You know him. He’s your friend. The big one.

I don’t know who Lena’s talking about. I try to get her to tell me what he does, where he was when he came, what he said. But she just can’t explain. And as she struggles, her agitation grows.

— I don’t think I was very nice to him. That’s not like me. I didn’t mean to be nasty. But I’m worried he might not come back again. And I really liked him.

So who was it? I couldn’t find out. So I suggested lunch. Food’s always a useful distraction. And the moment passed.

But now, thinking about it again, I think I know who the mystery man might have been.

Me.

The old me, before I started getting into shape and losing a few trouser sizes. Friends have mentioned how much it’s changed my appearance. Last night my daughter Annelie told me my head suddenly looked too big for the rest of my body.

Is it the old, super-sized Alan that Lena’s missing? This one?

This was me a year ago, not long after Lena’s diagnosis, woefully out of shape after too many hours sitting at the computer. And too many cakes. Bordering on obese. In my earlier years I’d kept in pretty good shape with the sports I loved — football, cricket, rugby, tennis, squash. And the one I was best at, although it wasn’t really my favourite: running. The photo showed I was still running — to seed.

I hated the photos — and the one I’ve shown you is far from the worst! I hated the cruel trick my clothes were playing on me, pretending to have shrunk. I hated that my legs had clearly grown longer, making it a struggle to reach down and put socks on my feet. I started avoiding mirrors, but couldn’t miss my reflection in those big store-front windows on the corner as we took our daily walk to town. How come my belly always arrived before the rest of me? 

It all had to change. And not just for my own self-esteem. If I was going to take proper care of Lena in the years to come, then I’d better start taking proper care of myself first. 

I didn’t need an expert or the internet to tell me why I was piling on the pounds, or how to fix it. For the last few years — ever since we came back to the UK — I’d been feasting on the foods I’d always loved. Freshly-baked bread, Cornish pasties, apple pie, cream cakes, chocolate cakes … any type of cake really. And in the meantime, I’d become less and less active. Yes, we had our walks, but walking alone wasn’t enough to use up all those extra calories I’d been stuffing into myself. Some people can get away with it. People like Lena, for instance. In fact Lena’s most annoying habit is that she can eat anything she wants — as well as anything the kids and I don’t want — without losing her figure. But that’s not the way my metabolism works.

I’ve got no idea where my metabolism is located or what it looks like, but if I had to imagine it, it would look like a baby bird waiting for food with its mouth always wide open, pleading to be fed more, never satisfied. Or is that metabolism? Maybe it’s just appetite. But anyway, how was I going to fix it?

As usual, it was daughter Josie who came up with a sensible answer. She told me about a free web app she’d discovered, which tracked daily calorie intake. As I was cooking, she told me, I could simply enter the name of each ingredient and then its weight or volume, and the app would calculate the total calorie value. If I then divided by the number of servings, I could work out my own intake. 

I wasn’t convinced.

— So how is that going to stop me stuffing my face?

— By making you feel guilty. You set a target number of calories, the maximum you want to allow yourself each day. When you beat the target you feel great, when you don’t, you feel awful.

— And that works?

— It does for me. But … maybe it’s not right for you. They say it can be dangerous for people with anorexia.

— Do I look anorexic?

Josie took a long hard look at me, up and down … and then burst out laughing.

It didn’t make me feel any better.

A couple of weeks later, Josie had another suggestion.

— You said you wanted to get into better shape. So do I. Why don’t we go out for a run?

— Yes, I’d be up for that. Where shall we go?

— Somewhere not too far to start with. What about up to the Park and back.

I should have noticed that innocuous little word ‘up’. And I should have remembered the full name of the park: Buile Hill Park. What followed ranks high as one of the worst 30 minutes of my entire life. Right out of the door I was puffing and wheezing, begging Josie to slow down. Before we came to the end of our street, I needed to stop for a rest. And then we started going up. I’d walked this way hundreds of times and hardly noticed it was a hill. Now it felt like a mountain. My legs, my arms, my chest, my head, all of them were screaming at me to stop this madness. But I wasn’t going to stop. For a minute or two, just to recover and regroup perhaps, but I had to get to the end somehow.

No matter how much I hated that run, it was a turning-point in my life. A few days later, I staggered the same route again, alone this time, and trying to go just a little bit further without stopping. I did it again the following week. And despite my earlier misgivings, I started using Josie’s recommended calorie app. Within a couple of weeks, it was part of my normal kitchen routine. 

What drove me on? 

Partly it was Josie’s guilt theory. I really did have a sense of failure on the days when my calorie intake was higher than the target, or if I felt there had been too many days since my last run. 

Partly it was my response to Lena’s dementia diagnosis. That was my wake-up call, reminding me that life is finite and bodies are vulnerable. As I saw it, getting back into shape was the best way to prepare myself for the battles to come against Alzheimer’s, both for Lena’s sake and my own.

But above all, I think, I was motivated by success. As the months passed, I was able to run further, I could feel the muscles strengthening, the stomach receding, and the kilos falling away. My clothes now fit me again — in fact, when I went shopping for new jeans, I found I could fit into a pair a size smaller than I’d been for 20 years. To celebrate my new body-shape, I even bought a full-length mirror for my study.

And then in October, four months ago now, I did something entirely out of character. For the first time in my life, I started going to the gym. Voluntarily. In my mid-sixties.

Whereas Lena had always loved the gym, I was the opposite. In fact, I used to call myself a gymnophobe ( … until I discovered the word in the dictionary had an entirely different meaning – it turns out that gymnophobia is ‘a fear of nudity’). How to explain my aversion, when I’d always loved sport so much? Maybe the memory of a PE teacher at school, who used our twice-weekly sessions in the gym as an opportunity to bully us kids.

But now, as Lena started on her Dementia and Physical Activity research programme at Fit City, I noticed there was a full-sized gym right next to the room where she and her small group were being put through their paces. So why not try it out? I signed up. And soon, after a few sessions sticking to the cardio equipment where I felt comfortable — the treadmill, the rowing machine, the exercise bike — I found myself experimenting with lifting a few weights too. Like this:

So here I am in February 2015, a year after that first picture, and nearly 20 kilos lighter. It’s all going well for me, and I feel in better shape than I’ve been for over 20 years. 

But what about Lena? Has my change of appearance confused her? Does she think a new man has come into her life? And does she want the old one back?