I won’t think of Alzheimer’s sufferers in the past tense

When I was a child, my parents took The Sunday Times and The Observer. Even then, I could see that they were different in tone, the contrast exemplified by their columnists, Jilly Cooper and Katharine Whitehorn. Both were clever, but Cooper went to considerable lengths to hide it, while Whitehorn did no such thing. In her columns, and her hardy perennial cookbook, Cooking in a Bedsitter, she sounded like the godmother of one’s dreams: insouciant, sophisticated and kind.

Now Whitehorn is 90 and suffering from advanced Alzheimer’s. Last week, her fellow columnist, Polly Toynbee, wrote, “she is no longer Katharine Whitehorn as was”. In yesterday’s Observer, colleagues wrote movingly of her “high intellect without high seriousness”. But many wrote in the past tense, as though she were dead.

Whitehorn was strongly in favour of assisted suicide, and Toynbee asserts that “her sons say...that if the real Katharine could see herself now she would be horrified”. Many of us, no doubt, feel the same about assisted suicide. Yet I find myself recoiling from the idea that the 90-year-old in the care home is not the “real” Katharine Whitehorn.

The “real” Katharine did not spring into existence on the day her first witty article was published. She was born a speechless infant, enjoyed a long and glorious flowering of her talent, and now is dwindling. But to write about her, however diminished, in the past tense is to deny her humanity. Ninety years ago she was Katharine the helpless baby. Now she is Katharine the old woman. In her long life there have been many Katharines – but she is Katharine still.

There is a belief that children should regularly be dosed with poetry, rather as the young of past generations were obliged to swallow a daily spoonful of cod-liver oil. It’s frightfully nasty, the thinking goes, but it’s for your own good. Now author Philip Pullman has joined the debate, recommending that parents should read poetry to children, even if the language seems bewildering. “We must put up with the bewilderment for the sake of being bewitched,” he argued.

Unlike Michael Gove’s erstwhile wheeze to make primary schoolchildren learn poetry by heart, a bedtime poem strikes me as an admirable idea. There is all the difference in the world between the drear slog of learning “Timothy Winters”, with the grim prospect of having to recite it to Miss Trunchbull in the morning; and lying cosy in your bed, half-asleep, while your mama trips her way through the fleas that tease in the High Pyrenees.

Almost 60 years ago, in the kitchens of the British Baking Industries Research Association, the Chorleywood loaf was born – a cheap white bread with the consistency and flavour of a damp flannel. Then seen as a boon to housewives, the Chorleywood loaf is now vilified by nutritionists and bread-fanciers alike.

However, man cannot live by spelt alone. Try making fried bread with sourdough and you will be sadly disappointed. There are certain comestibles – nutritionally reprehensible, no doubt – which nevertheless tweak the heart strings with all the emotional resonance of Proust’s madeleine: 99 Flakes, Tunnock’s Tea Cakes, and a proper bacon sandwich, made with limp white bread and plenty of ketchup.

read more at telegraph.co.uk/opinion