Our work will only be done when everyone knows music is key to unlocking anguish of dementia
Sally had no notion of starting a charity about music’s therapeutic impact on people with dementia when she started writing a book about her mother’s experience with Alzheimer’s disease.
Even now, as Chair of Playlist For Life, she hopes to see the day when the charity can be wound down.
The organisation’s aim is to make the association between music and dementia as intrinsic as that of the graze and the sticking plaster.
“Once everyone knows that, we’ll be able to say our work is done,” said Sally, who set up the charity in 2013.
“We want to get to the point where anybody who is diagnosed with dementia, or hears the word, will simply know that making their own playlist is the thing to do next. There are still lots of people who don’t know this. We’re still scratching the surface.”
Playlist For Life’s writers James Robertson ( author of And The Land Lay Still) and Sarah Perry ( The Essex Serpent), talking to them about my first draft, and how I realised I was going to have to start again because it wasn’t really working.
“I was despairing because I’d done 100,000 words which had taken me months. They laughed and told me to come back to them when I was on the fifth draft.
“In journalism, you’re used to doing things quickly, to a deadline, as well as you can. I had to get used to the whole mindset of honing and refining and editing and junking and starting again.
“But, believe it or not, I’ve already started another one.”
And she remains confident that physical books are here to stay, despite the rise of ebook readers.
She said: “I’m tremendously evangelical about books. There’s nothing like reading the word on the page, and I think the Kindle moment has passed its peak, and there’s a movement back to book in paper form.”
Sally recalls how she read the works of
Enid Blyton “by the agitated, more engaged and more lucid just by thoughtfully introducing music to them, especially at the times they find most difficult, that’s transformational and is already informing the culture in care homes.”
Visit www.playlistforlife. org.uk bucketload” as a girl, and how reading was encouraged, but never prescribed, by her mother, Mamie, and father, the late journalist and broadcaster Magnus Magnusson.
“Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings was a seminal book for me when I was about 12,” she said.
“I adored that sense of ‘northerness’, Tolkien playing with the sagas and Norse myths.
“I was reading for myself, and going to Iceland with my father at that age, seeing where the sagas had happened, in this crucible of storytelling that Iceland is.”
The fact that neither parent is around to see her break new ground in her career is one note of regret for Sally, who is married to film- maker Norman Stone.
Magnus died in 2007 and Mamie in 2012.
Sally said: “I often think it’s a pity they aren’t here to share things with, that I can’t sit down over a cup of tea and tell my mum I’m stuck, and have her tell me to just plunge in and fix it later; or that I should write an Icelandic novel about sagas and folklore and I can’t talk to my dad about it, can’t show it to him, even if he might tell me it’s a lot of rubbish and to try something else next time.
“I miss that. I would like to think that anything I do would please them.”