Superglue

16th June 2011 Thursday

The Speech and Language Therapist sits on our sofa with a cup of tea on the table in front of her and a very small notebook on her knee. You can tell she has a sweet nature. She has flawless pale skin and looks about sixteen.

In answer to my question she says she doesn’t know if the brain can re-generate itself through physical exercise or memory exercises. She says my husband shouldn’t try and read for pleasure if causes him stress. Which it does. And it’s fine to supply a word he is struggling for and that it’s no good hoping he’ll remember it if he just tries harder.

She suggests strategies. We could use a map with post-it notes on it to locate places we know, with photos and descriptions and put it up in the dining room. And make a book with photos of the people in our lives with their names written underneath. I wonder if we should label the appliances in the kitchen when he says,

‘I know all the people in the photos stuck on the...... white thing that keeps things cold.’

‘Do you mean the fridge?’

‘Of course I do - it’s so embarrassing.’

Later we drive out through rain showers and sunbursts to a farm high on a ridge in a forest where we’ll be on Saturday - a Mid Summer Fair where my husband is exhibiting his ceramics and giving two money talks. We get lost several times but the glorious views of Devon hills and fields when we finally get there make it all worthwhile.

Back home, I put the first allotment globe artichokes into a big pan of boiling water and make a garlic mayonnaise for leaf dipping. Then very carefully, we start packing up all his weird and wonderful creatures in reams of bubble wrap. Even so I manage to snap off the little cigarette in the beak of The Duck. Thank God for Superglue.

If only there was something squeezable in a tube for mending broken brains.