World Book Day 2022
Zibiah Loakthar, our Cuimhne Coordinator, writes
World Book Day is a great opportunity to exchange recommendations of good books with each other!
Our Irish in Britain Cuimhne team is gathering suggestions of good books that may help open up conversations in the community about dementia and also of books that may support reminiscence conversations. We would love to hear your recommendations to share with everyone.
We are particularly interested to hear about:
Novels for adults featuring people living with dementia and family carers.
For instance, we warmly recommend “The Little Girl in the Radiator”, a novel written by Martin Slevin sensitively drawing upon his own experiences caring for his mother who was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. This book won the British Medical Association's Book of the Year (Chairman's Choice in 2013) and is one we often recommend to people who take up our Cuimhne training as a way of beginning to think in our community about the different impacts dementia can have upon individuals and people around them.
2. Books that can support reminiscence conversations by helping people better understand the earlier life experiences of people in our Irish in Britain community.
For people living with dementia, earlier memories are foregrounded as more recent memories recede. Books that give an insight into the past can help younger family members and community volunteers better understand the kinds of experiences people with dementia may be very vividly reliving and help support reminiscence conversations.
What might it have been like for instance to migrate from Ireland and set up a new life in England? People’s experiences will be individual and diverse. Books such as Ethel Corduff’s “Ireland’s Loss: Britain’s Gain” offer insight into the diverse experiences of Irish migrants in the nursing profession.
Books such as Ultan Cowley’s “The Men Who Built Britain” offer insight into the lives of Irish migrants working in the construction industry. There are a great many books that could yet still be written about Irish migrants who entered other trades and professions, for instance about the experiences of people who came in their thousands to work in factories and of Irish women who took up au pair type work in people’s homes.
Community oral history projects help record and preserve memories and we can consult people as living talking books.
3. Children’s books that help open up conversations about dementia.
This is very much an emerging field in children’s literature. There are some great books here. For instance, “My Grandma Has Dementia” by Alex Winstanley, is a brilliant rhyming illustrated book aimed at 4 to 11-year-olds, introducing dementia to children in a gentle and child-friendly way. The book is inspired and informed by people with lived experience of dementia and promotes an inclusive and diverse society.
In a bookshop last week, I came across “Coffee Rabbit Snowdrop Lost” written by Betina Birkjaer and wonderfully illustrated by Anna Margrethe Kjaergaard. The story explores the life of a grandpa living with dementia from a child’s perspective. The grandpa keeps 123 different flowers and “knows the name of each one by heart. In Latin.” When asked for an eight letter words for the first sign of spring starting with S, he answers “Galathus nivalis”; the grandma whispers Snowdrop in the child Stump’s ear.
Stump notices the grandpa losing words and together with the grandma they come up with new ways of connecting and stimulating the grandpa’s longer-term memories. In this way the relationship with the grandpa changes but is not lost.
It was great to come across this book, and others such as “Grandpa Forgets” by Suzi Lewis-Barned and Sophie Elliot, casually displayed amongst many other children’s books and to see dementia treated as an ordinary topic within mainstream fiction for young children.
As the saying goes, “If we do not see reflections of ourselves, we start to believe we do not exist”. There seems perhaps something of a gap in books about dementia of cultural relevance to the Irish community. To any writers or budding writers and artists and to any families with experience of dementia in our Irish in Britain community can you help to close this gap?!
Supporting people living with dementia to continue to enjoy books
Books can bring a lot of joy and in our community, we can be creative about enabling people who may be living with dementia to continue to enjoy books too.
Literacy and concentration skills can be impacted by dementia. Still, people may be able to enjoy listening to books being read aloud. The RNIB offers a free talking book service, find out more HERE.
We know sometimes people particularly enjoy and find comfort in hearing voices of people speaking in familiar accents. It would be great to have more books recorded by people with different accents too. Our Cuimhne team is very happy to help connect organisations seeking volunteers to read books aloud with volunteers that might be willing to create such recordings.
Even where people can no longer read books, people may still enjoy handling books and where space allows setting up bookshelves in community rooms and in care centres may give some people a lot of comfort.
Reading can be a solitary activity but can also bring people together. If you are part of a group that has set up a book club and have been thinking about how to make this kind of community activity inclusive to people who may have early-stage dementia and their carers we would love to hear your tips!
Please send your ideas to champions@irishinbritain.org
You may also be interested to read our previous Cuimhne blog about the benefits of reading HERE.