It’s all the rage
Well, that’s Christmas over for another year. I hope you had a good one. Tis the season to be jolly, after all.
If there was something, or someone, that prevented you from spreading good tidings of comfort and joy this year then you may be interested in the final piece in today’s edition. It’s about the growing popularity of rage rooms, places that provide a physical outlet for stress by letting people take out their frustrations on objects.
I hear they are especially popular with women.
Today’s feature article is from the brilliant Harry Pearson. He has already written about how dementia has affected his family (If you didn’t laugh, you’d cry), the weighty funeral instructions he received from his Dad (Ashes to ashes), and the poignant story of the missing hunting horn that came to dominate his father’s thoughts for some time before his passing.
Many of you have enjoyed them already. It’s not essential that you read them before today’s chapter from the dementia ward, but it is highly recommended. It’s a personal story mixed with some entertaining observations:
“By now she has the fixed smile and frightened shifting eyes of somebody who has volunteered for an hour of something only to discover she has over-estimated her capacity to endure it by 58 minutes.”
For the benefit of new readers, and those who want to enjoy the stories again, here are the links to his first three articles in chronological order:
Dementia also features in a lovely article I have selected from the Liverpool Post. It also features a son’s relationship with his mother but it is also about the decline of local radio:
“Local radio lives in that rare space where intimacy and community collide. Close enough to feel like it’s speaking directly to you, shared enough to make you realise you’re part of something bigger.”
The article includes a mention of the UK’s first dementia‑friendly DAB radio station - something I would have wanted my dad to hear when he was still living with the syndrome.
This is the last Eyes & Ears of 2025. The next edition will be out on Friday January 2. I sincerely hope 2026 is a very good year for you and I look forward to bringing you many more editions in the New Year.
The York Fruits
By Harry Pearson
In the dementia suite, care workers buzz around, upbeat and unfailingly helpful, the heroic yet unheralded soldiers in a war nobody acknowledges we are fighting. I arrive at 10am every Wednesday armed with a box of York Fruits. I line them up three at a time on the table in front of my mother. By now the sharing of sweets is about the only interaction that is possible.
Occasionally other visitors arrive. It is comforting to feel part of a shared experience however grim. Sometimes it is hard to tell who is visiting and who is a new resident. One morning much like any other: Smooth radio playing Candi Staton’s Young Hearts Run Free (not the best choice perhaps, but not the worst. A friend of mine was sitting with his father one afternoon and Ghost Town by The Specials came on), the staff serving coffee and fingers of fudge, a cleaner vacuuming in the hall, a smell of toast and lavender air freshener.
I have just sat down with Mum and opened the fruit jellies, when a woman who looks no older than I am comes in to the lounge. Smartly dressed in slacks and a jumper, she stands and chats with a woman in a wheelchair. She looks across and catches my eye. We smile at each other, a little ruefully, I feel. A minute or so later she comes over. I expect we will share a few words of mutual support. Instead she places her hands on either side of my face, kisses me on the forehead and says: “You’ve been a naughty boy, but I forgive you”.
Shortly after this encounter a fortyish man and his daughter arrive. She is in her late teens, slouching in an attempt to conceal her tallness. They stop in front of an old man who has a crumpled face and trousers hitched up to his chest. “Hello, Dad. How are you?” the visitor asks.
“My bees have escaped. I lost my bees,” replies the old man in the sort of voice you might expect to hear echoing from a haunted Cumbrian cave.
“I’ve brought a special visitor today,” the son says gesturing at the young woman. By now she has the fixed smile and frightened shifting eyes of somebody who has volunteered for an hour of something only to discover she has over-estimated her capacity to endure it by 58 minutes. “We’ve been to that nice café in the market place. The one with the lemon drizzle cake.”
“They’ve all gone, my bees,” the father wails.
“And then we went to the second hand bookshop,” the son continues in the same bright and perky tone. “They had some World War Two histories you’d have enjoyed, there was one about Arnhem I don’t think you’d read.”
“Call the police and tell them about my bees,” the father responds.
“Oh yes,” the son says. “I forget to tell you last time. You remember Alan’s daughter, Ruby?”
“My bees are gone. My bees are gone!” the father cries.
“Well, she’s getting married… in June”.
He ploughs on remorselessly and cheerily for 45 minutes until his father, exhausted by the search for his escaped bees, falls asleep.
I do exactly the same when I visit Mum. I sit and tell her everything I have done the previous week in minute detail in the upbeat voice of somebody trying to interest a child in algebra. I tell her where I have been and what birds I have seen, reminding her of her favourite, the wren, which used to nest in the wall of the back garden of the house I grew up in. “Dad liked nuthatches, didn’t he?” I say. “You got that nice lady who was the artist down the road to paint one for him as a Christmas present, remember?”
My mother barely looks at me. She is preoccupied smoothing the table to some degree of flatness only she can judge. At other times Mum rolls up her trouser legs and rolls them down again, and up and down, and up and down until I have to grip the table to prevent myself shouting: “Stop bloody fidgeting, will you?”.
The day I tell my mother that my daughter Maisie is pregnant and that she is about to become a great-grandmother she rolls her trouser bottom up way above her knee then bends forward and blows her nose on it. Walking past, one of the carers smiles at me. “Well,” she says. “I hope I’m as flexible when I’m her age”.
Five days later my Mum is dead. The box of York Fruits I had bought for this week’s visit sits on the hall table. It seems weirdly indecent to share them with anyone else, the betrayal of some bond. I drop them in the bin, then half an hour later fish them out again. I put them back on the table and wonder how long it will take before they go off.
Losing local radio - and my mum
Journalist David Lloyd has written a beautiful, heartrending tribute to his mum. The piece focuses on her love of local radio, and how he’s mourning its death — along with his mother’s. It’s from the Liverpool Post - but, in radio terms, it could apply to most places in the country.
“Mum’s radio was the thread that tied everything together,” he writes. “It was her social media — her steadfast link to the world in which she played her part with love and wonder. And, in those last fitful days, it was her gentle companion.
“It was also her time machine. Wherever she was, Mum’s radio had the power to transport me back to her side again. ‘Listen to what they’re playing, Dave,’ Mum would say, caught off-guard in her kitchen, phone pressed hard against the radio’s tiny speaker. ‘Remember? You used to play this when you came back home after college’.”
The article contains interviews with two DJs who spent years working on local radio who now work for the UK’s first dementia‑friendly DAB radio station, MDFR (Merseyside Dementia Friendly Radio).
“Now, with centralised servers and shared playlists, Roger says the BBC is stealthily, but surely, ‘taking the local out of local radio. ‘The same playlist will be aired in Cornwall, Hull and Liverpool, and the presenter will merely be filling in the gaps, he says. ‘Music is just a layer cake between news and travel. Station managers are servants to an agenda that doesn’t see local as important any more’.”
MDFR was set up by Nathan Gavin after his mum, and then his grandmother, were diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.
He fine-tuned playlists that wouldn’t overwhelm or distress. There’s no adverts (“nothing sonically unpleasant or emotionally manipulative”) and the station runs on donations, the odd fundraiser, and grant funding.
You can read more on MDFR here.
Smashing idea
Just in case your Christmas didn’t quite go according to plan, you may be interested to know about the growing popularity of rage rooms, aka smash rooms or wreck rooms.
Believed to have started in Japan, they are spaces where you get tooled up with hammers, bats, crowbars or wrenches and are let loose to smash objects to bits as a form of stress relief - or even just for fun.
This ITV article has more on the phenomenon and my own inquiries have revealed that there are at least two in the North East - in Newcastle and Prudhoe.