Mum started pulling rancid bacon out of Nan’s sideboard and finding talc in the fridge. Nan forgot how to bathe herself, and people who came round the house became ‘Those People’ rather than, you know, highly professional health workers . She even began to claim that she’d chatted with Les Dawson, Ena Sharples and Giant Haystacks (that’s a hell of a WhatsApp group!), still sweetish and simple, but somehow spoiling, like a fruit fermenting in the sun.

The real change was to my Mum. She would come home from Nan’s and the stress would have made her hair stand on end, and her eyes wild. Though she was stoic, just occasionally, the tension erupted out of her like a geyser.

Finally, Nan was admitted into a care home, where she spent the rest of her long life, smiling, saying “Ooooo-oooo!” and forgetting you existed the moment you stepped out of her line of sight.

I encountered dementia again a few times at a distance when I was doing community work. And then, it came for my Mother.

When Dad died in his seventies, Mum, typically stoic, just got on with it, embracing a new brace of grandkids and surrendering all her personal freedom to a dog and the war against bindweed. “I miss him every single day duck,” she’d tell me, pinching my cheek with Swarfega cracked fingers.

(I want to reassure you at this point that I am NOT actually any kind of water fowl. It’s a Northern thing. Like friendliness, and chips with curry sauce. Only one of which is a good thing.)

After Dad, Mum’s life got smaller. She was irrationally wary of courgettes, troubled by olives, and when we once brought samosas to a family gathering, she all but recoiled in terror. And the idea of going to a place where you sat and drank coffee and ate cake just for the pleasure of it…. Well, not her thank you very much! She turned down so many invitations that you began to worry that your children were dicks. Which occasionally they were, to be fair. And she was so over focussed on ‘not being a burden,’ that it became, well, burdensome.

It had always been a point of hilarity for us five kids that Mum would go through the entire family – including, daughters and pets (alive or deceased) – before she remembered my name.  But now she was almost beginning to list household objects before she got to me. The pool of things she would talk about got smaller and smaller. I noticed how she would avoid using names altogether. If you asked her a question she would avoid answering. She didn’t talk about anything that hadn’t happened either in, or to the house. There are doorstep con-artists who have not said the word ‘guttering’ as much as she did.

At the doctors she would somehow always manage to pull it together. But the periods of greater lucidity, began to be followed by ever more loopy flights of fancy. She would tell me about things that she had ‘watched’ on the radio, or regale me of tales of Dad and her brother at school, even though they’d grown up in different towns.

As is nearly always the case, the siblings who were the nearest took on the bulk of Mum’s care. When I talked to my sister on the phone I could not see her hair stood on end, and her eyes wild, but I could definitely hear it.