DEMENTIA CARE: MAGNETIC MEMORY.

 One day the world will be populated by bins. Just the bins. No humans left. The bins won’t be filled by anyone. Aliens, visiting the human-less world, might eventually decode the patterns left behind and realise that…
   This week, it’s BLUE BIN week.
   I must be sure of the bin I am putting out that night. In the early Jurassic, there was one bin to rule them all and in the black bag bind them…or something. And that bin bag was picked up weekly.
   Then the wheelie bin landed and multiplied across the land. And the Local Authority saw the wheelie bin, and the Local Authority said that this was good. But not good enough. In addition to the black bin, we gained the blue bin, the purple bin, some people had the green bin, and so on.
   Each bin is picked up in turn, week by week. And I fill these bins weekly, so that I can gauge how close to Bin-ageddon things are. I keep the paper and cardboard inside the house, in my own bins…
   This is a carer-thing. Minimise trivial effort here so that you can deploy vital effort elsewhere. I could go to the bins every time I finish a meal, and drop off the meal packaging. Or I could fill the indoor bins and empty all of them when it is bin night. Then put out the relevant bin.
   How do I know which bin to put out? That’s easy. I go out to fill the wheelie bins and I look up the street to see which bin is out. There’s one person in the street who puts the bin out early and that person has never steered me wrong.
   But I can’t rely on that alone.
   We are meant to rise before 7.00 in the morning and put our bins out on bin day itself. This is bullshit. Most of us deliver the bins to the street the night before. Occasionally in winter, with heavy winds, I might delay a bin until morning. At least the bin will still be there, sheltered heavily in the garden.
   There is a handy calendar. That calendar is out of date. However, it carries the bin cycle on it. And I keep that calendar pinned to the fridge by magnets. One magnet moves along from bin to bin, informing me of the weekly changes.
   That’s pretty much the whole system. Fill the bins weekly. Choose the right bin to place out on the street. Move the magnet to the next icon. Keep an eye on rubbish-levels for all bins. Hunt for my bin on the street after it has been emptied and ferried along the pavement a bit.
   There’s room in the kitchen for the bins and crates that I ferry outside on a weekly basis. Every three weeks, something new goes to the lorry. Has anything changed?
   Kitchen space. Things are crowded at the minute, as I wait for the official removal of furniture that’s now surplus to requirements. They’ll get back to me for a pick-up, apparently, but Covid created queues for everything.
   What does the lack of space mean? It means that now and then I brush into the calendar on the front of the fridge as I walk by. This is annoying. I’m in more of a ship’s galley than a kitchen.
   Solution. Move the calendar around to the side of the fridge. I look at all that space there. And I stare at a box of fridge magnets. Once upon a time, fridge magnets formed a wall of tourist memories on the old fridge.
   The furniture goes to the Local Authority for refurbishment and cut-price sale to those having difficulty purchasing full-price goods. If I don’t need it any longer, it can go to someone who has a use for it.
   This was the case with the old fridge. I removed the magnets from the old fridge and stared at the scuff-marks on the door and on the sides. Fridge magnets cause wear and tear. No worry. The old fridge went for refurbishment, after all.
   When the new fridge came in, I decided to leave the fridge magnets in a box. But now, as usual, I am having a general tidy…and I need the space. So the fridge magnets should go back on the fridge where they belong.
   New plan. Based on the wheelie bin calendar. The magnets holding the calendar in place have no direct contact with the fridge surface. Plan. Take A4 sheets of paper and use those to protect the fridge when ALL THE MAGNETS IN THE WORLD go on there.
   This came to pass, and it was good.
   I’ve now plastered the fridge sides with magnets. Not the door. Just the sides. Sheets of paper protect the fridge. This arrangement forced me to fill the white space created by the paper sheets.
   And that’s not a bad thing.
   I tried to arrange the magnets thematically. There are magnets for places we’ve been, and magnets given as gifts by people who went to all sorts of destinations. I have fridge magnet memories of journeys across a pre-Covid world.
   And if the fridge should ever go for refurbishment, it won’t need as much refurbishment thanks to the layer of paper smoothing the rough edges of the past.
   Now I’ve restored the memories from out of a cardboard box. And that box goes for recycling in the paper and cardboard bin. Not just yet. On bin day. The fridge has had its magnetic memory restored.
   It joins several rooms and all the halls in that parade of memories. One of the first things I did when I took over the dementia-proofing task of making the house safer was…posting memories everywhere.
   I bought acrylic photo panels and I went deep into printing photo memories of places from the pre-Covid world. Memory galleries had to be placed high enough in the halls to avoid collisions. Apart from that, there wasn’t much of an angle on safety. This was all about memory.
   Going places. Memorable places. You’d remember standing under the Statue of Liberty on a bright sunny day. And you’d talk about it as you walked through the kitchen on the way to the bathroom upstairs. The pictures change up there, and you talk about those places as well.
   Daily carers change shifts and new carers come in. More conversations about places you’ve been to.
   This was very important. I had to make the house safe, but not take everything away. Dangerous things went. But in a subtle way. And memories came in. They were prolonged. I kept the fire of memory burning brightly in a highly interactive way.
   Fridge magnets. They served the same purpose as the acrylic galleries did. Care in the home is about preserving the home. Don’t get me wrong. I am almost a decade into this now, and you wouldn’t recognise the place if you looked back. But I made changes gradually.
   You’ll do that, as the nature of care also changes gradually. Mobility issues. Let’s hope mobility changes gradually. Be prepared for rapid alterations, naturally. A few items come in and a few more go out.
   That reminds me. I have to contact stores to take things away. Everyone in caring knows the guy from stores. They say you meet everyone in the system, sooner or later. That’s less likely to be management, as management couldn’t come out when Covid came in.
   I am in a mood to clear clutter away. Perhaps that stems from my success in maintaining a space for the Christmas tree. It is an imaginary space for eleven months of the year. Then, on the first of December, I get the full use out of that tree.
   New pressures arise from changes in mobility. Bulkier equipment takes up more and more space. What can I remove from that room and store in another, just to preserve the space for a very tall tree?
   Anything and everything I can.
   The memory galleries remain. They are still points worth talking about, when fresh carers march through the door. The fridge, being the fridge, serves a vital purpose. With the magnets on the sides, I have room in the blue bin for the brown cardboard box that acted as magnet storage for too long.
   My memory of the layout of this place is layered, and many of those layers relate to different phases of caring. As the dementia slowly progressed, I softened the dangers that wouldn’t apply to people who could concentrate.
   Lack of concentration makes everything so much more dangerous. The kitchen, with its cooking opportunities. And the top of the stairs, offering scope for rapid transit down if you aren’t looking where you are going.
   Hell, I can concentrate for myself and someone I am looking after, and even I brushed against the magnets on the fridge door. Which is why I moved the magnets from the fridge door. I could complain about the situation…
   And it is good to vent steam…
   But if you can fix a situation, that’s far better than complaining about it. I can’t fix dementia. But I can remove ceramic items and replace them with plastic ones. I can put signs up, warning about door operation. Safety barriers. Yes, I’ve created safety barriers out of actual safety barriers and out of room dividers.
   Loss of memory is a danger. I poked and prodded memory with all of those tourist galleries and the associated fridge magnets. In a place where memory is failing, slipping away, provide traction where and when you can.
   So use magnetic memory. Put up fridge magnets. Even if the person you look after never bought any souvenirs of the places you went to…just go online and buy in mass-produced memories. Cheap. Tacky. Memorable. Provide boosters for what memory remains for as long as you can.
   And if you want to pass your fridge on when it is time, use paper. It certainly reduces the risk of the magnet sticking to the fridge while the souvenir comes away in your hand. Been there. Had to wrestle with that. Not a memory I wish to repeat. Though it is one I retain.