Hello, this is bbc news. Its emerged that police were called to the home of tory leadership candidate Boris Johnson and his partner on thursday night after a neighbour said she heard a loud argument. Mrjohnson and jeremy hunt will take part in the First Nationwide hustings this afternoon well be bringing you that live at 3pm. Long queues have built up at Manchester Airport as an it failure prevents passengers from checking airlines have cancelled flights over iran after the shooting down of a drone. Officials will meet tomorrow to call for a de of tensions. De escalation. Campaigners have joined Richard Ratcliffe outside the Iranian Embassy to show solidarity with him as his Hunger Strike over his detained wifes plight enters its eighth day. The government announces a new permament memorial to mark the First National windrush day which honors the british caribbean community. Now on bbc news, George Alagiah is talking books. Hello and welcome to talking books at hay festival here in wales. Im George Alagiah. Every year the festival brings together writers and thinkers, artists and politicians, a heady mix to stimulate ideas and debate. Today ill be talking to nicci gerrard, whose writing, both fiction and nonfiction, illustrates a vast range of interests. Her latest work, what dementia teaches us about love, is a sometimes disturbing but ultimately life affirming look at a disease that could affect us all one way or another. Nicci gerrard, welcome to talking books. Applause. Im really chuffed to be here, thank you for having me. This book, what dementia teaches us about love, its about an issue that we can, if we ever did, no longer ignore, we cant walk on the other side, its something that will confront all of us. The numbers are pretty staggering. Its interesting you say that, the numbers are staggering so in the uk alone there are 850,000, 900,000 people who have the diagnosis and then there are about the same number without the diagnosis. Its said that somebody develops dementia every three seconds. Every three seconds . Every three seconds so put like that its huge and there can be almost nobody who doesnt have some kind of intimate connection with the illness but you say we cant walk by on the other side, well, often we do walk by on the other side. We are so scared of it, we dont know how to deal with it, that we try to hold it at bay. Part of the not dealing with it is the language we use. I was interested you just said People Living with dementia although a lot of people might regard them as, i dont know, patients, people who are suffering. How have you settled on the language you use . Language, as you know its active, vocabulary is very active. If you say people are sufferers then youre casting them into a role of being a victim, of being different from the rest of us. A lot of people who are living with dementia do suffer. There is a lot of suffering involved, a lot of sorrow and a lot of tragedy. At the same time there are many People Living with dementia who are living really well with dementia and the diagnosis doesnt have to be a sentence, it can be the beginning of a new chapter. One of the problems about the word and the word itself is so freighted with fear that maybe we need a different one, is that when people hear the word they jump cut forward to an imagined ending, they see themselves at the end stages and for most people there is a long road to travel on before they get there and its a road that can be full of adventure and love and courage and good things as well as sad and scary things. This book, parts of it are sad and scary but it is, i promise, ultimately an uplifting book. Ijust wondered, do you think the conversation about dementia is changing and how has it changed, say in the last 20 years . Thats a really good question because it absolutely is changing. 30 years ago there were about a third of the number of people who had the illness, just because we are an ageing population, so it was quite easy not to think about it too much and i think for a long time it has been a stigma, its been something we dare not name, its the illness that were most scared of and partly because its about kind of losing our self while we are still here, its about shame and loss of control and its something were so scared of that we have tended to try not to see it, we put it out of sight, lots of people have dementia very much behind closed doors in kitchens and bedrooms and hospital wards and Nursing Homes so weve been able to push it away and we are less and less able to do that now and more and more people are speaking about it so people who have the illness are standing up and saying i have it and its an illness by the way, its notjust dementia, some kind of bogey, its an illness like cancer is an illness. I thought what was interesting about the book is that part of it is almost philosophical because its trying to work out what is the self, where does it stop and where does it start . Ijust wonder, would you mind reading, its quite early on in the book, a passage which i think looks at this difficulty but trying to work out what is the self . Sure. I used to say that we are made of our memories, but what happens when memories are lost, who are we then . If we are out of our mind, where have we gone . If we have lost the plot, what happened to the story we are in . Even at the bitter end i never thought my father wasnt himself although at the same time i felt he had lost himself. He was gone but he remained. He was absent and yet powerfully present. There was something that endured beyond language and recollection, a trace perhaps like grooves that life had worn into him the way a river carves into rock. He still had his sweetness, his past lived on in his smile, his frown, the way he raised his bushy silver eyebrows. It lived on in us. He might not have recognised us but we could recognise him. I dont know what the word for this indelible essence is. Once it would have been soul. Civilisation, control and safety form a crust over deep waters. In all of us, often pushed into the corners of our minds, is the uneasy awareness of how frail our hold over ourselves is, how precarious a grip we have on our minds and bodies. Dementia, all the many and often harrowing forms of dementia, make us ask what is it to be a self, to be human . Applause. So i wonder, have you answered for yourself satisfactorily, and i know you look at it in the book, answered that question, what is the self . 10 years ago, 12 years ago, before my father had the condition and before i then kind of did lots of work with people with dementia, i certainly would have thought and said blithely that i was made of my memories. I would have said that my value and my selfhood lay in my purpose and my self sufficiency and my independence, my reciprocal relationships, my success, my youth, my vigour, all the things that we so value in Todays Society and now i profoundly dont believe that any more, so if i think about someone like my father i think he didnt lose his self. I think he lost himself to his self, he lost his sense of self, he lost his identity, he eventually lost his shame, his self consciousness, he lost his ability to have a place in the world but yet somehow, and this is quite miraculous in a way, theres something about being human which means we survive. We survive everything. Because you know dementia close up, intimately, can you describe for us what it might feel like in that transitional period when you kind of, somebody says to you youve got dementia and you know all about it and you have to prepare . One of the things that people often say about dementia is that when you meet a person with dementia youve just met a person with dementia and there are so many different forms of dementia and its a very unique condition and thats one of the reasons why its so very hard for us to know how to kind of lay a healing hand on it but i think that moment of diagnosis, of knowing you are entering a world where you will gradually be losing your control over yourself must be uniquely terrifying. I had a memory test to see if i had dementia and it was. That was part of your research or because you were worried . Part of my research and also because im worried because its everywhere in my family and here i am, im 60 and im losing lots of memories and losing my capacity to remember so i wanted to find out and it was a very terrifying test, and it did make me kind of try, and thinking about my father, trying to imagine what its like being told that youre entering this new phase of your life when the things that you perhaps most valued about yourself, especially people who have lived a life of the mind, the language, the memories, everything you have built up youre going to lose. I dont know what it feels like, i know what other people have told me it feels like and for different people it feels like different things. For some people itjust brings despair and they cannot cope with it and ive interviewed quite a lot of people who have literally shut the door on the world because they could not go out into the world, they could not face it so they have just, and for those people who could not acknowledge the diagnosis or confront what it meant, the diagnosis has a kind of invincible power and it can devour them, and then ive met other people who are incredibly kind of tolerant, a lot of people know in advance they have it so its just a confirmation, people can be amazingly accepting and make it into a kind of next chapter, next adventure and deal with it with extraordinary resilience. But one of the things you say does happen to some people and some families, because this is notjust a disease that affects one person, it affects others, is shame, so whats that about . Actually, i think its one of the most central things about the condition that makes it so scary for people, so all the things we have spent decades being so careful about, we lose, and a lot of its very bodily, a lot of it is about becoming incontinent. But you say because of the shame, couples will often come there is an understanding that one compensates for the other and hides the thing and then makes treatment such as it is more difficult. The shame spreads so its notjust the shame of the person who has the illness but the shame of the person looking after them and people get fearfully embarrassed and feel humiliated and then they dont go out in case something happens and the person whos looking after them can often cover up and they dont go out and they shut the door and it becomes an illness that brings in its wake huge loneliness, huge loneliness. You say in the books somewhere that yes, look after the person, love them, but its also important to go off and do your own thing. Yes, i would say its more than important, its absolutely vital. I think there are lots of people ive met who are doing this Impossible Task of having no life themselves, of completely putting their own self on hold and looking after the person they love and its like its their kind of pledge and their duty and their task and its really difficult but here i am, im 60 and ive grown up, im a lifelong feminist and all my life ive thought that what you need to do is you need to have agency and autonomy, you mustnt everjust be the servant of somebody else. On the other hand this task of looking after somebody that you love and that you have pledged yourself to is incredibly important and somehow one has to manage both those two, you have to retain yourself and your sanity. It struck me that although dementia is particularly difficult and challenging disease, these notions you have about caring and how to do it and best practice and so on extends beyond dementia to any disease that can end up with a terminal diagnosis. Orjust to life. I think in a way, thats why we called the book what dementia teaches us about love so its what dementia has to show us about us and how it is to be human in the world and how it is to kind of turn to people who are frail and offer our help as we hope to be helped in our turn and i have learned the most extraordinary amountjust from being with people who are vulnerable and i feel kind of quite ashamed of myself when i think, i think that in the past i would have hurtled past somebody who was looking confused and befuddled in the supermarket aisle and maybe been a bit impatient with them because they were getting in my way and im in a hurry and i need to get to the checkout and now at least i can stop and offer help and it takes nothing. I mention in my introduction that you had brought about change in the nhs and this was because of a particular experience of your father had, john, and you set up Johns Campaign, and brought about that change. Do you want to talk about that a little bit . What happened to your father . My father had alzheimers for ten years or more than ten years and he was what is described as living well, whatever that means, he was living well with his illness and he was living at home with my mother who hed been married to for 61 years at the time of his death and he was working in the garden and walking by the river and teasing his grandchildren and talking about his past which remained very vivid to him and although he was gradually going towards his twilight, he was very contented most of the time, he was a man who loved the Natural World and he took great solace from that and then he went into hospitalfor leg ulcers. That hospital had very strict visiting hours, which we as a family were horribly obedient to, and then there was also an outbreak of norovirus which meant there was a shutdown of the ward he was in so there were days and days went by where he had no visitor and he must have lain in bed feeling abandoned by us and five weeks later when i came and collected him he was a skeleton. He was completely immobile, he couldnt stand on his own two feet, he couldnt lift himself up in bed. He was completely inarticulate, he couldnt say my name or his own, he couldnt string two words together and he was quite wrecked so he was like a ghost in his life and we took him home and we had a hospital bed downstairs and we did all the things for him and with him that we hadnt done when he was in hospital, we thought we could somehow get him back, we could draw him back to land and we couldnt so, for nine months he was no longer living with dementia, he was dying with dementia and death came as a kind of kindness but the point of that story is that what i realised too late for him, it is a complete nonsense to have visiting hours for carers, so the campaign was completely simple and single issue, itjust said that carers are people itjust said that carers of people who are living with dementia should have the same right to accompany them when hospital or away from home as do the parents of sick children. But the fact is that just about the whole of the nhs has adopted Johns Campaign and its aims. It has, every acute hospital in england and almost every acute hospital in the uk has now signed up and thats not because of me, its because of this great army of people who have made this into a movement. I want to come back to what dementia teaches us about love but i also want to, youve written novels, im interested in what extent there an overlap between your fiction and your nonfiction, especially talking about dementia and whether there are things you can say in fiction that you cant say in nonfiction. Im thinking in particular in the book in the twilight hour, the main character a 94 year old woman, eleanor, now shes coming to the end of her life and is busy trying to raise some of her memories because shes worried what people will find. What people might find, yes. And yet dementia is about trying to hang on to memories so im interested in that kind of overlap and the other thing in tuesdays god, i willjoin two books together, your description there of a frail character is really about the early stages of dementia and were you able to talk about things in the way that you couldnt have done in this book . Definitely. Certainly in fiction you can go to kind of dark places and you can imagine things as well and so there are ways in which in fiction i was trying to explore the same things as i was thinking about as my father was declining and you can say kind of intimate things in fiction that i wouldnt, especially thinking about my father, there were certain kind of. He was a very private man so theres only so much i could say about my father because hes dead but he still a very private but hes still a very private dignified man and so that needs to be protected and infection to be protected and in fiction you can explore things and imagine things and in fact i think that the fiction and the plays and the poetry that is now being written about dementia can kind of get to the heart of an illness in a way that nothing else can because its about kind of the fragility of the self. Its interesting with novels because novels rely on memory and dementia is all about those kind of narrative frameworks falling away. In twilight hour, that thing about exploring memory. Memory which gives us our selfhood is also a curse. Memory is the thing that brings us sorrow. Lets go back to the book. There will come a time when it is, life is going to draw to a close and youve got this wonderful list of things you think you should sort ofjot down and do. Would you like to read that . I would. When i started writing this book i made myself a list of the things that i would do should i discover i had dementia. Put my Financial Affairs in order and update my will. Write a living will stating my precise wishes including a dnr. Investigate ways of choosing the time and manner of my death. Say the diagnosis out loud to everyone i know, taking tommy and theresa as my inspirations. Write a letter to sean. Write a letter to each of my four children. Throw away things i dont want people to find. Radically tidy my home. Start giving things away. Say sorry to a few people who are on my conscience. Do those things ive always promised myself i would do one day when i have time, space, freshness, not one of those bucket lists but read the great novels that i missed, revive the disintegrating italian i used to speak, listen to the nightingales singing in the woods near my house, have fun. As the great dr seuss says in the cat in the hat, fun is good but its strangely easy to forget that. Stop hurtling through life in that great race against time that we can never win. Read poetry every day out loud. Do more wild swimming. Dance with abandon. Avoid self pity as tommy says, why not me . Make peace with myself. Let go of anger. Still my restless heart. Eat oysters every day. I should probably do more of these things anyway, of course. We shouldnt have to wait for a diagnosis before we attempt to lead a better life. Life is finite from the start. A finite life is a precious one. We will all be mourned in the end. All right, i want to end, im going to read a bit of your book now if you dont mind and i think its a fitting place to end and it goes like this. A person might have nothing left, no memory, no language, no consciousness that they exist in the world and yet in this broken body of theirs some intelligible essence of themselves is lodged. Nicci gerard, thank you very much. Applause. Thank you. It isa it is a beautiful summer is dying out there across much of the uk, we have blue skies and plenty. This picture is someone of are watchers in guernsey so it looks gorgeous, just a bit of fair weather cloud bubbling up so not wall to wall blue sky but for the rest of today we keep the long spells of sunshine and its a bit warmer than it has been, so its a bit warmer than it has been, 03 its a bit warmer than it has been, soa high its a bit warmer than it has been, so a High Pressure driving are weather just setting so a High Pressure driving are weatherjust setting off so a High Pressure driving are weather just setting off towards the east, low pressure waiting in the winds will be more of a troublemaker on late sunday and into the new working week but for the rest of the afternoon sunny spells across the uk. We have that fair weather cloud, delivery packing up towards the south west with a bit more cloud edging in towards the afternoon but top temperatures of 2a degrees, 18 i9 top temperatures of 2a degrees, 18 19 across scotland or Northern Ireland with the odd shower that should ease away overnight, that many of us dry and clear but things are changing from the south west, rain arrives in the early hours of sunday across cornwall and pembrokeshire, Northern Ireland could see some spots of rain on sunday morning. Low pressure across the south west moving north and east on sunday, much of the day do a lot of dry unsettled weather for central and eastern parts of england and then there could be an isolated shower. Scotland mostly dry but in the afternoon a few showers will build across the northern half of scotland, Northern Ireland, wales and the far south west of england will turn breezy and cloudy with rain arriving late in the day but ahead of that 2a or 25 degrees in central and eastern parts so that will feel short and humid and with that building heat that will fuel some heavy rain and thunderstorms arriving in the south west and through sunday night moving north across england and wales, 15 millimetres of rain, enough to bring standing water on the roads into the early hours of monday. Monday morning we will see the rain pressure a cross morning we will see the rain pressure across Northern Ireland and into scotland, there could be 80 millimetres of rain which would cause flooding issues. Next week we keep that unsettled them, but with blue skies and increasing heat and humidity, highs of up to 31 degrees but keep an eye on the latest warnings. You can find them on our bbc weather website. This is bbc news. Im lukwesa burak. The headlines at three borisjohnson is seen in public for the First Time Since it emerged police were called to the home he shares with his partner after a neighbour said she heard a loud argument. Mrjohnson and jeremy hunt are taking part in the First Nationwide hustings for leadership of the conservative party this afternoon. And this is the scene where those hustings will be taking place well be bringing you that live in the next few minutes. Long queues build up at Manchester Airport as an it failure prevents many passengers from checking in at all three terminals