Who Will Sing the Old Songs?

A true, no holds barred account of a family living with dementia, frustration, love and heartbreak and a welfare system that let them down.In a busy world it’s easy to miss the decline of cognitive function in an elderly person; easy to judge it as slight confusion; easier still to ignore it completely – until suddenly, without warning, it explodes into your life. For John Walsh’s family, that’s exactly what happened; his parents’ 60 years of togetherness were suddenly no more. Now they, as a family, were dependent on others; reliant on Britain’s welfare system. What happened next was shocking and devastating.Eighteen months of social services, doctors, hospitals, care homes and frustration. No chance of a happy ending; absolutely no light leading to the end of the tunnel. Just darkness and injustice.John was horrified by what happened to his parents, shocked by the lack of support for them, as he struggled to reconcile himself to a welfare system in which pensioners are forced to sell their homes to fund depressingly poor standards of care, whilst young men who’ve never worked a day in their lives, happily stand at the bar drinking their way through hundreds of pounds worth of benefits.There are almost a million people living with dementia in Britain today. That number will double within the next 20 years. Forty-two percent of the population are affected by the disease in one way or another, yet money allocated to its research accounts for just 2.5 percent of the funds available. What has gone so wrong?This is a dark story, told with the honesty of humour and the distress and turmoil of loss.