There are many problems with illness unto death but perhaps the strangest is that it makes the world more beautiful. What has always been almost unnoticed becomes exceptional and fleeting. Here we are in the middle of an Indian summer. The sun beyond the shadows is strong. Like in the images of the Aten, the sun disk, the little fingers at the end of its rays are tender and hot and, like life itself, strong with endings.

Each early evening, I drive the fifteen minutes to the residence where she is for the moment. Her carers who looked after her at home have left us in the lurch. They also have problems. So the residence it has to be. It is high on the hill above the Ria de Aldan, a striking inlet off the Ria de Pontevedra. I drive up the narrow track to collect her and then back down again to walk round the old church and sit in the shade for a cup of coffee. She fiddles with the napkin and mumbles nonsense while I help the cup to her lips. This is the point we have reached as have something just short of a million people in the UK. To these you have to add the other million who are left to get on with the job of caring, those who are old and infirm themselves and the children who come home from school to homework and a failing parent. These the government has left in the lurch with enough each week for a couple of decent meals. That four percent of the population is saving the NHS how much exactly? You do the maths.

My wife was born in Vigo here in Galicia and is therefore a native of this land. Why stay in England where the help is useless and horribly expensive when we can come here where the care is precious and well under half the price? And as she loses her English which she spoke so well, there is what she has left of her native tongue to fall back on.

Our finca here overlooks the Ria de Pontevedra and we put a wooden house on its rather precipitous slope some fifteen years ago in happier times. It has three bedrooms and a biggish living room. There is a terrace overlooking the estuary and the straggle of Bueu below. Bueu is our local town although we live in a village called Beluso which supplies us with most of our needs. For the local capital you have to drive or bus to Cangas and take a ferry across the Ria de Vigo to Vigo itself.

It is the carers who suffer or at least who can articulate their suffering. That is partly my reason for writing this blog. I always thought blogging a tad ridiculous but feel now that I should give it a go. It is the hidden horror. No hope of a cure while work on cancer and AIDS goes roaring ahead. Perhaps I should do a Captain Tom and start walking so that there may be more funds for research.

Caring is Intimate in so many ways that turning towards a loved one is also a turning away from the world just as it seems at its most attractive. `just as loneliness creeps up on you little by little so the many valuable contacts dissipate. You turn your back as everyone else turns their backs. Lucia was always there to help. She helped her sister who is blind and her mother in her old age. All our holidays were taken up by this so that Lucia hardly travelled at all.T he very word dementia is like the plague and so many turn away often because they simply don’t know how to deal with it. I wonder how I might have reacted had it been someone other than my wife who was suffering. I now spend too much time here on my own waiting for phone calls that rarely come. This column is a part of my answer, a reaching out to those I have never met. There is always the word.

Next week I will write a little about myself and my family and then, the week after, about Lucia and hers. I just hope I can keep going as suicidal thoughts are worth less than a halfpenny in my situation.