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	TX: 09.01.09 - John Killick PRESENTER: PETER WHITE

	Downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio4 THE ATTACHED TRANSCRIPT WAS TYPED FROM A RECORDING AND NOT COPIED FROM AN ORIGINAL SCRIPT. BECAUSE OF THE RISK OF MISHEARING AND THE DIFFICULTY IN SOME CASES OF IDENTIFYING INDIVIDUAL SPEAKERS, THE 麻豆约拍 CANNOT VOUCH FOR ITS COMPLETE ACCURACY. WHITE Now for more than 10 years the poet John Killick has been writing poetry about people with dementia based on his conversations with them. And if you've been listening to You and Yours this week, and I hope you have, you'll already have heard some of them. This month the government is publishing a strategy which aims to improve the lives of people with dementia and their carers. The recommendations range from better hospital care, to tackling the stigma which people with dementia face. Well I spoke to John Killick about his work but before we hear that here's the final poem in our series. It's taken from his latest collection Dementia Diary. KILLICK Defence Bobby was bigger than me And when I got it I got a right good thwack from this bloke He just laddled into me And I couldn't stutter I was laying in the playground Biff - out Bobby was going to get a doing And I administered it If you steam into me - stars I cloaked myself in myself And that was good for me I got that from him too I had my dose and Bobby had his dose Big Al's bigger than me too But I'm not going to lie down under his blows He's in there I can still cloak myself in myself WHITE John Killick, that has all the elements, doesn't it, of a lot of the poems that you've culled from these conversations because it's got the reported speech, it's got the vivid memory, what does it say to you? KILLICK Oh that one says a great deal to me. Well they all do but that one specially because I could give you a bit of background to it. That's by Ian McQueen, a man in his mid 60s in Scotland, and I worked with him on about eight occasions. When I say worked that means we were having conversations, I was recording them and afterwards I took what he had said and edited it, as I might edit a poem of my own. To make a poem out of it I would then take it back to him and amaze him with his own poem. And that's what happened. Now what he's doing in this poem, it seems to me, Big Al is Alzheimer's, so he's comparing how he deals now with Alzheimer's with the way he dealt with the playground bully in his childhood. WHITE And presumably part of what he's saying is that he gets a lot of the defence from within himself, from his own resources. KILLICK Absolutely, so it's a very positive message he's giving, he's saying you don't want to lie down under dementia, you really want to fight it, you want to assert your own selfhood in defence. WHITE Now that's the message that's coming through from the people that you talk to, how much do you think that message is getting through in terms of the way that we're dealing with Alzheimer's and dementia? KILLICK Ah well that's another story Peter. I do think it is getting through. The books that these poems come in are bought and I give readings and talks all over the place and people do react. But when you go into hospital wards and nursing homes and day centres it's a bit distressing sometimes to see how easy it is for people to fall into the old ways of treating the person as a disease and not as a person. And the message of these poems, it seems to me, above all, is that all these are still people and must be treated as such. WHITE And I was very struck with a point you made in the first interview you gave to us over three years ago where you said that the important thing was to deal with people in this situation in the present, in the situation that they actually find themselves, not perhaps forever looking back unless they want to. KILLICK That's right. This business of people losing memory, we mustn't concentrate on that, that's a negative, we must concentrate on the positives, the things that are still there. And this living in the present, it seems to me, has a very important message. I'm going to read you a Haiku of my own, a very short poem, a Japanese form, which conveys this and this is the Haiku: This gift I bring you Please handle it carefully It is the present WHITE That's very moving and given that we live in the present and we're only just beginning to come to terms with this condition and maybe the numbers of people who it's going to affect, what practically would you like to see done that you think would make a big difference? KILLICK Well I think retraining of staff in institutions would be a great help. But the message has got to be got through to everybody, it's got to be got through to the managers as well because there's a systemic failure somehow from the top in many of these places where if the kind of right attitudes - that is valuing the person, valuing being in the present - are not instituted there from the beginning then the staff are just going to carry on just as they did before in the old ways. WHITE Why do you think that is - I mean there's obviously a huge fear of this condition and related conditions and presumably managers are no more immune from that than anyone else? KILLICK That's absolutely true, yes. And that fear has to be got over. When I started this work 15 years ago now I was scared stiff of people with dementia, I didn't understand them, I could only see the symptoms. And I suddenly realised that they were real people and not just real people but the dementia seems to do something to people, it seems to remove the accretions of socialisation to some extent and of habit and to present people in their real and essential selves. And that's why I cannot understand when some relatives say to me - oh he's gone away - or - she's gone away - to me they haven't gone away, they're even more real than they would have been. WHITE Because those phrases that ring through those poems that we've been listening to all week they are the stuff of poetry in a way aren't they. KILLICK They are and there are metaphors there too. And this is a message about the language of people with dementia. What dementia seems to do is to rob people of their intellectual capacity but it certainly doesn't rob them of their emotional force and it doesn't rob them of the other aspects of language which perhaps have been overlaid by the intellectual. The kind of language that children use and which now suddenly comes up again - imaginative, emotional uses of words - and metaphor of course is an example of that. And Ian's metaphor of the school bully is a very good example. WHITE What do you think you've gained from your contact with people and the work that you've done with them over the last 15 years? KILLICK Well I didn't do it for myself Peter, I did it for other people. And I know that sounds very big but I did it because I saw the need for other people to be communicated with and for me to then communicate this message to people around them. But personally it's changed my life, I didn't intend it to, it has made me, I believe, a more grounded person. WHITE John Killick. You can hear more examples of John's work and find out about the new dementia strategy via the You and Yours webiste and this item is also our latest disability podcast. Back to the Transcripts homepage Back to the You and Yours homepage The 麻豆约拍 is not responsible for external websites

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