Everything is autumnal now. The seasons of a life are drawing down and mimic the weather. Green is turning to brown and the ever less reliable summer is turning to drizzle. This year the peaches fell still hard from the tree and rotted on the ground. The apples likewise. Compote and jam are waiting for the cold. I picked the last of the figs this morning from the great rambling tree covered in brambles. I shall make some jam of it later today. Fig jam is easy. The recipe is my mother-in-law’s: whole figs, chop off the stalk and boil with sugar and lemon juice for ten minutes. I recall making it with her not so long ago. Actually, so long ago.

But autumn is in the heart also. The good years are past. The good people dispersed alongside many who stepped aside at the first sign of difficulty.

How long has it been? Alt one point came the bolt from the blue and the bolt from the blue was that it wasn’t a bolt from the blue, that I knew immediately that I had always known or known for quite some time. It was suddenly overwhelmingly obvious that there had been a problem for years but that the human ability to look away from bad news had hidden it in plain sight.

And so, comes the inevitable question: when did it begin? When should an attentive husband have first noticed that something was wrong? When she gave up driving? Was it when the odd word failed – as it has with me my entire life? Was it – now I come to think of it – when there was the strange failure to understand, a misapprehension? The failure to stop singing while I was having my siesta? These fragments I have stored against our ruins. Perhaps it is the human condition that prays for things to continue as they are, that there be no disruption in the day-to-day and thus these little – and not so little – signals are pushed with a ready hand to the back of the mind. The mind that is still more or less in one piece refuses to accept another that is in even less than one piece. Kerouac told us that, whatever we do, it always ends badly.

She was finally diagnosed with semantic dementia so it must have been language that I should have noticed first, After all, I was supposed to be a writer, and of all writers, a poet, a fingersmith of language and even I trained myself to ignore the clues.

The great panjandrum at the Spire Medical Centre where we went for the MRI scan – much too long to wait for the NHS – turned his screen round so that we could see the damaged brain. It was undeniable on the screen in blues and greens, Do you see this? Look there, look there. The finger pointing out the darker patches in vivid green. Look there, that is a normal brain. And it flashes across my mind: A Normal Brain. Beethoven’s brain? Dostoievski’s brain? Nietzsche’s brain. The scientist fails to see the existential nonsense he is telling us. Schumann’s brain with that sharp spike broken bone cutting into it and driving him to suicide. Psychotic melancholia indeed ? All present at the mad hatter’s tea party.

He gives us a pamphlet. Just so you know what to expect. This is a cruel disease. My secretary will make another (horribly expensive) appointment, Good day.

And then my third-rate brain is suddenly normal and can still cope and thus is expected to cope. A million of us in the UK. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? But more of this as we struggle on through these blogs. I listen to Just One Thing on the radio and am told that writing a ten-minute diary before bed is good of one’s mental health. Well, here goes and thank you, dear reader for your interest.