“You can’t really force people, can you?”
Elizabeth was replying to Charlie’s proposal for a programme of geriatric press-ganging to counter the falling attendance at the community centre that we’d heard was jeopardising funding and therefore the future of the centre itself.
She referred to the old idiom about taking a horse to water, telling us about an aunt of hers whom she had badgered for years to have a walking frame and who had finally conceded following a fall in the supermarket. It seemed to me that this just proved Charlie’s point.
It is a dilemma, of course. In the developed world, choice and freedom have assumed the status of watchwords, yet surely neither are unconditional? After all, my freedom can impact on another’s. So if attendance at prescribed activities can be shown to enhance the wellbeing, physical and mental, of individuals, and reduce their dependence on others, then surely there is a case for systemic encouragement, if not obligation.
However, if it is to work, it depends on examining the reasons for the decline in attendance. One issue is compatibility. The spectrum of the appetites and needs of us crumblies is very wide. It is difficult for a small project with few volunteers to provide activities that suit everyone who attends. So some stop coming because the games are too childish or the quizzes too demanding. However there is another, rather more uncomfortable, factor: fear.
You cannot turn a page, press a button or open your device nowadays without encountering scare stories about dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. We oldies are consistently confronted with bad news about the next stage of our lives and so we become reluctant to engage in any activity that associates us with that next stage. Attendance becomes a stigma, tantamount to acknowledging our graduation from the slippered pantaloon age into that of the demented tatterdemalion.
I doubt if coercion as commended by Charlie is going to overcome this stigma. Dementia has become an industry, and as someone with a couple of years’ experience in delivering activities, I’m not convinced that the community centres have got the right dishes on the menu.
What’s needed is a more adventurous a la carte offer. Games such as cribbage, pontoon, rummy, dominoes, shove ha’penny, bagatelle and table quoits that will take them back to the school yard and rattle their marbles. OK, we’d need more volunteers, but maybe crumblies like those in my little group could be recruited. That would have a further benefit –making our own graduation into dementia a gentler process.
