Textual healing

The subject of how to care for the elderly and those suffering dementia has been very much in the air lately. We're all aware that the UK has an ageing population, whose care will have to be funded from a dwindling tax base. Some 10 million people in the UK are over 65 years old. (Hell, I'm joining them on my next birthday, my 66th, later this month. Me, in my mock Converse trainers and leopard-skin pillbox Bob Dylan bunnet, trying to convince myself that I'm an artist and I don't look back. Omigod, I'm actually, technically, One of Them.)

In 20 years' time, it's estimated there will be 15.5 million of us in the UK who are over 65, the number increasing to 19 million by the middle of this century. Little wonder the subject of how to pay for care proves so daunting to politicians. We hear the elderly described in terms of being a "burden" on the welfare state. But if caring for the old is a burden society has to bear, then it had better bear it gladly.

The issue of funding often aggravates the complicated feelings - resentment, among others, let's face it - that "the elderly" trigger. The people you meet in care homes when some combination of duty, family ties, honouring old friendship takes you there, come, of course, from an incredibly diverse range of backgrounds. They are retired doctors and nurses and teachers who once taught you, and joiners and butchers and builders and former soldiers; folk that never got a start and were "on benefits" all their lives; parents, neighbours, widowers and divorcees; folk that "fought drink", or were made redundant at 50. They were fly-men, head-hunters, bank clerks and church-goers and socialists and atheists and pacifists and harmless biddies and bonny-fechters, folk who followed their team and total chancers and ballroom dancers … They were big readers or avid cinema-goers or opera enthusiasts or rock fans or jazzers or into am-dram. They were artists or writers or musicians themselves.

It's hard, but we need to look closer, see the old as individuals. Their experience should be, could be, an asset. To us. And to them. They have a right to continue to enjoy things they've taken part in throughout their lives. They may be having to move into residential care, but their lives are not over. Maybe they will even finally have the chance to deeply engage with something that hasn't meant much to them so far. Creative solutions should be called upon - and I have to believe that poetry, language at its most naked and most playful, must be a useful tool.

The Scottish Poetry Library and the Scottish Storytelling Centre have been collaborating on the pilot scheme of what we all hope is to be an ongoing project called Living Voices. Into care homes and sheltered housing complexes in three regions, they have been taking poetry old and new. It's not just old daffodils, lost dinner tickets and last duchesses and the Highwayman and Flannan Isle or Up The Airy Mountain and To A Mouses, Louses or Pet Yowes, not just Tam O'Shanter and his grey mare Meg, not just Corbies or Belles Dames Sans Merci or Kings sitting in Dumfermline toun drinking the blude red wine or stopping by woods on snowy evenings or seasons of mists and mellow fruitfulness - wonderful texts full of recall, reminiscence, rhythm, rhyme, pieces spilling over with immediate, now, living, sensuous detail, distinct voices, as each and every one of these undoubtedly are.

No. To my surprise, I'm told that a raw wee elegy for my mother, Sorting Through, detailing the universal, painful, intimate experience of dealing with a loved-one's things in the immediate aftermath of loss - a poem that I might have flinched away from reading aloud in such a setting myself - has been immediately popular and stimulated a whole lot of talk and communication. So it's not a matter of "don't mention the war". It's proven to be quite the reverse. They want words that deal with reality.

Certainly, a session can legitimately be about nothing more than pure escapism and entertainment. Pleasure. People who can't remember what happened half-an-hour ago can just come out with whole screeds of what, long, long ago, they learned by heart. And then they remember the English teacher who taught them it, and his skelly eye, and his fancy for the music teacher that everybody knew all about, and they remember who they were sitting next to in the class and what she did to Archie Esslemont with the point of her protractor and what their granny came out with when they did the poem out loud for everybody at teatime …

The scheme has proved its effectiveness. Well, we've long known that music and memory go hand in glove - music is memory, according to neurologist Oliver Sacks in The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat - and, lo, poetry seems to work in exactly the same way. There is loads of anecdotal evidence from staff in the homes about marked, even miraculous, shifts of mood and engagement in certain individuals. One man who had been very withdrawn (depressed?) now "joins in everything and has a lot to say to the others. Really connects".

I'll learn more at tomorrow's celebration of Living Voices at the Scottish Poetry Library, where research will be revealed into the project's effectiveness in improving health and wellbeing among elderly care residents. I'm going out of pure selfishness. These people have stories; true stories that I need to plunder for the made-up stories I need to tell.

Neither of my parents lived long enough to suffer from dementia. I loved them very much, still miss them - but never had to look after either of them, worry about them, witness them "in care"; never saw them diminished or gradually lost to themselves the way I saw other friends agonise over their parents' final, endgame predicaments. Nevertheless I'm going in pursuit of a subject that, it seems, has been stalking me for the past few years.

My friend, the poet Edwin Morgan, was, for a long time before his death, in a care home round the corner from where I live in Glasgow. Though physically frail he was for a good while mentally as acute as ever. I remember what a good acoustic his tiled bathroom had as, from the open door to him sitting there at his desk by the bed, I declaimed to him. And I recall the very precise direction he gave me as I rehearsed reading aloud his poem, which he'd delegated me to say at the opening of the Scottish Parliament Building in 2004: "Liz, you're not getting enough out of 'not wholly the power, not yet wholly the power …'"

I visited him there, of course, though not nearly often enough. Other, closer, better friends, old and young, did though, and regularly. The Edinburgh crowd, the boy-poets (my contemporaries) came over to continue the series of "absinthe afternoons" they'd begun together in the 1990s in Eddie's modernist, 1960s-style, west end flat. Distinguished international poets, translators and editors visited - Seamus Heaney came once, as I remember. Hamish Whyte, Eddie's publisher and literary executor, and James McGonigal, Morgan's biographer, were like the sons he never had, assiduously watching over every facet of his welfare. But still it got grim. He faded. Dimmed. Suffered from a series of terrible nightmares he was in thrall to - until Jim and Hamish, with difficulty, prevailed upon Eddie to turn them into poems. And so on his last, his 90th birthday, Dreams And Other Nightmares was published, and, crucially, those night terrors lost their power over him.

Moved by this story, I wrote - with Jim's blessing and help - a three-hander play for Glasgay! 2011 in celebration of the life force that was, till the very end, Eddie. (It will, hurrah, be revived next summer at the Tron.) Then last year at Luminate, "Scotland's creative ageing festival celebrating creativity as we age" - which I felt deeply ambivalent about as I really don't think they, the aged ("we", I should say, brandishing my bus pass), are essentially different from any other demographic, shouldn't be in a ghetto - I was involved in some work-in-progress, rehearsed readings of an old, slight, 30-minute, originally-for-radio play of mine.

As a condition of the funding, we were reading at a sheltered housing complex in Edinburgh. Could this possibly be appropriate? It was essentially a story about grief and loss. In the play, three disparate characters in their own, fictional sheltered housing complex have been tasked with putting on a Burns supper together. The protagonist, a good man, politically sound but perhaps a bit remote with the other human beings around him, is lost without his warm and sociable wife, who has recently died. His bête-noire, the widow of a minister and a terrible snob who frankly never was a very nice person when she had all her marbles, has now lost them. She is a danger to herself and others. Something will have to be done. It was supposed to be a comedy. Surely - a bit too much reality - they'd hate this?

How patronising of me. Yes, I was right enough about them enjoying the carefully chosen poetry reading I'd put together as a curtain-raiser. And, yes, they really loved, sang along with, that gorgeous jazz medley of American popular standards from the third member of our play's cast. But Mortal Memories did become a proper play that then became, I'm proud to say, the 300th Play, Pie and a Pint lunchtime theatre production at Glasgow's Oran Mor this May, largely because of the input of that audience that day.

The full-length play that I'm currently struggling with has a character well on the way to being lost to herself. It's not about her, it's about her three daughters, all in their late 50s, who love her but disagree about what to do next, and who, for different reasons, all want her house for themselves. I was stuck; about to abandon it, until, through my letterbox, came a proof copy of Sally Magnusson's book, Where Memories Go, which will be out in January. It's a memoir - intimate and truthful, painful and joyous - of the dementia which robbed her family of their mother. The Mamie in my play (coincidence, the character always been called that) is nothing like the real Mamie Magnusson, but still, in this book there are all kinds of insights, which fascinated and helped tether me to this subject.

Of course, I'm not old. My survival strategy? Denial. Denial and a pair of rockabilly brothel-creepers in viper-green, tartan or leopard-skin. (Sensible actually, but not Hotters or Reikers, OK?) My hair might be white but, hey, I can think platinum blonde if I like. I'll be playing with words, reading, drawing, "keeping creative" if I can. Just as long as those proteins and neurons Alois Alzheimer discovered aren't already busily clotting and fusing and forming themselves into those terrible, twisted, tangled trees in my brain.