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First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2017
Copyright © Simon McDermott 2017
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Ebook Edition © February 2018 ISBN: 9780008232634
For my father
Contents
Pride of Britain Awards, November 2016
Pride of Britain Awards, November 2016
The lights were blinding.
I was sat surrounded by some of Britain’s most famous faces – Simon Cowell, Stephen Hawking and Prince Charles. Two cameramen made their way over to my table, one positioning himself right in front of me. I could see the red light. I knew they were recording and my heart was pounding. On the stage, James Corden filled the screen, his voice booming across the room:
‘There’s a carpool karaoke star I want to pay tribute to this evening that isn’t to do with me. He’s 80 years old and he has the voice of Frank Sinatra and instead of Sunset Boulevard, he likes to cruise the mean streets of Blackburn, Lancashire. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Mr Ted McDermott and his son Simon.’
The screen cut to a video of me driving with my dad in the car as he belted out ‘Volare’. I felt pride and heartbreak all at once. There was the dad I knew and loved. He was happy and full of joy, with little sign of the confusion and aggression that had blighted our lives for the past four years. The interview cut to a picture of Mum and Dad when they were younger and then to Mum as she sat there with tears in her eyes: ‘You do get upset about it. The person that you knew is slowly going away,’ she said.
How did we get here?
My dad, Ted, was diagnosed with dementia in 2013, when he was 77. He can no longer recognize his family or where he is. It’s been devastating to watch this insidious disease take him over, but through everything, music has been the one thing that’s kept us together. Dad still loves to play his records at full volume as he sings around the house, remembering the words to every song, even if he doesn’t recognize anything else around him.
Living with dementia means that no day is ever the same. There are moments when Dad is happy and caring and moments when he can get incredibly angry and upset but not know why. Evenings he’ll often spend hours wandering around the house, shouting my mum’s name, or looking for people who aren’t there.
It was after one particularly bad outburst that I took Dad driving around the Ribble Valley in Lancashire, playing his old backing tracks to try and calm him down. It didn’t take long before he was singing along in perfect tune. Dad – for a moment – was back to his old self and all the confusion and aggression had gone.
Those drives in the car gave us something to hold on to during the really bad times. I started to record them just for myself and Mum, but then I had the idea of uploading them to Facebook, with a link to a fundraising page I’d set up to support