Audrey’s Blog on living well with disability and breast cancer

" We need a systematic approach to foster humanistic values, of oneness and harmony. If we start doing it now, there is hope that this century will be different from the previous one. It is in everybody's interest. So let us work for peace within our families and society, and not expect help from God, Buddha or the governments." Dalai Lama It's been hard this last few weeks to have the words to describe the myriad of emotions that have affected me. In some ways I envy those who purport to have certainty in what should be done to respond to the terrorism we see affecting so much of our world. And of course it had an impact on me because as a European, terror came very close to home. I have no easy answers to share, no wise idioms to make it all ok. I understand some the complexity of the factors that have brought us to where we are now; I know that we in the UK have played our own role in that, like so many others in the West. I know too that some pow

I noticed some social media activity around the John Lewis advert on Friday and thought, "I'm not getting sucked into watching it"...muttering about cynical manipulations. But I gave in, after all it was a distraction from work. I watched it without knowledge of the content so was more prepare for cuteness than the grief it evoked in me. The story is about an isolated elderly man...living on the moon. Now in my defence I had been viral and although, after a day in bed I was a little better, robust I was not. But the strangely the image of the social isolation the film told of didn't create an empathy for the story teller, it distressed me. At one level it awakened my own feelings of upset, guilt and helplessness from when my own Mum was still living alone. No matter what we did and other support we organised it wasn't enough to assuage the loneliness and fear that Alzheimer's had worsened drastically. The advert of course didn't in