Since my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's, we have been watching him more carefully for further signs of deterioration, but there has not been much change. The slurring of words I noticed on his birthday seems to have disappeared, so I am happy to blame the wine for that. However, reading about the disease I have noticed that many Alzheimer's cases showed symptoms many years before diagnosis, symptoms which the sufferer and the family often dismissed.

In dad's case, we noticed a sharp decline in abilities early in the year, but with all the wisdom of hindsight, I can now put other pieces of the jigsaw together. Of course, my brother Greg, for a couple of years, had maintained that dad was not much better than mum, and he may have been right all along. It was always my mother who was expected to run the house, so her shortcomings were more evident to us. My father had never really established much of a role in the house or in the garden, and consequently his neglect of these things went unnoticed - in fact, neglect was his chosen modus operandi.

Dad always used to repeat stories. Was this an early symptom? After a few years all of us had heard every story dozens of times, and became quite indifferent to them. More recently however, these stories started to involve new events, more bizarre than before; some of them became quite unbelieveable. We didn't know whether dad was embroidering his tales to regain a bit of audience interest, or whether he seriously believed what he was saying.

The garden and garage were another possible clue. Dad was never a keen gardener - except for occasional mad pruning frenzies in which every bush was wrestled to the ground, its remains little more than a bare stump. Dad always did the minimum in the garden, and this soon dropped to nothing. Similarly, the tools in the garage began to disappear beneath a shroud of cobwebs and rust. It was sad to see them die like that. Dad had been an engineer all his life, and many of these tools dated from the 1940's. Some, those that had belonged to our grandfather, were much older than that.

The mail is delivered once a day to my parents' house, but dad has checked the mailbox several times a day for a long time. He was always very bad at remembering our names, and would often run through two or three names before he got the right one. When Greg and I were little, and misbehaving, he often shouted at us but used the name of someone else nearby, almost sending them into shock. Again I wonder, am I just distorting the past, or were these early signs of dementia?