Pulling myself together

Today didn't start well.  If I tell you that the point where it started to go wrong was with a question and a statement from Ash you might understand.  If I tell you that the question was 'have I got any socks down here?' and my answer was 'you should have plenty upstairs' and that the statement was 'I'm just taking Max for a walk' and my reply was 'that's OK, I'm just going out anyway' do you understand more?  If you do then you probably share your life with dementia and know exactly how I should have responded.  For those of you who don't I should have answered the question about socks with 'yes' and I should have answered the statement about going out with 'OK'.  Simple answers, uncluttered and understandable from any and every angle but for some reason I just didn't think and it nearly fell apart.  Luckily I managed to recover myself, and the situation, by finding socks and getting out of the house quickly.  If I'm honest I hadn't woken up in the happiest of moods so the difficulties may have started earlier than I thought.  Yesterday I talked of batting away memories of days gone by but sometimes I struggle to do it and this morning was one of those times.  Worse, I could feel myself wanting to wallow in it all, to feel sorry for myself and to think about times that were more interesting, more exciting and more fun but that way madness lies and I realised, if not in time to avoid messing up those two answers, then certainly in time to take control of myself and I went for a very long walk.  Not only that but I knew I needed something to redirect my head so I took my camera.  Ash bought it for me many years ago but he was the photographer in the family and I've hardly used it.  Now though I've been making the most of traffic free lanes on walks by myself and have discovered stunning views I've never noticed before.  So I carried the camera, took photos of the views and came home feeling re-energised and with a determination to learn how to actually use that camera which is something else I've never done before.  We nearly came to grief when I got home and mentioned to Ash that I really needed his super-duper camera to make the most of the views and he decided to teach me how to use my own.  Him teaching me something has never been a good idea even before all this but you'll be pleased to know that I nodded my head and made appropriate comments in all the right places so we came out of that unscathed and now I'm going to take myself off to study it all properly and hopefully add photography to the ever growing list of things I'm learning to do for myself.

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