My life-partner has Alzheimer’s disease, and so a great deal of my work is concerned with different ways of influencing how people with dementia are perceived and treated. In June 2026 I gave a keynote presentation, ‘Brackets Are Exciting: lacunae, fragment, allusion and non-propositional speech acts in the art of learning Dementian’, at the University of Lisbon: https://www.rhome.letras.ulisboa.pt/en/rhome-2026/programme-and-book-of-abstracts

I have also become involved with Dementia UK, which supports people with dementia and the people who care for them. They are running a campaign to highlight the challenges that face us, and one result is that BBC Morning Live ran a feature on 5 March 2026, in which I made a brief appearance: https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/m002s5k7. On 29 July 2026, I met the Prime Minister Andy Burnham and Baroness Louise Casey, who is conducting a review of adult social care:

My project to create a booklet about communicating with people with dementia is now complete. Its title is Beyond Words and  it was inspired by the work of Professor Liz Barry at Warwick University, who researches the social process and experience of ageing. I was very moved by the ideas and images in her paper about how communication does not have to be in words but instead can be a form of playful improvisation, using facial expression, mime, mirroring, gestures, body-language, nonsense-words and laughter. It changed how I relate to my life-partner.

You can download a copy of the booklet here: warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/bw

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On my poetry workshops page I mention the name of Rebecca Swainston, an artist who lives in Reading and whose work I encountered in 2020. I was so taken with her work that in the summer of 2025 I commissioned her to paint my portrait – which I am delighted to say will be the cover image for my forthcoming collection Broken or Unbroken, It Is All One (Two Rivers Press, spring 2027): https://tworiverspress.com/?s=Broken+or+Unbroken – and you can visit Rebecca’s website at https://rebeccaswainston.co.uk

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I’m very pleased to have been invited to be on the editorial committee of a new online journal Antenna, hosted by the medical humanities programme of Lisbon University; go to https://humanidadesmedicas.letras.ulisboa.pt/en/creative-journal-antena/ for information about how to submit work.