On 7/7 last year we were on a family holiday at Lyme Regis. We were sitting outside a beach café, when Dan’s mobile started going off with messages like, r u ok, and that’s how we learned of theLondon bombings. After a few minutes Dan was getting good information and relaying it to us, as we drank our coffee. ‘London is closed’ he said. And the strange thing to me was that people at the other tables carried on with their breakfast, not one of them making any comment or acknowledging that they had heard any of Dan’s increasingly apocalyptic bulletins. I put it down to their Englishness, or perhaps to the fact that they did not come from London and so the information had little relevance to them.

Or perhaps we were simply observing the ways people live now in gated communities of their minds.

Michelle Harrison, head of the public sector consultancy at the Henley Centre Headlight Vision, has observed the trend:

"For the last 20 years we've been asking people the same question: Do you think the quality of life in Britain is best improved by a) looking after the community's interests instead of our own, or b) looking after ourselves, which ultimately raises standards for all?

"Fifty-three per cent now say b, looking after ourselves. Last year that was around 45%. From 1994 to 2000 there was a big gap [in favour of the community] and since then it has narrowed and now crossed over."

So we mark the anniversary and listen to the stories repeated of the bombings and the tortuous arguments about why these things happen but what does it mean? For us it marks a year in the progress of Anna’s dementia, so that now we could not think of having a holiday like that again. And we cannot look to others to have much interest in our problem.