‘Tim is making a face.’

Well that’s conclusive, she does see faces, certainly some of the time. Actually I was copying her face of wide-eyed pretend surprise, as she ate ice-cream, and it is an expression that she learned herself from her mother.

‘I’m like a little girl – I want to go out.’ Well, put like that, who am I to argue?

But when a carer says, ‘She is like a child,’ I wince, making another face.

(She meant that Anna does not like getting dressed or undressed, and a child may be like that.)

A journalist misquoted Julie-Ann, our Alzheimers Society worker: ‘Caring for someone with dementia is like looking after a newborn baby. It is a 24-hour worry.’ When she saw it in the local paper, Julie-Ann phoned to apologise.

Again, I understand the point that was being made. And perhaps we can say that Anna is like a child, but in the way we all are at times, that she has dependency needs which she does not acknowledge, and that is like a child.

But that does not really make her like a child. And the trouble is that if people start to think you are like something, the go on to think you are that thing. A simile becomes a metaphor becomes a fact – as in, ‘You baby!’

Here are some ways Anna is not (like) a child:

She remembers what was like to be young.

She regrets not being the feisty independent middle aged lady she was before the diagnosis.

She understands a dirty joke.

She weighs 120 pounds.

She has beautiful clothes, that she bought herself.

She still has her own money, from her years of working for the NHS.

She laughs like a woman.

When she is distressed, she expresses the sadness of her years.