Natural Improvement, Fast
I ate at a kitchen table on the Galician coast where people have eaten the same plain food every morning for generations. Fish, eggs, a little liver. It tasted of nothing special. But the people who eat it don't fade the way the rest of us do. And nobody knew why until someone finally tested what was reaching their brains. My friend Cathy moved to a fishing village in the north of Spain nine years ago. Sold the flat in Reading, married a man she met on a walking holiday, and went. Most of us thought she'd be home inside a year. She wasn't. She built a life there, a stone house with lemon trees and a view of the water. I'd seen the photographs. I'd never been. She'd been asking me to come for years. Every Christmas card: "Just come, Helen. You need it." I kept saying next year. You know how that goes. I booked the trip in March. Not because I suddenly had the time. Because I needed to be somewhere that wasn't my own kitchen at eleven o'clock at night, watching my husband fall asleep in his chair with the television talking to no one. Tom is sixty-four. He has type 2 diabetes. He's been on his tablets for eight years. His GP says he's fine. Every six months: bloods taken, a five-minute appointment, and the same sentence, "Everything's looking good, Tom. Keep doing what you're doing." But Tom is not doing good. The words go first. He'll be halfway through a sentence and the word he wants just isn't there. He stops. His hand makes a small circle in the air, as if he can wind the word up out of the floor. "The, you know the thing. The thing you… " And I fill it in for him, the way you learn to, gently, so he doesn't notice you've been waiting. The mornings are the worst. He comes down at half six and sits at the kitchen table and just, stops. Doesn't reach for the kettle, doesn't open the paper. Both hands flat on the table, staring at the middle distance, waiting for his brain to agree to start the day. I watched him from the hall once. Four minutes. Then he
