Terry Prone: It’s no mystery that the little grey cells need to be exercised regularly

British mystery author Agatha Christie autographing French editions of her books, circa 1950.

A new word, today, for readers to consider.

Dementiachondria. A freshly invented noun, describing a condition whereby the sufferer attributes their every ailment to oncoming undiagnosed dementia consequent upon age. Just as normal bog standard hypochondria doesn’t exclude the possibility of the owner actually being sick, indeed, very sick, dementiachondria does not mean that you’re not really halfway down the slippery slope. It just means you live in a welter of potential symptoms and possible significances.

You can’t bring your symptoms to the GP, because you wouldn’t remember them (Boom, Boom)! But, of course, this is the point where Helpful Offspring say, “Why don’t you make a list and bring it with you next time you go to the local health clinic?” To which the answers are “Shag off, you think I haven’t already thought of so bleeding obvious an option?” and “Helpful Offspring, lemme tell you something. You bring a list on paper to a doctor, optician or dentist and you know what? They hate it and you on sight. Bringing a list to a medic is the paper equivalent of saying ‘I’m the kind of person who…’ It establishes you as a bore to be avoided at all costs.” 

I should make it clear, here, that I don’t have Helpful Offspring. The one son related to me is helpful but without the capital letters denotative of patronising lessons in living for aging parents. This is no end merciful, because beyond number, now, are the cases I have come across in older acquaintances and friends where the love of their middle-aged children is expressed in long-suffering sighs, dutiful visits accompanied by grandchildren, those visits embellished with the weird rhetoric of in-law control freakery — “Now, Alicia, we don’t run around Grandad when he’s walking, do we?” — and hints that a smaller home for Granny or even going into a home is worth considering.

The awful thing about Helpful Offspring is that when their parent exerts their basic human right not to be made feel like a gorilla in the zoo, presenting its “I’m up for it” bright red bottom to visitors, when their parent snaps “I know that” in response to something they maybe didn’t know, that assertiveness, in and of itself, gets interpreted by Helpful Offspring as evidence of parental down-hilling. 

They share it with other Helpful Offspring and shrug in the good-hearted way indicative of the fell certainty that, sooner or later… Meanwhile, their parent is simultaneously infuriated by the kindly superiority and convinced, the third time they go into a room and ask it what the hell they’re looking for, that unwilling incarceration may come for them sooner, rather than later. 

Dread duality

That’s the dread duality of dementiachondria: denial of the import of any symptom coupled with rabbit-in-headlights conviction that said symptom is prophetic in the Cassandra sense. Then the dementiachondriac wonders if the pain in the ass prophet from Greek mythology was Cassandra or someone else. And then goes down the rabbit hole of checking if it was Greek or Roman mythology, while being secretly pleased to be on point with rabbit holes.

Dementiachondria means that everything is read through a warped lens. So, while the new biography of detective story writer Agatha Christie will be read by people of all ages, for many younger readers the riveting bit will be the story of her disappearing from her home and marriage with “memory loss” in her late 20s. Dementiachondriacs, on the other hand, will delightedly concentrate on her continued productivity into her 80s. Until they hit this bit.

“ Elephants Can Remember (1972) was the last outing for Agatha’s Mrs Ariadne Oliver. The very title suggests the subject of memory was weighing upon its 81 year old author’s mind. Language researchers at the University of Toronto have calculated that the novel is 31% less rich in vocabulary than Destination Unknown, written when she was 63. And analysis by the same team also discovered that only 0.27% of Agatha’s youthful work The Mysterious Affair at Styles is made-up of ‘indefinite’ words like ‘thing,’ ‘something’ and ‘anything,’ whereas in Postern of Fate, written when she was 83, the percentage rises to 1.23%. Ian Lancashire, one of the authors of the study, points out that Elephants Can Remember may also be read as a portrait of the declining mental powers of Mrs Oliver, who forgets things she ought to have known and who has to call in Hercule Poirot for help.”

The dementiachondriac reads that last sentence hoping Christie was so clever that she chose to diminish her vocabulary in the book to deliberately underline the plight of Mrs Ariadne Oliver.

But no. It is clear the vocabulary diminution is wider than the sections devoted to that character; Christie simply had fewer words available to her. The fact that this has been identified as long as 25 years ago in the work of Iris Murdoch, who did lose everything (including her privacy, courtesy of her deeply repellent late husband, John Bayley) to Alzheimers, fills the dementiachondriac with fear. And with the determination to use “10-dollar words” wherever possible. “10-dollar words” being what Herman Wouk dubbed the linguistic “door stoppers”; long, rare and multi-syllabic verbiage deployed in the counter-productive attempt to appear sophisticated and literary. Or to fend off dementia. The big drawback attached to reading the post-mortem research into Christie’s cognitive deterioration is that, while it’s intriguing to note the increase in her use of what are called “indefinite words” as she aged, to be intriguing is not the same as being useful.

Sometimes it’s the opposite, particularly if you earn your living as a writer. Most hacks who are older than 40 write columns or reports and then go through the draft text with voices yelling in the back of our heads, those voices belonging to the editors/producers who trained us.

Following their instructions, always shot through with rage, we excise exclamation marks, try to remove what Macauley called “the big, grey words of the lexicon”: and stop the plural mating with the singular, which is grammatical miscegenation and don’t tell me that’s a big grey word — find me another way of conveying that meaning.

 In addition to the puritanical editorial voices in our heads, because of dementiachondria, we also have to look out for indefinite words and start spraying our manuscript with synonyms.

As soon as we press “send”, we have to go do ten minutes on the stepper, because sitting at a computer is one of the things pre-disposing one to a failing brain. While going up and down on it, we worry that auto-correct, which is like a moustache-twirling villain in an old melodrama, awaiting its moment to introduce evil into our already fraught lives, will change a word or name that has been written so that it becomes incomprehensible, ridiculous or libelous.

Dementiachondria, like its step-parent, hypochondria, is pointless hard work.

Agatha Christie by Lucy Worsley, Hodder&Stoughton 2022