Kathryn Allix

I'm taking on Fans vs Dementia for Dad - an 18 mile Walk to Remember - with my friend Elaine on Sunday 11th Oct 2026!

When mum first told me that dad had been diagnosed with vascular dementia in May 2022 I was partly relieved that it wasn’t Alzheimer’s as I always assumed that would have been the worse diagnosis.

However, although Alzheimer’s is the most common form of dementia, there are other types including vascular (caused by reduced blood flow to the brain) which is the 2^nd most common and, as we were to discover, no less heartbreaking.

We were told that medication wasn’t an option – side effects – and delays due to covid meant that there was a 1-2 year wait for courses for cognitive stimulation! So a 15min call from the doctor changed all of our lives and there was apparently nothing we could do to help other than to love and support dad for the remainder of his life.

He knew there was something wrong in the early days – he started to stutter (something he’d never done previously), get confused more easily and would forget what he was saying. He would point to his head when he got frustrated and say, ‘I’ve got this thing’!

It of course got progressively worse and suffice to say there’s a lot more to it than your loved one forgetting who you are (as distressing as that is). Everything you knew how to do, without ever really knowing how you knew to do it, just disappears from the memory. It’s referred to as the Long Goodbye or Anticipatory Grief due to the sorrow and sense of loss you feel for a loved one before they pass away, as you slowly lose the person they used to be yet, physically, they’re still here.

We occasionally got glimpses of the dad we knew – a small fist pump when I told him Arsenal won but then moments later, he’d gone again. It’s like the brain clicked for a split second and you had to grab that moment before it got snatched away.

Dad sadly passed away on 24^th March 2025. It was heartbreaking to watch him suffer as he did, and so when I saw that Dementia UK had a Fans v Dementia fundraising scheme it seemed the perfect way to raise money for such a worthwhile cause as Dad was a huge Arsenal fan, as am I. He even took me to my first Arsenal match at Highbury on my 18^th birthday!

I will thus be walking from my hometown of Sidcup in Kent to the Emirates football stadium, Arsenal’s home ground, in North London via their original ‘home’ of Woolwich (Arsenal) which will be ~18 miles in total. My good friend, Elaine, has kindly agreed to join me on this 'Walk to Remember' which I am immensely grateful for. 

The statistics around dementia are truly scary - one in three people born in the UK will develop dementia in their lifetime, one in 11 people over the age of 65 have dementia and around one million people currently live with the condition. During the course of a 90 minutes football match, 30 people in the UK will develop dementia.

I will always remember dad as he was before dementia took hold – our shared love of sport, teaching me to swim & cycle, driving me around Kent to play hockey, his dry sense of humour, strong family values, helping to decipher DIY furniture instructions, and his invaluable advice on everything from finances to drafting letters to life itself. I was (am!) immensely proud of dad (Peter Allix to others) - he had two degrees and, after retiring from a successful career in the Civil Service, volunteered at the Citizens Advice Bureau for years helping others! I miss him every day...

Any kind donation that you can offer will help Dementia UK to provide life-changing support for other families affected by dementia. 

£21 could pay for the telephone costs of four families calling our free Helpline whenever they need support.

£33 could fund an hour with a dementia specialist Admiral Nurse, helping a family with practical solutions and emotional support.

Early signs of vascular dementia 

• Concentration problems 
• Difficulty with planning & decision-making
• Slowed thought process
• Changes in mood, behaviour & personality
• Difficulties with understanding
• Short-term memory problems
• If someone develops symptoms of dementia after a stroke, they may also have speech or vision problems   

Thank you for reading and for your support x