Peter Berry and Deb Bunt met by chance – through the spin of the wheel one might say – in Sax Velo, a cycling shop in Suffolk in 2018. Deb (together with husband Martin) had recently retired and moved to the market town of Saxmundham. Peter, a Suffolk man through and through, took over his father’s timber business; for him the trees and woods of his county are as familiar as old friends and family. Peter is also a keen cyclist and, aged just 50, he was diagnosed with dementia.
Deb knew no one in her new neighbourhood. And very little about dementia, other than holding the common and mistaken belief that it only came with old age, liver spots and false teeth. Peter, slim, fit, and living with Alzheimer’s when she meets him, not only blows apart this myth but offers to show her some local cycling routes. And so an unlikely friendship begins.
Like all the best friendships it’s mutually reciprocal, hugely rewarding for both, and based on trust. It’s been captured in a remarkable book, brilliantly entitled Slow Puncture. It tells of their year together and in doing so, lays bare Peter Berry’s tumultuous Alzheimer’s journey in his words. So they are co-authors but it is Deb Bunt who has written it. Peter simply can’t. What’s more he will never read it. He will never, in fact, read his own story.
The more the pair cycle together over the months, the more the trust builds between them and the more Deb learns, not just about Peter and his dementia monster, his ways of coping and his hidden demons, but about herself.
Peter shows her the joys to be found in living in the moment and of celebrating the journey for what it is even if you lose your way and end up, as it were, in Orford instead of Framlingham. “It is perhaps a cruel paradox that Peter’s dementia, which is chipping away at his world and shrinking it, has created a whole new world for me,” Deb says.
While, in his inimitable way, Peter tells her that while the condition’s taken so much from him – his income, his self-esteem, his future, he has taken a lot from it. “I live every day; I enjoy every day even if I might forget it moments later. They say you only live once, but that’s rubbish: you only die once. You live every day. And that’s what I fully intend to do”.
Slow Puncture: Living Well With Dementia by Peter Berry and Deb Bunt is available from Amazon. Advice and support for people living with early onset dementia and can be found at www.youngdementiauk.org