I spent yesterday taking pictures of Alan, a 68-year-old former head teacher with Alzheimer’s Disease. He is taking part in a project to raise awareness of the stigma faced by people with mental illness. I have lots of photos and audio to plough through and send to my colleagues at Inspired Youth, whose project this is, who will combine them with other material to create a multimedia piece. But Alan left quite an impression on me. He is the first Alzheimer’s sufferer I have met and it was a priviledge to hear his story. A former head teacher whose first love was literature and who can still quote Samuel Beckett and other famous writers, he has sadly been robbed of the ability to read. His decreased spacial-awareness, rambling gait and tendency to break randomly into song leads many people to assume he’s drunk and to tut and comment accordingly. But as he kept telling us: “I get by”.