Category: Dementia

Cupcake Day and Launch of Memory Box Appeal

Cupcake Day

Cupcake Day is a national fundraising event for the Alzheimer’s Society. To find out more, or to host your own event, please click here: Cupcake Day

The In Our Day project will be hosting our own Cupcake Day at Walkley Library, between 10.30am and 12.30pm. Please contact us if you are interested in volunteering on the day or doing some baking!

This will be a dementia-friendly event, with everyone welcome to eat, drink a cup of tea and have a chat, as well as to explore the library.

Please note that the library is not yet wheelchair accessible. Currently, access is via steps at the front of the library, or a a door around the back with a narrow ramp. Bus routes 95, 52a and 31 pass close to the library.

Walkley Library Memory Box

At the cupcake day, we will be launching our Walkley Library Memory Box appeal, to collect resources for dementia-friendly activities at the library for the In Our Day project, and in the future.

You will also be able to write down your memories associated with the object on luggage labels as well as being able to write longer pieces about your memories of Walkley.

Objects suitable for donation would be should be fairly small and not fragile or dangerous. A good object would be something that holds a memory for you, such as:

  • Household items such as an old flat iron, a wooden spoon or a kitchen gadget.
  • Crafted items, knitting patterns, craft materials.
  • Items of clothing, accessories.
  • Holiday memories e.g. sunglasses, an old film camera, postcards and souvenirs.
  • Photographs of local places, old football programmes, theatre programmes.
  • Toys from bygone eras, items to do with childhood.

Please get in touch if you have any questions or anything that you would like to contribute towards the event. We look forward to hearing from you.

Cupcake day 15th June 2019 poster

Hello from the In Our Day Project!

Welcome to the In Our Day Project

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Hello! This is the first blog post for the In Our Day project. At the moment, we are just starting to recruit volunteers and find organisations and individuals to take part in it. So far, I’ve talked to the Alzheimer’s Society in Sheffield, and they have really helped us to get on our way!

Many thanks to Sheffield City Council for the Dementia Innovation Fund grant. There are projects taking place across the city in 2019, and they all aim to improve the lives of people with dementia through multi-generational activities, bringing together people of different ages to enjoy different activities such as arts, crafts, music or reminiscing and remembering together.

With Walkley Library as our base, the In Our Day project will work with local young people, who may be college or university students, or who may have an interest in all things vintage and retro. The volunteers will be trained as as dementia-friendly oral history volunteers.

Working with care homes, local doctors’ surgeries and charities, these volunteers will interview older people with dementia and their carers about their experiences of being young, in a series of workshops and one-to-one sessions. This will result in a book, social media presence and website, as well as intergenerational social events, which will become the basis of an ongoing, community-based resource for reminiscence and oral history in Sheffield, based at Walkley Carnegie Library.

As the project grows, this website and the social media for the project will grow, with pictures, media and pieces of writing. This is just the very start of it!

About me

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I’m Anne Grange, and I’m the project co-ordinator. I live in Walkley and have been a volunteer at Walkley Library for over four years, organising author events and spoken word sessions, among many other things. I’m a writer, with published two novels that you can find more about here.

From 2013-2017, I worked in older people’s mental health wards in Derbyshire, running weekly reminiscence and poetry sessions. These sessions also involved crafts, baking, music, and lots of joy and laughter.

Many of the poems and pieces of writing by the patients across Derbyshire were captured in a poetry book project called Dales Tales.

I’ll leave you with a taster of one of the poems that was written during the project, inspired by the patients’s reminiscences of night’s out in Ilkeston! Hopefully, the In Our Day project will inspire many more evocative pieces of writing.

The Saturday Night Hop

Every Saturday night
At t’top of the Co-op in Ilkeston
Or the Astoria in Nottingham

The boys met the girls in there,
So they didn’t have to pay for them.
Got drunk first on pints of bitter
In the Warren. Lots of pubs,
But they all shut at ten.

They’d swagger into the dancehall
Full of Dutch courage.
Hair slicked back.
Blue eyes, black hair:
Gift of the gab.
String ties, drainpipe trousers
Purple drape jackets.
The girls loved it.

They were in skirts with petticoats
Lipstick applied carefully at a friend’s house.
Ready to jive and rock ‘n’ roll.
Lined up to see who’d get picked first.
Twirling around the dancefloor,
Sweet-talk and cheap scent.

All over by eleven –
Running for the last bus home,
Fish and chips,
Walking the best girl home.
She’d have to wipe that make-up off
Before her dad saw her.