How Many Camels are there in Holland? by Phyillida Law – review

Phyllida Law has a delightfully natural style, a gift for anecdote and the knack of seeing the funny side of pretty much everything.  She’s a good actor: she’s obviously a fine cook, too, if the recipes in How Many Camels Are There in Holland? Dementia, Ma and Me (Fourth Estate, £12.99) are anything to go by. Also included are a series of her lovely watercolour sketches, of Tuscan villas, Christmas stockings, her mother asleep. Is there nothing the woman can’t do?

Someone so accomplished could write a book about their weekly trip to the supermarket and make it highly amusing. A volume about her mother’s decline into dementia is hardly a more promising proposition, yet this is a funny, brave and heartening volume.

Concealed within its whimsy is much sadness and also an important truth: that the people we love can still be very fully themselves, even when memory and recognition and language fail.