We explored carers experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic in England to identify long-term impacts and implications, and to suggest future support for caregivers.
Data were collected during COVID-19 rapid response studies (IDEAL-CDI; INCLUDE) from carers participating in a British longitudinal cohort study (IDEAL). Semi-structured interview data were compared to their accounts from previous interviews conducted during the first 18 months of the pandemic.
There was indication of some return to pre-pandemic lifestyles but without appropriate support carers risked reaching crisis point. Evidence points to a need for assessment and management of support needs to ensure well-being and sustainable dementia caregiving.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: People with dementia have been affected in unique ways during the COVID-19 pandemic. It is not known whether the impact of the pandemic has changed with time or with the changes in social restrictions. This study explored how experiences of coping with the effects of the pandemic in the UK changed over time. RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODS: We conducted semi-structured interviews with people with dementia living in the community in England and Wales who had taken part in a qualitative interview at an earlier stage of the pandemic. We applied framework analysis to identify themes and compared these with interviewees' previous accounts. FINDINGS: Nine people aged between 51 and 89 years were interviewed; four were female and five had early onset dementia. We identified three themes: 1. Navigating a changing world: Living with coronavirus; 2. A 'downward spiral': Managing advancing dementia; and 3. Availability, accessibility, and suitability of support. Findings reflect participants' ongoing caution about re-emerging from social restrictions to resume valued activities, and how this led to coping behaviours to minimise the impact on wellbeing in the absence of formal support and services. DISCUSSION AND IMPLICATIONS: Despite easing of restrictions across the UK, the negative impact of the coronavirus pandemic on people with dementia continues. Whilst individuals and services have adapted to some of the challenges, there is now an opportunity to rebuild support networks and services to ensure people with dementia are suitably advised, supported and socially engaged to allow them to live as well as possible.

This article considers the theme of crisis throughout Ishiguro's output, to emphasise the central tensions between different binaries: the collective and the individual, the commonplace and the unique, the sensational and the (too) easily overlooked. Continuing the scholarly interest in the importance of memory to Ishiguro's narratives, the argument takes three themes: mnemonic crises and the role of memory in times of crisis; crises of time, in which an individual's ‘generation’ sits uncomfortably with changing or changed circumstances; and how crisis might be artificially calmed through euphemism. The first two themes draw on the work of memory studies in a cultural or societal sense, the latter considers Ishiguro's euphemsims in the context of how language processing can overwrite memory. In attending to Ishiguro's quietness, I focus on readerly complicity, since it is the cognitive work of the reader which reveals the full extent of a given crisis.

This article foregrounds representations of ageing and memory within Kazuo Ishiguro's novels, particularly Never Let Me Go (2005) and, the less critically considered, the Buried Giant (2015). While criticism and reviews touch upon themes of ageing, loneliness, and loss of bodily function, scholars are yet to reveal either the centrality of this to Ishiguro's work or how this might speak to real-life questions surrounding ageing. Few readers of Never Let Me Go realise that in writing it Ishiguro's guiding question was 'how can I get young people to go through the experience of old people'? the arguments here seek to restore such authorly intentions to prominence. Ishiguro is more interested in socio-cultural meanings of ageing than biologically impoverished memories: this article examines the shifting relationships Ishiguro presents between memory and age as regards what happens to the ways in which memories are valued, and how people might be valuable (or not) for their memories. Interdisciplinary with age studies and social gerontology, this article demonstrates how Ishiguro both contributes to, and contends with, socially constructed concepts of ageing. In refocusing Ishiguro criticism onto reminiscence rather than nostalgia, this article aims to put ageing firmly on the agenda of future research.

This article reads Thomas Hardy's many musical instrument poems as the meeting point for the concerns of several critical fields: material culture, memory studies and the emerging interdisciplinary field of musical haptics. Close readings illuminate not only their relevance to such enquiries, but also how Hardy's manipulation of poetic form engenders a tactile musicality or 'poetics of touch' (as Marion Thain puts it). This article focuses on the aspects of these poems which have undergone least exploration: the depiction of the bodily effort involved in music-playing. While some of the poems are critical favourites ('Old Furniture') many of those studied here are routinely overlooked. A mnemonically-minded poet, Hardy wrote about the memories objects hold and the memories that may be mediated through them. For Hardy, the history of objects is inseparable from that of their now-dead owners: person and thing are tied together in memory. This is in part due to an object's inherent tangibility, and musical instruments are particularly tactile objects, benefiting from the further mnemonic of music itself. The core of the article considers Hardy's late poem 'Haunting Fingers: a Phantasy in a Museum of Musical Instruments', which hears instruments speak out their memories of being touched, and through memory feel 'old muscles travel/Over their tense contours'. Revisions to the manuscript show Hardy removing 'death' and privileging instead the immediacy of remembered touch. Paying attention to the reading and note-Taking Hardy did within nineteenth-century science, this article traces Hardy's imaginative explorations of the processes involved in playing musical instruments back to discoveries about the workings of the unconscious. Saleeby, James, Maudesley and Bastian informed Hardy's knowledge of the science behind music-playing, while musical haptics helps this study unpack why Hardy attends to the interactions which take place at the point of mechanical contact: finger to key, and to string.

This article considers how Ishiguro's 2015 novel about mass forgetting in post-Arthurian Britain adds to debates about what it means to be a human living within a society. There are four areas of enquiry linked by their emphasis on the interdependence of remembering and forgetting: ideas of memory in nationhood; the depiction of the British landscape; the cognitive process of recognition; and the emotional aspects of remembering. Interdisciplinary in scope, this article uses evidence from psychological studies of memory alongside detailed close readings of the text, allowing a more precise analysis of the role of the narrator and the effect of Ishiguro's text on the reader. By keeping his previous corpus in view throughout, it evaluates Ishiguro's continued use of memory and nationality as themes, while demonstrating the new departures offered by the conjunction of an ancient setting and a contemporary reading audience. One of the first sustained critical efforts on the Buried Giant, this article puts the novel firmly on the agenda of literary, cultural and memory studies respectively.