Sitting with my mum in her nursing home, I gripped her hand as I told her my plans.
‘I’m going to be doing 50 challenges for my 50th birthday,’ I said, even though I knew she didn’t quite understand. With my dad passing away from Parkinson’s and dementia in December 2017, aged 75, it was heartbreaking to see my mum now ill with vascular dementia and Alzheimer’s. It didn’t seem fair that our family was being blighted by this cruel disease again.
That’s why I’d come up with the idea for my birthday. ‘Life is too short,’ I thought. I didn’t want to let life pass me by,
