The only treatment really available today for Alzheimer's is patience and kindness.

There is no cure for the disease, the most common cause of dementia which is taking its relentless toll across the world.

From my own experience, I know how hard it is to watch someone close being taken by dementia, their own frustration as memories fade and to see how it affects their families.

It is also, in its own strange way, lovely how it also makes you look a little more thoughtfully and gently at life in the present and learn to take such pleasure while you can of being with the ones you love.

So I shall join the bike ride from London to the coastal town of Brighton to raise money for the Alzheimer's Society to help find better treatment and, one day hopefully, a cure for the fatal disease.

I have been practising on my bicycle daily to get on better terms with muscles and joints, mindful that the distance to Brighton is not far off one mile to each of my 71 years.