Being a restless geek who occasionally blogs about creating questionable, do-it-yourself gizmos (often deployed outdoors), I'm used to losing track of my memories. Like, all the time. Quite literally. Sometimes I find them under the desk, or melting behind the radiator. But, hopefully, not often in the kids' bowls of Cheerios at breakfast.

...Yet I never expect to lose the actual supposedly non-volatile stuff installed into our heads during our haphazard manufacture. You know, those bits and bytes that power our trails of random thought about work, family, friends... and the true meaning of Love Island. Allows us to approach our everyday challenges; both logically and rationally, but also in a completely arbitrary, preconceived, (extremely) human-like fashion. Ultimately, this is THE single point of failure that defines who we are, what we are relative to the world around us, and the Tweets that we decide to send out at 2 in the morning. All equally important, of course.

That's why the more I think about how our late grandmother and grandaunt spent their last days on this planet, shrouded in the thick mountain fog that is Alzheimer's and dementia, the more I feel saddened. That we could spend our entire lifetime carefully moulding ourselves into who we want to be, choosing our own paths, yet could still depart in a heap of confusion and uncertainty. Disoriented. Lost. And none of it because we chose not to carry a map, listen to advice or forgot to charge our phone.

It so happens that I will be undertaking the Brecon Beacons 10 Peaks Ultramarathon with my friend Neil in September. And since all manners of strides ought to be made at resolving this illness, here's my small contribution to the far grander cause of making progress in combatting this terrifying disease.

...And yes, there will be wholly unnecessary tech involved for which there will be the inevitable write up*. But only once I recover from haunting flashbacks of yet another peak that taunts us from the distance.

Thanks for reading!

*For a limited time only, every donor will get exclusive access to blog content which is actually freely available to anyone with Internet access. Which is probably everyone reading this. Like, right now. So for the purposes of Just Giving Terms and Conditions... no, there's nothing being given away.