Melanie Reid

Journalist at The Times

Times journalist. Memoir The World I Fell Out Of. Saltire non-fiction prize 2019. [email protected]

Articles

Sundowning: a calm label for fear and chaos

5 days ago | observer.co.uk | Melanie Reid

As night falls, dementia can wreak more havoc on patients and carers My earliest exposure to dementia, as a six-year-old, seemed like a crime scene: poo smeared on the white walls of the downstairs loo. My mother wasn’t in the house – she was out chasing my grandmother, by then far down the road knocking on neighbours’ doors demanding to know where Margaret was. Poor granny.
Melanie Reid: ‘After I broke my neck my husband looked after me. Now I care for him’

2 weeks ago | observer.co.uk | Melanie Reid

In the first of her new column, journalist Melanie Reid explains how a riding accident changed her life "Never sick or sorry." When I was a pony-mad kid, that’s how small ads described horses for sale: archaic shorthand from a time when the value of animals and people lay in their suitability for work or war. Occasionally, I’ve chewed on that memory. I’ve had time enough.
Address the caregiver crisis

1 month ago | buckscountyherald.com | Melanie Reid

Seniors throughout Bucks County rely on in-home caregivers, people I work with every day, for any number of things, from simply getting out of bed to bathing, eating and keeping their house in order. Similarly, children with complex medical conditions need help in their day to day lives, too. This work is incredibly important, but increasingly, caregivers are leaving the industry because of Pennsylvania’s incredibly low Medicaid reimbursement rate, and I can’t blame them.
Melanie Reid: It’s taken six years to build our home - and we’re still not in

Nov 28, 2024 | thetimes.com | Melanie Reid

I have a theory that if anyone on a limited budget knew how hard building a house was going to be, they’d stick to Lego and dreams. Leave building to the developers and the wealthy. We didn’t know that. Just over six years ago, our dream grew big enough to merit a formal encounter with an architect, laying out our problem. Our 17th-century cottage had become totally unsuitable for our increasing age and disability.
Count your blessings in the fading snowfalls

Nov 24, 2024 | thetimes.com | Melanie Reid

In rural areas, heavy snow is a beautiful but demanding visitor. Effortlessly, it can close you down. You wake to the unmistakable blue gloom blanking the skylights and go straight on to a war footing. How deep is it? Four-by-four or tractor job? How much digging to feed the animals? Will we be able to get into the office? Are the main roads blocked? It used to be a frequent event.
This is my last Spinal Column. Writing it helped me survive

Nov 22, 2024 | thetimes.com | Melanie Reid

The first Spinal Column, nearly 15 years ago, wasn’t a column. It was an opiate-fuelled ramble into a Dictaphone that lay on the pillow beside me in the high-dependency unit. It was two weeks after my accident and I had just come off a ventilator. I couldn’t turn my head — I couldn’t move anything — but I felt a desperate need to explain what had happened and this seemed the only way.
We all need a bit of help from time to time … so does the high street

Nov 17, 2024 | thetimes.com | Melanie Reid

An administrative error, together with a lack of manual dexterity, necessitated a visit to the nearest Vodafone store. I’ve joked in the past about how mobile phone shops exist purely for oldies who can’t manage tech, while everyone under 55 just looks stuff up online. Well, a rather pleasing revelation. The queue consisted of four young people and three easily under 50. “It’s all pretty complicated now,” my lovely assistant, Alex, told me.
Gregor Fisher: ‘I’ve made friends with the idea of death’

Nov 15, 2024 | thetimes.com | Melanie Reid

Gregor Fisher has always excelled at characters who inhabit an area at the edge of reason: challenging us to laugh at things that shouldn’t really be funny, teasing us with the humour in incipient madness. There was, inescapably, Rab C Nesbitt, Glasgow’s profane, drunken street sage. Everyone knew a Rab. And now Fisher is back starring in a top-name BBC1 comedy series, Only Child, as an old curmudgeon, Ken, who struggles to look after himself, his faculties fading. Everyone knows a Ken too.
My idea of a perfect picture of me? There’s no wheelchair in it

Nov 15, 2024 | thetimes.com | Melanie Reid

When we first planned the new house, back when dinosaurs roamed, I felt Dave should have a luxury. It consisted of a walk-in dressing room with a window and fitted wardrobes with sliding doors down one side. Somehow, through all the budget cuts and square metre shrinkage, the dressing room survived. What I didn’t realise, until I recoiled with shock last week on a site visit, was that the doors came with mirrors on the outside of them.
Whether it’s a message in a bottle or crude graffiti, we all want to be remembered

Nov 10, 2024 | thetimes.com | Melanie Reid

One of the quirks of humankind is that even modest people crave a legacy. We want to be remembered. We lived. We achieved. We’d all like a tiny monument to that fact. Hence the lovely story of the message in a bottle found deep in the walls of a Galloway lighthouse, left by the engineers who 132 years ago installed a new lantern. The letter reeks of Victorian pride and professionalism — the men spent five months doing something important, something they felt worthy of recording.