I ’m putting my family on notice: when I start dwindling into dementia I want them to put me into “Dementiaville”, the experimental village complete with supermarket, hairdresser, pub and theatre in the Netherlands.

Trained staff and carers are disguised as waitresses, hairdressers, barmen and barmaids, friends and extended family members. Not for me those soulless hospital wards where 15 to 20 people sit motionless and expressionless watching TV, the monotony only relieved by meals and medication.

That’s not living. It’s a kind of dying. And we’re committing almost a million people with dementia a year to this living death. What surprises me is that as a medical profession, as a government and as a society, we stand by and allow this horrible state of affairs to continue.

Dementiaville, or Hogewey, as it’s actually called, was started 20 years ago a short distance from Amsterdam by a woman and five other founder members who were determined to give patients with dementia a decent life.