It started with the odd thing slipping his mind. A name, or a place he had been on his regular morning runs. And a laugh about it with the family, as if trying to mask their worry, and the potential seriousness of the situation.
But gradually, Stuart Taylor, the former St Mirren, Airdrie and Falkirk midfielder, who is now assistant manager of Dundee, began to notice that his dad, Alex, was forgetting the little details more and more.
“With my dad, for years, it was a thing in our house, where he would go ‘Thingmy’, you know what I mean?” Taylor said.
“He’d forget something, and he would always say Thingmy. It’s not a word you’ll find in the dictionary, but my dad would always say that he met Thingmy, or he was at Thingmy’s for a cup of tea, and we would know what he was talking about.
“But then it got to the stage where Thingmy was backed up by another Thingmy. And we would be saying to him ‘Dad, we’ve no idea what you’re talking about’.
“Gradually it all fell into place just why he had been forgetting so many things, and you start to look a bit closer, and you realise that something’s not right.”
Sadly for the Taylor family, it would transpire that Alex was suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. What followed was a hugely testing time for them all, not least for his wife, Margaret.
“My brother used to phone down and say that it was pretty bad,” he said.
“I would bring them down as much as they could come down really.
“There was actually one time they came down to Birmingham and I was working and my wife had something on with my son. So, my mum had taken my two daughters into the town centre with my dad.
“The kids wanted to go to the toilet, but my dad wanted to go and see something. So, my dad went one way, and my mum went the other. She couldn't leave the kids because they were so young.
“She phoned me right away and I said I'll get out of work, so I basically came away from the training ground and by then my dad had gone.
“We went to the police station. It was quite scary as to how things can happen that quickly. But the police were brilliant. They got all the security tapes, and you saw him standing there at the train station.
“It was really disappointing from our side of it that you saw the train driver get really impatient with him. You could see my dad was confused. You could clearly see he was pointing in different directions and the train driver just sort of pointed over his shoulder and went, ‘in you go’.
“So, my dad went on the train and the police blue lighted it all the way into Birmingham. They said to the guy, where's that train going to? He said, it's Birmingham New Street. So they blue lighted there too, but the train had already gone to the next stop, so again, they checked there and he was nowhere to be seen.
“He had got off a couple of stops after he had got on and it was a mess. But what they did then was they put it on Facebook, and it was the power of Facebook that found him. The policeman phoned us back 20 minutes later and said they had found dad.
“A woman looked out her front door and saw a strange guy looking quite confused, walking about around a car. The car was the same colour and the same type of car as my mum's.
“He had got off at the train station, walked down the street, saw the car, looked at the car and said, that's my car. Just total chance.
“That was my first experience of going, ‘right, okay, mum, this is a whole other thing’. I just had to see it to understand what it was like every day.
“That’s when I noticed, my mum really does need respite. You know, it's more help for my mum, really.
“So yeah, there were tough moments.”
Amid the seemingly constant darkness of that period though, there was the odd chink of light, and a glimpse of the old Alex.
“We were away from home on Boxing Day one year and Paul gave us Christmas Eve and Christmas morning off,” Taylor said.
“So, I travelled up the road to see the family and then was going back down for training at 6pm on Christmas Day.
“I sat with my dad for an hour, and he hadn’t said a word, not a single word, and then it was time for me to go.
“I said ‘right dad, that’s me, I need to get back down for training’, and he said as clear as day, ‘that you away already? That was quick.’ “I just thought, are you winding me up? Then he gave me a little smile just to let me know that he was still in there.
“I said this to my mum, you felt really lucky to be there at those moments when he did come through.”
Taylor could not be there all the time, though, and the source of the vital respite that his mum Margaret received during that awful period brings us to the reason why he is, bravely, speaking to me about all of this in the first place.
Dementia charity Alzheimer Scotland were on hand to ease the pressure on the family, and go some way at least to easing the mind of Taylor, who is eternally grateful for the support they provided. Now, he wants to repay them.
Taylor has launched ‘Shooting Stars’, a football match in aid of the charity that has been dubbed Scotland’s answer to Soccer Aid, as he looks to not only raise critical funds for Alzheimer Scotland, but also raise awareness of the services they provide. Not just for those suffering from the disease, but for their families.
They include former footballing greats like Allan McGregor, Frank McAvennie, James McFadden, Steve Archibald and Stephen Hunt, as well as celebrities like Still Game’s Sanjeev Kohli and boxer Martin Bakole, who fights Joseph Parker in Riyadh this evening.
Organising such an occasion, and giving a little back, is he feels, the least he can do.
“Because I was living down south at the time when my dad was ill, we reached out to them for my mum to get a little bit of respite,” he explained.
“They sent someone out to take him for walks and stuff like that, and I don't know if people know that facility is there.
“What was a big help for my mum and my dad at the time was to get into the little meetings that they have, little coffee shops.
“My mum still goes to them, and she thinks, well, if I stop going, it's one person less, and what would happen if everyone stopped going when a loved one had passed away, well they wouldn't have these meetings. So, I need to keep going to keep that alive for other people that will need it.
“My dad used to go to it, and they used to say, right, give us a song Alex, and he'd sing them a song, and afterwards he’d say, ‘that wee party was great, can we go back again?’
“So, it's something totally different, which is great, and there are these support mechanisms out there, but whether everybody knows about it or not, I guess that's just trying to get that message out as well.
“The thing with the game is that the players are not being paid for it. So many of them that I've spoken to wanted to be involved in it because their dad, their granddad, their auntie, their mum, whatever the case may be, somebody's been affected by it along the way. For a lot of them, it's a personal experience.
“Yes, it's about awareness. Yes, it's going to raise a bit of money. But it's about people giving back. That's the reason why I'm doing it, because it's giving back.
“And when you hear people that have been affected by it, you're like, well, I know how you feel.”
Tragically, as Taylor alludes to, his dad eventually passed away in 2021. Like many of those left behind when a loved one has passed on after suffering from such an affliction, he was left wrestling with his grief, but also a sense of relief that his dad was no longer suffering.
He has chosen to channel that in a constructive way, and hopes that this game and a charity dinner running alongside it will now become an annual event.
“You do lose them twice, you know?” he said.
“You lose them when, obviously, they lose their memory, and then my dad got to a stage where he didn't speak.
“There was a point where he would be talking in riddles. Saying things like ’36, 40, window’. And you’d be thinking, ‘what?’ Then we got to the stage where his speech went, and then he went too. And both of those moments were obviously tough.
“I must admit, and it sounds terrible, but there was a sense of relief.
“He was in a home in Milton of Campsie called Lillyburn, in the Kintyre Unit, and they were absolutely fantastic. The people there were brilliant, and we were very grateful for that.
“But every time you heard an ambulance going by at the top of the road you were thinking that it was for dad. You would be constantly worried about how he his night had gone, had he been anxious, was he ok?
“That then all goes, and it is horrible because you’ve lost him, but he was going through a horrendous situation.
“Now, I hope that something good can come out of what was a terrible time, and that we can not only help the charity, but let people out there who are going through something similar know that they are not alone.”
* To find out more about the charity match and book tickets, please visit www.alzscot.org/shootingstars. Tickets are priced at just £5 for adults, and it is free entry for under-18s.
