Let’s just have a nice cup of tea: The story of a community working together to raise awareness about dementia and funding for much-needed support services…. By Cass Alexander Alzheimers New Zealand In the midst of a hectic conference, where I was seen with a mobile phone in each ear, organising television crews and frantically answering journalists’ questions about a new dementia drug subsidy, I was approached by the calm-looking president of Alzheimers Marlborough. Diane Johnson grabbed me, while I grabbed an on-the-run muffin and a cup of coffee and said, “Cass, we’ve got something big we think would do wonders for publicity during Awareness and Appeal Week. Something really big.” She promised to fly me across the Cook Straight (the stretch of the Pacific Ocean which divides New Zealand’s North and South islands) to tell me more about this ‘something big,’ at a later date. I think I caught her say something about ‘tea caddies’. In my already over-active mind was an image of Tiger Woods pushing a whole lot of trays with tea cups and saucers. But then when I told someone about Diane’s proposal a few days later, I was informed a tea caddy looked something like this: And that’s when I realised I’d seen them all over the place, in opportunity (thrift) shops, at my grandmother’s house, even lurking at the back of the cupboards at home as dusty relics from previous tenants. When I cleared my desk at work and called Diane, she informed me a local chap in Blenheim, Marlborough (the beautiful wine country at the top of New Zealand’s South Island), by the name of Graham Brooks had around 2,000 tea caddies stored in boxes in his chicken coop. “Graham thinks it might be the largest collection in the world,” Diane told me. He had trawled through the online community of tea caddy collectors (!) and surmised his collection might just top them all. Graham had been collecting for 35 years, after his mother-in-law gave him a caddy for Christmas and then another for his birthday. A friend visited his house and said, “you’ve got a great collection of caddies there” and suddenly, those few gifts plus the few more Graham had collected amounted to a collection and from there, Graham made the conscious decision to be a caddy collector. He brought caddies back from Australia, Europe, America, even Jamaica. At his house (where he also has collections of Girls Annuals, cigarette cases and Charles Dickens original editions), Graham told me a story about working for a mate in Brisbane, Australia, fixing an air conditioning unit in a mall, where he discovered a shop full of caddies – “There were about 500 or 600 of them, I reckon. I purchased the big ones and got out quick,” he said. Later, he discovered the tea caddy shop had burnt down. Traditionally, local Alzheimers New Zealand organisations throughout the country host a campaign called “Cuppa for a Cause” as part of Awareness and Appeal Week

Original Source of Community Bands Together in the Fight Against Alzheimer’s Dementia