A few days ago I was walking through the city, near St Paul’s.

And because I had nowhere else to be, I ended up taking a mid-afternoon detour through Postman’s Park.

I headed to the flower bed in front of all the plaques, parked myself on a bench, and made a conscious effort to just sit and look around.

And more and more I find it is a conscious effort – I hardly ever just sit and do nothing these days. There’s always a way out.

How many collective minutes, hours, days, weeks and months do you think we’ve lost to just absently staring at our phones? I asked my housemate that the other day while we were watching TV – well, half watching, you know how it goes.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to go all “phones are bad, delete your apps, don’t use them” at you – the truth is, I’m not quite sure how I ever navigated London with any success without mine.

My phone tells me the weather, shows me important dog news, lets me communicate with my friends using only the whale emoji, and on those rare occasions when I venture out of my stomping ground and into south London, it tells me how to get home. Plus, Twitter and Instagram remain my favourite way of not talking when I don’t really feel like it, and not making eye contact with people I want to avoid.

Phones have become a shortcut, a fast forward, an excuse to be busy. They’re the somewhere else you have to be without actually moving your feet.

When you live in a big city, phones are pretty much essential. But we also need to give our brains time to stop and drift and think.

Because I’m not sure I really want to find myself patting around for a little screen whenever I pause or have to wait anywhere, or immediately reaching for it whenever I sit down, or creepily cupping it in my pocket wherever I walk.

And the truth is, I’ve got this nagging feeling that I think most of us would like to be doing more with our spare time – myself included – and an equally nagging feeling that phones will probably be why most of us won’t.

So I’m trying to become a bit more conscious and aware of how I’m spending my time, and allow myself to get bored. I want to get to the point where reaching for my phone when I have nothing to do feels weird and ridiculous and odd, instead of the other way around.

I thought about all this as I sat in Postman’s Park, and listened to the passing traffic, sirens and car horns. I sat, and occasionally wrote down ideas, and got restless. My mind drifted and wondered, and my eyes scanned and watched. A few times, patches of flowers round the edge of the bed quivered, and out popped the nose of a tiny mouse.

And in contrast to all the other times I’ve sat down to kill some time and ended up distracting myself, by the time I got up and walked off with this post writing itself in my head, I knew exactly where half an hour could go.

This post originally appeared in my weekly newsletter. Find out more about that badboy here. 

This post originally appeared in my weekly newsletter which is usually about London, or me, or dogs, or all those things at once. Or like this one, something else entirely. You can sign up here.

Last week, my mum took herself into central London.

She was looking for the offices of a magazine she subscribes to; I’m not sure exactly why. But she couldn’t find the building, so she got back on the train and came home, and began calling them instead.

My mum is 67 years old.

She likes shopping, the mountains, going to the snow centre in Hemel Hempstead, getting her hair done, exhibitions at the RA in Green Park, and concerts at the Royal Albert Hall. Every Saturday at 6pm she’ll go for dinner in Prezzo, and a few months ago – to our collective bafflement – she started going to church.

My mum also has Frontotemporal dementia.

Which, if you’re not familiar – and I wasn’t, so why would you be – is the official name for Pick’s Disease; the most common form of dementia affecting young people.

(The one and only upside to dementia, it turns out, is being considered young if you’re under 65).

She was diagnosed two years ago, but we’d been watching the slow deterioration of her capacity to understand, communicate, and behave in what would be considered a socially acceptable way for a while before that.

Dementia’s trump card is its slow progression, which is either a blessing or a curse depending on what stage you’re at. It dawdles along for years removing the names of everyday objects and people, steadily chipping away at empathy, tipping into weird and compulsive behaviour. At times, it shifts into a mode I like to call “wtf, you’re making no sense”.

Essentially, it makes pinpointing the exact moment the person is no longer able to do something a difficult game. And as Pick’s sufferers have little to no awareness that there’s anything seriously wrong, it’s the family who have decide when to allow the person their independence, and when to take it away.

Before mum was diagnosed, I had an idea of what dementia looked like in my head.

It had the withered, expressionless face of an eldery person, a mind that forgot how to find their way home, and a body that fell over. It was also clad in beige.

In reality, mum looks like any other ex-head teacher who’s seven years into retirement. She goes to daily classes at the gym, takes the tube, walks the dog, wears make up – although increasingly dad has to remind her to put it on – and colour co-ordinates her clothes (usually either purple, pink, red or blue).

She presents as a normal 60-something, but after a couple of minutes of one-way conversation, you’ll realise something’s not quite right.

If you know what’s wrong, you’ll understand and roll with it.

If you don’t, you’ll probably do what the staff at the woman’s magazine did, which is start to worry and call 101 to have the police do a check.

Despite affecting a frankly ridiculous amount of people worldwide, dementia isn’t really talked about that much. Least of all by the family and friends going through it, and rarely by the sufferers themselves – who aren’t always elderly, frail, and forgetting their way.

September 21st was World Alzheimer’s Day, and September is World Alzheimer’s Month, which sets out to raise awareness of the different types of dementia in all the forms it takes. And that’s why I’m going slightly off topic today and writing this – because the more people who are aware that there are people like my mum around the world, and in this city, the better.

Because she’ll undoubtedly continue taking herself up to London on errands she can’t explain and we don’t understand. And we’ll continue to let her, as long as it’s safe.

You can donate money to the Alzheimer’s Society here.