The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen, 83 ¼ Years Old by Hendrik Groen.

83 year old Hendrik Groen lives at a care home in Amsterdam. Here is his 2013 diary.

I got a lot from reading this book, the format is rather good. Remember when people published personal blogs on the web, rather than these very short snippets we now get from Facebook and Twitter? Well, Hendrik’s diary entries are very much like the best of blogs. You have a lovely mix of personal life, current day cultural trends and landmark historical occasions.

This book enables you to enter the very often closed world of life for 80 plus year olds in residential care homes. Although this book is set in Amsterdam, the attitudes, issues and problems are worldwide.

Hendrik’s diary entries are not simple prose but lengthy rants about whatever has got Hendrik’s goat that day. The language used is not simple but very mature and his range of vocabulary is spectacular.

This book brings an intelligent look at the daily life of residents in a care home. It explains what is important to them in their sunset years. I can see parts of this book being used in staff training sessions across a range of industries to explain to workers how the elderly think and understand their world. I found this book very useful and not just in relating to elderly passengers travelling on my National Express coach. My own father is also 83 years old and this month has just moved into a residential care home in Cardiff. This book helped me to see things through my dad’s eyes too. Not only does it give an 83 year old’s take on care homes, other residents, cultural changes and historical events but also the challenges posed to residents who have dementia. Because of the way dementia creeps on, I was blind to my father developing vascular dementia and just thought he was getting old and not bothering to compete for conversation between my mother and my wife. I was concerned how my father would cope with being split away from my mother, put into a care home and accepting his own dementia.

I found this book helpful, informative and reassuring. It allowed me to enter my father’s world and see it from his eyes. When I read this, I thought “that’s my dad!”...

Everyone in here has strong views on the subject of cake crumbs in fish tanks. But ask them what they think of the war in Syria and they’ll stare at you as if you’ve just asked them to explain the theory of relativity. A handful of fish floating belly-up are a thousand times worse than a busload of women and children blown to smithereens in some far-off country.

...I took a lot from this book and found it a pleasure to read. There is a lovely humour that runs through this book that is all deprecating, for example…

So indeed, yesterday I attended ‘Feel Good Fitness’. It was my first time. And also my last. When it was over and the instructor - ‘Call me Tina’ - gushed that I should definitely come again next week, I told her right then and there that once was enough. ‘Oh, and why is that?’ she asked suspiciously. ‘Because with so much female pulchritude about, I can’t concentrate on the exercises properly. I stiffen up.’

… I really liked this book and it was great to enter Hendrik’s world on such an intimate and personal level. Even if you do not have an elderly relative living in a care home, it is great read in the way that reality television fails to capture. It is a very good reading experience that I will vote the top score of 5 stars because it is entertaining, informative and rather witty.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher Penguin for giving me a copy of this book on the understanding that I provide an honest review.