The Extraordinary Life of a Somerset Care Home Family Member and the Power of Identity

When someone moves into a care home, they bring decades of memories, relationships, habits, pride, humour, and routines, all the things that make them themselves. A bedroom should reflect who they are, not just be where someone sleeps. Photographs on the wall, familiar objects on a shelf, small details chosen with care offer a sense of the life they’ve lived, the interests they hold close, and the conversations that might begin there.

For someone living with Alzheimer’s, like Paul who was diagnosed in February 2021, this matters. As the condition progresses, a person’s ability to communicate, to say what brings them comfort or what feels familiar, gradually fades. The people around them need to know this information. That knowledge has to be built in from the start, held by the team, and visible in the room.

 

Story of Adventure, Cricket and Home

 

Paul Graham has ridden a penny farthing from Delhi to the foothills of the Himalayas, had a private audience with the Dalai Lama, cycled into the pedestrianised heart of Venice without a second thought, and raised over £100,000 for charity along the way. He has been a cricket club member for 61 years and his love story began with a secret bottle of wine and a handwritten letter sent from Australia.

 

In his room at Catherine House Care Home in Frome, you see a metal penny farthing on the wall, photographs from a life lived across two hemispheres and a cricket book on the side table that he still looks at every day. But to understand why those things matter, you need to know the story behind them.

 

Born into War, A Life Already in Motion

 

Born on 27 December 1942 in Hindhead, Surrey, allegedly under a table, as family legend has it, he arrived into a world at war. Paul holds both a UK and Australian passport and spent most of his life making good use of both.

 

At 18 he threw himself into the wine trade, completing apprenticeships in Bordeaux, Germany, and Southern Spain before taking a “ten-pound Pom” passage to Australia, landing a job with Brown Brothers wine company, which at the time bore the name Brown Brothers and Graham, his own family name!

 

A year later when his father fell ill, Paul was asked to return home by his mother.  His father was adamant that he should stay and make a life for himself in Australia but, already in Durban, South Africa, he continued homewards to London. It was the first of many journeys shaped by the people waiting at the other end.

 

Back in England, he spent 20 years in the wine trade before, at 40, reinventing himself.  He qualified as a solicitor, funding his studies by working on a North Sea oil rig. In his downtime on the rig, he wrote letters home for colleagues who struggled with literacy. Even at the edges of the North Sea, Paul was finding ways to be useful to the people around him.

 

Then came the penny farthing, and everything changed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dancing on the Pedals, Holy Cows, and Meeting the Dalai Lama

 

In 1986, Paul and his friend Charles Paternina bought two antique high-wheel bicycles – called “Ordinary’s” –  at Christie’s on something close to a whim. Riding them around Richmond Park proved immediately impractical, so Paul had a modern version built instead.  What followed were over 100,000 kilometres and more than £100,000 raised for various charities, one extraordinary journey at a time.

 

In 1988 he rode the Camino de Santiago from the foothills of the Pyrenees, raising money for Help the Hospices, with friends running marathons alongside him. Because the penny farthing has no gears or chain, Paul’s legs were his only brakes. On steep descents he developed what he called “dancing on the pedals”, standing off the saddle and pushing back against the wheel’s momentum. Travelling at ten miles per hour through tiny Spanish villages, he and Charles became a spectacle. After one punishing 90-kilometre day, it was obvious that a halfway house, or refuge, was desperately needed. With the London based Confraternity of Saint James, the group raised funds to restore a crumbling priest’s house in Rabanal del Camino. Today Refugio Gaucelmo shelters pilgrims of 53 nationalities.

 

Two years later, in 1990, Paul set off on his most audacious ride yet, 600 kilometres to the foothills of the Himalayas, beginning symbolically at Westminster Bridge before the real journey started in Delhi. He had been interviewed before setting off by Mark Tully, the BBC’s legendary Bureau Chief. His goal was to raise £20,000 for the London based charity, Help Tibet. This was to be spent on health clinics serving Tibetan refugees.

 

The roads were famously chaotic. Holy cows wandered freely across his path. The terrain was punishing. And then, after ten days of pedalling through the mountainous foothills, Paul arrived in Dharamsala for a private audience with the Dalai Lama!

 

His Holiness was so captivated by the mechanics of the high-wheel bicycle that he asked to keep it overnight to examine how it worked. It was the Tibetan New Year. It was, by any measure, an extraordinary moment, two very different worlds meeting through the simple, irresistible curiosity of an old-fashioned machine.

 

Love, Delivered by Bottle

 

Between adventures, Paul found himself in Watervale in the Clare Valley wine region of South Australia, chatting to a stranger at a bar about the local Riesling. The stranger turned out to be the winemaker, Robert Crabtree. Paul was ushered around the corner for a tasting, and what followed were years of returning for the harvest and eventually taking a share in a neighbouring vineyard to save it from developers.

 

That vineyard had one more gift to give. Robert’s wife, Elizabeth, had a secret mission; for their recently met English friend, Helena,to carry back home the very first pressing from Paul’s own vines, along with a letter not to be opened until Helena and Paul met up in London.  This took place over lunch during which they read the letter together.  Elizabeth told Paul that the bearer of the letter would make him a wonderful wife! That lunch was the beginning of a life together, and Paul and Helena married in 1995.

 

Venice, a Wheelchair, and a King

 

The adventures were never just about the road. Paul became a trusted legal advisor for a Spanish bank in the City of London, where he worked until his retirement at 62.  His professional life brought its own remarkable encounters. At a high-profile Anglo Spanish Society ball in 1987, the guests of honour included the King of Spain and the then Prince and Princess of Wales, Charles and Diana. The King of Spain had broken his leg, and somehow Paul found himself tasked with sourcing a wheelchair for him to use throughout the evening.

 

When the night ended, the wheelchair came home with Paul.

 

For decades it lived with him and Helena, always referred to simply as “the King of Spain’s wheelchair”, a functional object with an extraordinary history that sat in the corner of their lives for years, prompting the same fond, bewildered question: what on earth are we going to do with this?

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Belgium to Otranto: Nearly 2,000 Miles for a Hospice

 

One of Paul’s most gruelling penny-farthing rides was for Help the Hospices.  Nearly 1,000 miles cycling from Canterbury Cathedral, across the Channel, the Belgian coast, through Bruges, along the Rhine, through the Black Forest and across the Alps to Venice, raising £50,000 for St. Oswald’s Hospice in Newcastle. Arriving in Venice, he rode straight into St Mark’s Square, entirely unbothered by the fact that the city is strictly pedestrianised and pedal vehicles are banned. Police and crowds stopped and stared.

 

Later, from Venice he called Helena sounding perfectly fine. Then he slipped in the shower and broke two ribs.

 

He set off the next morning anyway. Ribs bound, he cycled 1,014 kilometres south to Otranto on the heel of Italy. Helena joined him halfway with a support vehicle, baffled as to why he wouldn’t help lift her suitcase from the car, only realising later quite how much pain he had been stoically enduring the entire time. He didn’t mention it once!

 

Cricket: A Lifelong Devotion

 

When Paul wasn’t on two wheels, he was almost certainly following the cricket. Sixty-one years of membership with the Marylebone Cricket Club. Last summer was the first year he didn’t make the trip to Lord’s, but his son, Lawrie, is currently an Associate member, with around twenty years of waiting ahead before reaching his father’s full-member status.

 

For Paul, cricket has never simply been a spectator sport. It is a living world of statistics, stories, characters, and history.

 

A Life Still Present: Paul at Catherine House Care Home

 

Paul’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis is not what defines him at Catherine House. He is Paul Graham, the man who rode a penny farthing in many different countries and continents, kept cycling with two broken ribs, and has followed cricket for over sixty years.

 

The team took the time to learn this story, the rides, the wine, the cricket, the life lived across two hemispheres, and from that, created a personal identity board for him. This is something they do for every resident, fondly referred to as family member, at Catherine House Care Home. It brings together who someone is, their history, their passions, the things that still matter to them, so that everyone who cares for them understands the person, not just the diagnosis.

 

The team put a penny farthing on his wall. His cricket book sits on his side table. Walk into his room and you know straight away, this is Paul’s room, and this is Paul.

To find out more about Catherine House Care Home, please visit here

To find out more about Evolve Care Group, please contact us