This is the Guardian. sponsors of Paralympics GB and here's Oliver Lamb Watson, wheelchair fencer for Great Britain.

I started fencing after my doctor told me,

No, you'll never be an athlete. And I thought, watch me.

Now when I want to start something new, I start on Tik-Tok. Like recently I search for

pasta recipes. It started with a simple sauce. Now I'm making my own spaghetti from scratch.

It's easy when I can cook along to the

Tik-Tok video. Search Paralympic TB on Tik-Tok and follow the journey to

Paris. It starts on Tik-Tok. Welcome to the Guardian Long Reed, showcasing the best long-form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking.

For the text version of this and all our long reads go to the

Guardian.com forward slash long read.

It comes for your very soul.

How Alzheimer's undid my dazzling creative wife in her 40s

by Michael Aylwin.

My wife always said she would die of Alzheimer's. It turns out she was right about that.

For years, I insisted she would not.

In the end, Vanessa clinched our little argument by dying last September.

But we had known her fate since 2019, the year she was diagnosed at the age of 49. For at least

three years before that though the realization dawned by hideous degrees, which way the debate was going.

When we met in the mid-noughties, the proposition that Vanessa did not have Alzheimer's, nor was about to develop it, was an easy motion to defend.

She was dazzling and creative with a successful career as a marketing executive.

In that context, her preoccupation with this old person's disease came across as a little absurd.

We met on the dance floor of a nightclub in 2004.

...