For most of us, most of the time, we take our day-to-day freedom to makedecisions for ourselves for granted. Faced with countless large and small ques-tions about our personal lives and relationships, our finances, our health andmedical care, and our plans for the future, we are constantly making choices.Some of these choices may be very much informed by the expectations,wishes, and suggestions of those around us, but if they were challenged, these decisions would still be respected and upheld in law as our own – that is,unless our mental capacity to make our own decisions is questioned. Theonset of illness, the diagnosis of mental illness or a learning disability, or evenadvanced age or unusual behaviour, can all prompt concern that we lack ca-pacity, that we cannot manage our own affairs, and that our decisions are no longer legally valid. Although this is a book about many non-legal things, its starting point is the law of England and Wales surrounding mental capacity. This was the legalframework encountered in 1939 by Miss Beatrice Ruth Alexander, a retiredhousekeeper whose story is at the heart of this book. Vital to this legal frame-work was the Court of Protection, previously known as the Lunacy Office, aninstitution which may be unique in the world as a ‘specialist court chargedwith the determination of capacity’.1 Simply put, the Court of Protection was,and still is, ‘concerned with the ways in which decisions may lawfully be madeon behalf of those who are unable to make decisions for themselves’.2 To d a y,such decisions may concern medical treatment, from being vaccinated towithdrawing life support, or very personal matters such as entering into amarriage or sexual relationship, or transactions of a financial nature like mak-ing a will or selling a house.