Can anyone tell me which newspaper is doing a feature about old people's homes today?

[Caligula]

So that I can run out and buy it? Twice on Today this morning, I heard this mentioned, and twice I missed the gist of it and which paper was running this - does anyone know?

Not sure, but think it's the telegraph. There's a playwright (Alan Bennett maybe?) who's written a play about it.

Thanks EB. Damn. I was hoping it would be the Independent or the Guardian.

Oh well, off to buy the Torygraph!

I think that Alan Bennet has written about it in his autobiography. His mother died in an old peoples home, I think.

I found it online yesterday. (Remembered there is such a thing as the www!)

alan bennett exerpt

Oh, but he writes so well.

I spent yesterday driving for 5 hours to see my Mother and his words could be mine if only I had his talent. My mother is exceptionaly well cared for, she is lucker than Bennet's mother in that respect. But what he describes is whart is happening to my mum.

He said

'Once her speech has unravelled, any further deterioration in her personality becomes hard for an onlooker to gauge (and we are all onlookers). Speechless and seemingly beyond reach, she dozes in the first-floor bedroom in the house above the bay, regularly fed and watered, her hair done every fortnight, oblivious of place and time and touch. In the other beds, women come and go, or come and die, my mother outlasting them all. '

I could cry. And as he says as a child I was terrified that she would die and leave me. Now I will see her death as a blessing. So sad.

How sad!

AFter working in a hospice, dementia was deffo one of the most feared of ailments among the staff there.

My father died of cancer, and at the time I thought that was awful. But in reality his pain relief was excellent (thanks to the hospice) and up to the last week of his life he was still doing the things that he wanted. My last memory of him is of him telling me a joke on the phone as we discussed dds first trip to the swimming pool. He remained himself.

What has happened to my mother is a whole level of awfulness. She simply isn't there any more. The care she has is astonishing, it reaffirms my faith in human nature if I am being honest, but my mother is dying by inches; stripped of her personality and self. It is the most awful thing to see.

for you and your Mum hmb, it must be very hard.

THis has been going on for 4.5 years. She hasn't known who I am in the last 3 years. She can hardly speak nowerdays.

I am so sorry, HMB.

It's a dreadful, dreadful illness.

But I'm glad Bennett in that devastatingly quiet, matter-of-fact way, has shone the spotlight on what's going on in some nursing homes. What a national treasure he is.

He is a national treasure, isn't he? So sorry to read that he has had colon cancer