Private care home: rust-stained extended old houses are a reversion to the past

Another of my occasional pictures of facilities for older people, in this case, a care home in south Sutton.

It is typical of many private care homes both in its location and in the building. South Sutton is the formerly classy area of this suburb, on the southern border of London, merging into Surrey stockbroker belt. Some of this area still contains giant houses worth from a half mill to £2m or so, with extensive grounds. When we moved here ten years ago, an estate agent looked us over and said: 'Well, you'll be wanting to look in south Sutton, won't you?'

But nearer to the town centre, the big Edwardian houses are multi-occupied, or knocked down and replaced by larger blocks of flats, or simply converted into flats or, the concern of this blog, translated into care homes.

Here is an unprepossessing example, with the off-putting rust stains on the outside cladding and the bizarre design presumably cramming more rooms into the site than the big old house that previously occupied it. Looking at the side of it, it seems to have been extended both front and back. Domestic scale and Edwardian style are lost.

Because of its building, this is not a care home that can make nostalgic claims of connection with leisurely Edwardian gentility, or of convenient modernity. Local authorities, when they ran residential care, gave up the inconvenient and mobility-inhibiting conversions of large gentlemen's residences and went for newbuild on grounds of efficient service provision and convenience and independence for residents. A lot of the large-house converted private sector care homes are an uninspiring reversion to the past.

The aim of active retirement is only to put off deterioration. Discuss.

The niggle has become a clarity.

I’m now approaching the anniversary of my retirement; it’s been a year. I was planning to write about how I was experiencing retirement regularly, but I haven’t, because I haven’t had anything to say.

When I got to the six-month mark, I started to write, but did not think it worth publishing. This was it: ‘The new time structure that I remarked upon at three months is quite ingrained: daily organ practice, daily work on writing or blogs, with greater pressure on the writing as deadlines approach, and occasional ‘real’ retirement days of going out etc. Of course, I’ve just experienced Christmas and New Year, which connects us up with the wider family.’

And there I ran out of things to say. Thinking about this, I had the vague feeling that there was something hanging about in the back of my mind about ‘the next change is when I die’. But that seemed overly dramatic, I couldn’t grasp the niggle that was twitching there, so I let it be.

Then Margaret fell out of the loft and broke her collarbone, the electronics on the church organ phutted and the ‘ingrained’ routine deroutinised. I spent a few weeks chasing round over treatment for Margaret and her two nights in hospital after A&E and for a titanium plate being inserted in her shoulder. I’ve spent most of the last six months doing more in the kitchen and around the house because she has had residual back problems, and is improving only slowly.

 

What this has made clear is the risk that as physical things happen to us in old age, the outcome is an extra bit of incapacity. And you can see the incapacity inexorably leading to less mobility, more problems until, perhaps ten of fifteen years hence, fading away towards exclusion from the active world and death.

So I want to defend myself against events, such as falls and illnesses, that will move that process on. And I feel I want to keep on walking rather than busing, doing things rather than relaxing, continuing to write books and articles rather than staying with the easier stuff like blogs.

Is the objective of an active retirement only to put off deterioration and death? I’m now clear that is the question that is creating the niggle, but I don’t know the answer - yet. I wonder how others feel about it.

After the grandchildren...

'And the little one said...' The spare room after some of our grandchildren visited. Why are our dolls so elderly and decrepit? It's not a metaphor for the stage of our lives, we're grandparents. That means our dolls are from the previous generation or charity shops.