Wine and Fags make a good pension plan - an alternative approach to seniors' housing.

Sentinel Photo by John Clifford

As recently reported in the North Shore News, I have been retained to explore the feasibility of a seniors care facility on the site of West Vancouver's former Pierwell condominium development that has sadly gone into receivership. I was recently discussing this with some friends who asked why more seniors don't band together and build their own collective residence with a live-in chauffeur and care provider, rather than move into a larger facility.

This reminded me of a 2008 English article my dear friend Leonora Gaylor once sent me. I promised toshare it with my friends, but thought it might be of interest to some of you. After all, many of us are approaching our 80s and starting to wonder where we might be living next. 

While this article is somewhat dated, and the English references may be a bit obtuse, I think the message is as relevant today as it was in 2008. 

From The Times, August 14, 2008

Wine and fags make a good pension plan

By Carol Midgley

How very dreary that the staff of a Cornwall care home that granted a 90-year-old woman her lifelong wish to be served fish and chips by a man wearing a thong have been forced to apologize.

Apologize? What in God's name for? Where would you rather end up - the type of old folks' home where the staff respect that you are still a functioning being with a sense of humour, or the other sort where you're left to marinate in your own urine, your boiled mince just out of reach, while the “carers” stand around checking their eyeliner, waiting for you to die but preferably not on their shift?

We are always hearing about places where elderly people are addressed as if they were dribbling babies, made to share underwear and slapped if they don't go to the toilet at the required time. So, we should be cock-a-hoop that there's at least one - Woodland House, St Austell - where the staff are prepared literally to get their kit off to brighten their residents' lives.

Because everybody - absolutely everybody - dreads ending their days in a smelly, callous care home wearing someone else's false teeth. It's a definition of hell and an ever-looming spectre, yet we frequently push it away because it's too grotesque to contemplate.

Women worry about it more than men. They live, on average, seven years longer so will be stuck in that dreary day room with its ever-blaring TV for more interminable hours. Which is why people should do what Lorna Page has just done. Lorna, 93, recently had her first novel published and, with the earnings, bought a big house in Weare Gifford, Devon. Then she invited all her friends who are unhappy in their care homes to live with her instead, the plan being that they'll all look after each other. Unsurprisingly there has been an old-lady stampede. “Care homes can be such miserable places,” says Lorna. “You sit there all day staring out the window with no one to talk to... I've had dozens of offers. They are queueing up.”

I bet they are. I might even join the queue myself. Who wouldn't swap the constant reek of cabbage and Sanilav for a Golden Girls existence where you can get pie-eyed mixing your medication with gin and watching 60 Minute Makeover with your mates each day? It would be a bit like sharing a student house again but without the sex.

It's amazing that more of us don't do it (the living together, not the sex). People are surviving longer and often sitting on mortgage-free properties. Why not, if the need arrives, pool our resources and bow out of life to the tune of a continual party, surrounded by people we like, not resentful strangers? It would save your grown-up children visiting once a week to watch the vacant expression on your face as you answer that, yes, it was stew for lunch again and, no, you don't want any more Lucozade.

Yet we don't. We sleepwalk into the purgatory that we've dreaded for 20 years and submit to a fate of God knows what. I know some nursing homes are good, but many are bad. Worse than bad. The Commission for Social Care Inspection this year produced a report that said hundreds of care and nursing homes were so poorly run that they were a danger to residents. Investigators uncovered examples of residents being routinely tied to their beds and chairs, locked up or dragged around by their hair. Some were refused food to punish “bad behaviour”. One woman of 85 had her fingernails ripped off by a care worker, and a 78-year-old was covered in cigarette burns.

I must say that when I read things like this it makes me wonder why everyone is so obsessed with prolonging their lives into advanced old age, watching their alcohol units, wagging their fingers at an iced eclair and throwing themselves around a gym three times a week. We may as well say: “I must finish this 20k run because then I'll maximize the amount of time I'm alive to spend sitting around in purple crimplene trousers four sizes too big while a Nurse Ratched figure batters me with a wooden spoon.”

Surely the best policy if you hit 78 and look like you're heading for the Shady Pines Hell Hole is to quickly double your wine intake, up the fags by ten a day and if you don't already smoke, start. I am serious. I have friends who solemnly declare that their real “pension plan” is to drink themselves to death in a haze of tobacco and enjoy it. I see their point.

The OAP days could be some of the happiest and most hedonistic of your life, free from the middle-age checklist of constantly having to be somewhere, doing something, answering to someone. In Liverpool, where I live, pubs have “Mad Mondays” when pensioners pay £1 a pint and spend all day merry on the karaoke. Sometimes I peer wistfully through the window as I hurry past in my work heels.

Reports this week claim that care for elderly and infirm people could soon be stripped from local authority control to end the “postcode lottery” in which standards of care differ hugely across the country. Fine, but I reckon that we should take matters into our own hands. Make a pact with your friends to set up that commune and start stockpiling the sherry today. You may end your days half-cut but that's a far brighter prospect than wasting away on a wipe-down chair wearing a stranger's knickers.

If Gordon Brown has any holiday spending money left, he should send a big tray of piña coladas round to the Policy Exchange. Just when some in Labour's northern heartlands were beginning to thaw towards the Tories, up pops David Cameron's favourite think-tank with a report that suggests abandoning northern cities such as Liverpool and Sunderland and urging their residents to move south. Cameron has quickly distanced himself from the report, but it's no good. The scary ghost of Thatcher Past rises. Before this Mr. Cameron could have expected a slightly warmer welcome than usual when he visits Merseyside today. Now, judging by the reaction up here, he's more likely to get a Kirkby Kiss.