Many people know what it is to be ignored. It can stem from a range of attitudes about value and significance; learned behaviours or explicit choices. In the days when a bar could be crowded some people would find instant service, skipping ahead of others who had waited with patience. Not everyone is seen.

At some point this is an experience which we may all undergo as ageing changes our appearance, health and vigour. In Bleak House Krook quotes the despair of Tom Jarndyce that lengthy court proceedings are akin to being ‘drowned by drips’. Not all change is sudden, rapid and overwhelming. Usually our circumstances alter by small degrees, until we realise a bigger change has happened almost without our knowing. For the most part ageing follows this pattern until an event or illness makes us aware of both time and mortality.

A recent issue of the TLS featured a poem which captured the disparities of age and experience with insight and skill. Jamie McKendrick imagines meeting his younger self in a bar. Contrasting the two states of being – youth and maturity – McKendrick concludes with this assessment of his younger self:

All the fool seemed utterly sure of
was never in his life would he be me.

McKendrick, J. He Be Me The Times literary Supplement, 6 November 2020

Assumptions are dangerous things, especially when it comes to decision making in a pandemic. Care homes might often be regarded with benign indifference. Liminal places that sit at the edge of society’s thinking; policy-making; priorities. If ageing lends people invisibility then care homes find themselves similarly flickering in and out of the public imagination. For many years either a green or white Government paper has been promised. Yet, despite moments of recognised need, it seems that social care can recede into the background of political life with remarkable speed.

The degree to which the importance and operation of care homes can be sidelined was nowhere clearer than in the BBC documentary Lockdown 1.0 – Following the Science. During the programme the interviewer asks one of the key pandemic modellers why the scientists thought care homes were shielded. It is a question that clearly causes Dr Ian Hall some difficulty and his reply is couched among pauses; a slightly anxious look away from the camera; and, finally, commendable honesty:

“… We were.. erm, erm … That’s a good question… We never checked…”

Dr Ian Hall, speaking during the BBC documentary Following the Science at 54 minutes

It appears that a number of casual assumptions were made about the circumstances and daily reality of how care homes work. It is hard to see that any critical enquiry was made, or any steps taken, to contact the wealth of people who would have been able to spell out the risks within a few moments.The fact is that the detailed operation of care homes was all but invisible to the scientists and politicians making decisions about the impact of COVID-19.

As with so many of the assumptions and behaviours that mean people are left in the shadows, this is not necessarily deliberate. The slow drip of ageist attitudes eventually sinks places of care for older people under a swell of political indifference. We either assume that we shall avoid these places ourselves, or fear that one day we’ll need them – and consequently prefer to shun them from our thoughts. Given the age of most senior scientists and politicians it is hard to imagine that many of them don’t have relatives in places of care. How could they have personal contact with care homes and yet remain so oblivious to the ways in which they work?

Perhaps the key post-pandemic task will be to shed the cloak of invisibility which appears to have covered care during advancing years. To lift the sector out of its obscurity and have a frank conversation about the provisions we would want to see as we age. This will be hard, as our desire to look away from this reality runs deep. Nevertheless, as the full picture of events within places of care emerges – probably during a public inquiry – there may be a moment to achieve a lasting change in our attitude to ageing.