It was one of the stock responses in the long-running BBC comedy Dad’s Army. Whenever there was the slightest possibility of something going wrong, and Captain Mainwaring appealed for calm, Corporal Jones shouted ‘don’t panic’. He shouted it in a way that communicated the exact opposite of his words. Perhaps this is an ingrained reaction of the British people: when we were told that fuel supplies would be fine ‘so long as we shopped normally’, car keys across the Kingdom flew into people’s hands. The instruction to keep calm and carry on seems to be heard as a clarion call to action. The perception exacerbating the problem.

Listening to Anil Seth speaking on a recent edition of Radio 4’s Start the Week I was reminded just how much of our experience we take for granted. What we tend to notice is the unusual and we therefore focus on ‘exception reporting’ to add to our understanding of the world. Without doubt, especially for people in the West, the last couple of years have been full of exception reporting. The things we took to be routine and reliable have become irregular and doubtful. It began with toilet rolls, moved through domestic flour supplies, and now rests with petrol. Rather than just a tiny part of our experience reporting the exceptional, it feels like the balance has shifted dramatically. From seeing family members, to taking holidays, a once predictable world has become fragmented and startling. The new normal is a somewhat moth-eaten version of our former reality.

This is without doubt a Western phenomenon and even within advanced industrialised nations it is far from everyone’s experience. Many citizens have lived with serious uncertainties as a part of daily life. Much of the world experiences the unreliability of supply as the norm. When I lived in Argentina for a year it was not uncommon for public employees to be paid several months after it was due. This degree of coping with uncertainty is something alien to the West. A few years ago, when there was a hiccup at the Santander Bank, it meant that account holders didn’t get their salaries on the day they were due. In the NHS the switchboards went into meltdown. Operators had never known a day so busy. Even the slightest change in a culture with very high confidence in the delivery of services causes a major wobble.

In many respects this experience is changing a form of expectation that is novel for humanity. Across history this degree of reliability and its associated expectation has been both recent and rare. It is arguably the case that this confidence is paid for by the poorest communities on the planet. Post-colonial powers continue to leverage their advantages over other nations, ensuring that our certainty of supply is extracted at the price of unreasonable flexibility for the poorest people in the world. Added to which the emissions of the wealthy nations are accelerating changes to our climate where, once again, the most marginal communities will bear the heaviest toll.

The key question we ought to consider is whether we are panicking about the right things? Minor disruptions to rice and petrol are generally an inconvenience rather than a threat to life. The gradual shift in climate and its consequences for people living on the edge will end lives and devastate communities. However, it appears we are incapable of collective action until the consequences of disaster arrive on the doorsteps of the powerful.

In some respects it feels as though I have gone full circle in my own attitude towards waste. My grandfather would often berate me in the 1970s when, as a child, I’d put enough butter on my toast ‘to sink a battleship’. I’m not quite sure where the phrase originated, but I always took it to mean that excess use of anything during wartime would require more ships to cross the Atlantic – with the risk of sinking due to enemy action. That was my grandparents’ experience. People’s use of materials during WWII was therefore directly connected to the amount of danger involved with resupply. Maybe we need to reinvent that phrase today, not as a call for unregulated panic, but as a reminder of the small deeds connected to great consequences. Only when we understand the implications of every action and inaction are we likely to see the changes in behaviour needed to avoid a catastrophe.

‘Enough butter to incinerate a planet’?

There are many different things that can make us feel our age. From the commonplace of wistful reflection that police officers are looking younger, to the telltale bits of IT equipment in a film. ‘Look, it’s an Amstrad green screen’. In a world where the pace of technical change is ever faster this calibration of time is ever clearer. From the first appearance of computers, to the desktop PCs, then laptops and tablets, the clues to different decades are there to see in every movie. Seeing a production of Educating Rita at the York Theatre Royal last week was to behold a vanished academic setting. No computer; one-to-one tuition; books (and whisky) everywhere.

The consequences of ageing appear, ironically, to be timeless. Even as the UK government attempts to grapple with the question of how to fund social care, they are tackling a problem that is both ancient and modern. The Aged Poor in England and Wales is the title of the report written by Charles Booth and published in 1894. That was two years before the birth of my paternal grandfather who, like so many of his generation, troubled the exchequer very little (he died aged 69, having been predeceased by his wife). Yet demographics were changing and the question of how to support a population living longer into retirement was becoming more pressing.

“but for those who are not able-bodied, and these include almost all the old, each Board of Guardians is at liberty to adopt its own rules and to change them at will, or to act without any rules at all”.

Booth, C. (1894). The aged poor in England and Wales. Macmillan and Company.

In Booth’s report nearly 30% of the over 65s were receiving either indoor (Workhouse), or outdoor, relief. This sort of dependency and survival on minimal rations was not the kind of old age people wanted, either for themselves or for others. Rather than a life of comfortable leisure, the thought of retirement stimulated apprehension and fear. Not only were financial resources limited, but the NHS was decades away, leaving many dependent on charitable support and care – or to get by without health care altogether. As a curate in the 1990s I would meet older people who had harrowing memories of relatives suffering from illnesses which either lacked effective treatment altogether, or where treatment was unaffordable. It is not a situation to which any of us would wish to return.

Since social care lacks the coherence of a national service such as the NHS it can still feel potluck as to the quality of the care many receive. When I was involved in these decisions for my mother a few years ago, as her dementia advanced and her health deteriorated, the access to social care seemed haphazard. At the time when she needed to move from a care home to a nursing home I recall talking to a local manager who told me there was a room available but that ‘three people are interested in it’. What should have been a process focused on the needs of an older person suddenly took on the character of house buying. Would I get everything sorted in time, or would we be gazumped?

It is hard for people to understand the pressures and anxieties that the current situation creates for people seeking care. At a time when people are vulnerable and distressed the last thing we need is a system that is chaotic, and where there is no central co-ordination of supply and demand. Given that most of us will find ourselves in later life at some point, and in need of support, our inability to provide a decent level of care across society is symbolic either of a failure in self-care, or a fear to contemplate what we might one day need. Either way it is detrimental to us all if this situation is simply allowed to continue until it falls apart.

We are promised that later this week the UK Government will bring forward plans for social care. There is anxiety that while this may appear to be one thing it will turn out to be another. In other words, that the NHS will in fact receive the lion’s share of any increased funding. Yet instead of pitching one sector against another, we need both the NHS and social care to work together. One can never achieve its ambitions without the other; and older people can’t be left to fall between the gaps in service provision. The world has moved on since Charles Booth, but unless we have the political will to grasp this age-old challenge, we risk perpetuating a shameful dereliction of care.

It is likely that our unwillingness to resolve the way we support an ageing population reflects wider attitudes to older age. Age discrimination is frequently described as a widely tolerated part of society, and implies a failure to recognise the worth and dignity of people as they age. Just as in Educating Rita, where the student is also a teacher, we need to understand that socially constructed roles are often less clearcut than they seem to be at first sight. We should never underestimate the value of people in later life or the lessons their lives, and even their needs, can teach the rest of us.