Sometimes a poem says it best. Yesterday on Woman's Hour, the exquisite voice of the actress Virginia McKenna was heard, reciting a poem, in the voice of a “crabbit old woman”. “What do you see, nurse? What do you see?” it began. “A crabbit old woman, not very wise/ Uncertain of habit, with far-away eyes...” She was once a child, a carefree young girl, a bride, a mother, a grandmother, a widow. “I'm an old woman now/ Nature is cruel,/ 'Tis her jest to make old age/ Look like a fool.” It ended: “So open your eyes, nurses,/ Open and see... / Not a crabbit old woman,/ Look closer... See me.”

The Woman's Hour office was deluged with calls and e-mails afterwards.

The poem is part of a ten-minute video called What Do You See?, made by the actress Amanda Waring. As the daughter of Dorothy Tutin, who died in 2001, she watched her mother in various hospitals and was appalled that she was never “seen as a person” - not a famous person, just a person. So she made this film, not just to help the training of carers, nurses and doctors, but for everyone. Yesterday she headed straight from the BBC studio in Manchester to 10 Downing Street, to deliver a copy of her film to Gordon Brown.

Like many people, I have been wanting to kick Mr Brown into the real world all week. On Monday he announced his initiatives (to the medical profession's surprise) for further health screening so that heart disease, and the possibility of strokes and kidney disease, are detected earlier and lives can be saved, so we can all live longer than was once decreed by the natural lifespan our genes and our lifestyles dictated. Everyone is supposed to want to be 85. But do we?

On the same day, we were reminded that we're an ageing country and in 20 years' time there will be double the number of 85-year-olds. We know already that we cannot afford the proper care for them. The glaring gulf between the reality and the aspiration is enough to cause rising blood pressure all round. The Prime Minister's history as the 75p Chancellor (the pay rise he bestowed on pensioners in the millennium year) will dog him till the day he's carted into a care home himself - except of course he, like his predecessor, will be cushioned by his fat PM'S pension and a benevolent stipend from some merchant bank.

We are all headed in the same direction of old age, and most of us will end up alone. On the web, where the poem McKenna recited (Crabbit Old Woman, by Phyllis McCormack) is already popular, there is a heartfelt message tagged on to the end: “We will one day be there, too.” As the Woman's Hour discussion emphasised, we would all like to end up ideally in a community of like-minded friends - but care homes for aged members of professions, such as Denville Hall for actors, or Pickering House for aged hacks, are rare and extremely costly. For centuries it has been assumed that some selfless daughter will help any Aged Parent, but as the recent articles in times2 graphically indicated, not all daughters are able or willing to perform this duty.

I could name half a dozen friends of mine whose lives are blighted and limited by the care needs of a mother or an older spouse. Their stories are often horrifying, and behind the prospect they present is another, worse one: who will care for me, when I get there?

As Jane Shilling wrote, reviewing Somewhere Towards the End, by 90-year-old Diana Athill, Athill is cheered that women in her family “make old bones and good deaths”. But there is a chilly coda to this. Athill looked after her own dying mother. “But I have no daughter... And I haven't got the money to pay for care of any kind. If I don't have the luck to fall down dead while still able-bodied, it will be the geriatric ward for me.”

Even her redoubtable mind shrinks from this. “Fortunately, if a prospect is bleak enough, the mind jibs at dwelling on it,” she stoically adds.

We all jib at it: but for most the geriatric ward is the reality, a fact Jenni Murray's guests on Woman's Hour confronted robustly yesterday. As Annie Stevenson, of Help the Aged, said, the fear of old age is now deep in our collective unconscious: the fear of loneliness, boredom and helplessness. “We don't value old people, we don't value care or carers, so how can we expect them to perform at their best and treat people as human beings?”

There are, at the simplest level, small improvements to be made: to look someone in the eye and touch a hand takes only a second and costs nothing; and when your world consists of a 5ft space around your bed, such gestures make a difference.

“The problem is systemic, and the system is creaking,” Ms Stevenson said. But 2008 is our opportunity to get this right. The Government is creating a Green Paper, and she urges us to shout about the reality. “We have not solved the problem of how to fund and provide care for old age. We are in denial about it. Instead, we must decide how we want to live our lives in old age, and plan how we are going pay for it. We must stop frightening ourselves to death.”

I hope Gordon will spare ten minutes to watch Amanda Waring's film: the dour politicians of today are the crabbit old men of tomorrow.

Valerie Grove is the author of A Voyage round John Mortimer

Times Recommends

• Resist urge to throw voters red meat
• Slay sacred cows and be candid
• We cannot let these 100 deaths deflect us