I used to really like the idea of being an old lady. I’d daydream sometimes about which version of my OAP self I’d like best. Version A was really fat (farewell, dieting), unwaxed and stubby-nailed (farewell, tyranny of grooming), quite drunk (goodbye, units), living on a diet of cakes (mm, carbohydrates) and gin, happy as a clam. Version B was whip-thin, in Chanel, being insufferably rude and travelling a lot – less blissfully slothful, but perhaps more interesting. I’d have that mad violet hair you used to see in the 1970s. It would be great.

Today, aged 42, I think of old age with the kind of alarm that borders on panic. Forget my gin and cakes, or my pink bouclé suits and matching Sobranies; the more realistic choices are a) being incarcerated in a disgusting nursing home that smells of cabbage and wee, where people talk to you as though you were a stupid baby, and then hit you – or worse; or b) being an unspeakable burden to my poor children and slowly destroying their lives with my gaga demands and bodily malfunctions. Though I suppose at least I have children, which means, hopefully, I’ll at least interact with other human beings every now and then and not die of loneliness. Or, of course, c) I keep the marbles and keep relatively healthy and die in my sleep, but I can’t help feeling that’s a long shot.

And then there’s the financial thing: who pays for the foul nursing home? Who pays for the carer? Do I eat up my grandchildren's school fees with my OAP needs, or do I dispose of my children’s inheritance in order to end my days, at monstrous expense, in a poorly ventilated room full of dribbling strangers and malevolent staff?

I'm not being paranoid; just factual: a report published earlier this month by the Commission for Social Care Inspection found that a record number of care homes for the elderly were so poorly run that they were a danger to their residents. Reading up on this subject also threw up the fact that most abuse of the elderly happens in their own homes by family members. There are an embarrassment of horrific stories to back this up, which I'll kindly spare you, but which point to the salient fact that there is nowhere near enough help or support available to family carers who are at the end of their tether – in most cases, there isn’t any at all. And you don’t need to consider abuse to be in need of help: the lack of provision for old age causes the children of the elderly acute emotional distress, guilt, and the rest, as anyone who’s had to put a parent into an institution – having remortgaged first, for added stress – will know.

Old age is like the elephant in the room of the middle-aged: everyone I know could give themselves a panic attack if they thought about it hard enough – which we choose not to do, because, really, there are very few obvious solutions. So we skip over newspaper stories about elderly abuse – which is on the rise – or about age-related tragedies, like the one last week where a couple who had been married for 60 years chose to kill themselves rather than be sent to separate nursing homes.

The bodies of Tom Hughes, 82, and his wife Nancie, 86, were found in their retirement flat in Abergavenny, Monmouthshire, last weekend. They’d been visited by social services and told that Mrs Hughes faced going to a home for people with dementia but that her husband, a retired dentist, was well enough to move to an ordinary care home. A neighbour said: “It was too much to bear for them. They had spent their whole lives together.”

And even as we try to ignore these stories, we suddenly get tears in our eyes, out of the blue, because we spot some poor old man, bent in half and unable to straighten up, painstakingly shuffling to the shops in his slippers to buy his pathetic rations, or see an old lady sitting on a park bench, looking confused and unkempt and crying silently. Or at least I do. And then I torture myself imagining their lives 50 years ago, and their lives today, and it strikes me as scandalous that frail, vulnerable old people should be roaming about like this, clearly completely alone – because frankly the fortnightly visit from their harassed adult offspring doesn’t count.

It wouldn’t be tolerated if they were children – if packs of seemingly broken, half-blind kids wandered about various cities looking traumatised, barely able to put one foot in front of the other but having to in order not to starve, there would be a national outcry. Actually, forget children – if miserable-looking old dogs started popping up everywhere looking distressed, you wouldn’t be able to move for people running to call the RSPCA. And yet here are the old people, and we all feel terribly sorry for them, and for our future selves, and then turn a blind eye and try to think of something more cheerful.

It seems to me that there is the most incredible head-in-the-sandness going on concerning old age – and particularly the way the elderly are treated – both at a governmental and at a personal level. Gordon Brown proposed a new insurance-based system last week to fund care for the elderly; the idea is to stop people fretting about having to sell their homes to pay for care. Under the current system, anyone with a home or savings worth £22,250 or more (ie, everyone who doesn’t live in council property, basically) gets no help with care home fees.

This system, which penalises those who save, is to be scrapped, and replaced with a system where everyone gets government help. It’s something, I suppose, but I can’t help feeling it is only addressing one minute facet of a gigantic web of issues and concerns which, far from conveniently going away, grow in size and complexity by the day. Granted, old age isn’t a “sexy” subject – but we really need to come up with some workable solutions, or even suggestions. Personally, I’ve moved on from my earlier gin-and-cake/globetrotting model and am now planning an old ladies’ commune somewhere by the sea. I’ve thought about this very carefully – I’ve even earmarked a property – and have decided I would like to grow decrepit with my girlfriends: safety in numbers, and all that.

Every single woman of 40 or above that I mention my commune to literally begs for a space in it, which just goes to show how anguished and panicked we all are about the subject, no matter how breezily we cover it up. We’re none of us getting any younger: couldn’t we at least try to muster up some kind of safety net?

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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