Older and wiser

I’ll Die After Bingo Pope Lonergan Ebury, £16.99

For a decade, Pope Lonergan combined his burgeoning career in comedy with a job working in care homes for the elderly.

His day job certainly provided memorable, if gruesome, anecdotes for his stand-up act. There aren’t many careers where you’d be ambushed by a confused elderly man firing the contents of his catheter bag at you as he yells: “That’s what you get for sleeping with my wife!”

This memoir is full of pen portraits of residents who are no less fully rounded human beings just because they’ve grown old, and it is alternately funny and moving.

I chuckled reading about 98-year-old Second World War veteran Simon, who still “sleeps in Y-fronts and a vest because in the Navy they were told if the boat sinks, pyjamas weigh you down”.

But it is deeply affecting when Simon opens up to Lonergan about wartime traumas from 80 years ago.

Such moments explain why Lonergan sticks at this draining, undervalued minimum-wage job which is demanding physically – care workers are more than twice as likely to be injured than construction workers – and mentally.

Sadly, bureaucracy and under-resourcing prevent him and his colleagues devoting as much time to residents as they need. Lonergan is a recovering drug addict who was driven close to rock bottom by the job’s stresses. The book ends with him giving up the job for the sake of his mental health. Speaking as somebody who has never visited even the nicest care home without wanting to escape immediately back into the fresh air, I found it salutary to spend a few hours thinking about how they work, and what residents and staff need that they’re not getting – but it was an entertaining read too.

I doubt the problems will all be sorted by the time I’m ready to take up residency in a care home. But I pray my carers have some of Pope Lonergan’s imaginative compassion.