The most recent 20 comments posted to Making Light by Issendai:

Alison, what is the difference between residential and nursing care?

Having finally been able to watch the video, it struck me that neither of the relatives who will be running the home mentioned any experience with taking care of the elderly. They want to try it because it would be a nice thing to do. That's true, and it would be wonderful if they succeeded, but I still hear--well, because of the location of this thread, I hear, "We're starting a small press to help new authors."

So all she has to do now is convince a bank that her recently-published novel is *bound* to earn her enough to pay the interest on a £60,000 mortgage and she has the funds she needs to buy the house.

Or her daughter and son-in-law could have co-signed the mortgage. Far easier than selling a banker fairy tales about AuthorHouse royalties, though harder on the authorial ego.

The news stories make me wince. I don't blame her one bit for wanting to get out of the care home--I've been to a nursing home like that, and she's not exaggerating by a word--but she's moving herself and several of her friends into... a regular house? With no one but her daughter and son-in-law to help? They're essentially starting a private nursing home with a staff smaller than they'd need to run a B&B. And what happens when Lorna Page dies? Do all her friends expect to stay on? Will they have to find new places in care homes, and possibly get stuck in homes even worse than the ones they started with? And oh god, what happens if the money really isn't real?

Forget the AuthorHouse angle, the whole situation is a nightmare from the human angle. I really, truly hope that someone has put more thought (and financial backing) into this than the news stories are suggesting.

One of the official reasons the prison gives is that if an inmate has extra money, he's more likely to be shaken down for it. What about inmates who have savings? Are they prevented from withdrawing more than a certain amount per month? Are they forbidden to communicate with anyone on the outside to manage investments and accounts, thereby generating more money for themselves? Or is it just the ones who are already poor who are expected to stay poor?

I'm skeptical of a conspiracy to encourage recidivism. People relapse perfectly well on their own, and always have. On the other hand, good old-fashioned class snobbery is always an institutional favorite.

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