Dear Worrals, Thanks for your time. I've thought this one through, and discussed it with many over the past few years. (That's what happens when you're getting old and rickety (I am) and you see what this job shows you.) The care homes hereabouts are nearly all excellent; if they were hotels, I'd have to pay serious money to stay in them, but - as everyone knows - that isn't the point. I, and everyone I know in the local healthcare industry (including the workers in the homes themselves) fully intend saving up our sleeping pills, pieces of rope, or lengths of hosepipe (well, not if your car has a catalytic convertor) rather than become residents. Throughout our lives we depend on others in one way or another; so I feel that the issue isn't so much one of independence as of social relevance - once you feel that you are no longer contributing, and that (worse still) you have become a burden, life becomes intolerable. I'd happily lie all day on a Pegasus Bed, with tubes here, there, and everywhere if people were still seeking my opinion or asking me to do mental work for them; look at Prof Hawking. But to be helpless - and irrelevant. No, I'd rather be dead. I live in a cottage, 1000yds from my nearest neighbour; I intend my epitaph to be "Yes, we thought we hadn't seen him for a while, but we thought that the funny smell was just the drains."