I have done several jobs on residential homes, and always come away feeling terribly depressed. The sheer cruelty of age is bad enough, without some of the attendant squalor some of these homes have to offer at the end of a person's long and often hard working life. I frequently find myself looking at some human wreckage and wondering what they were like at my age, at 30 or as a child. No different from you and me. Is this what we have to come to?