My 99-year-old grandmother’s home and wellbeing gone in just five days | Clare Brown

A care home goes bust. For the trustees it’s just a financial problem, but for residents forced to move it is devastating

My grandmother, Alice Platt, was a matchmaker in actor Ian McKellen’s life. She went to a Quaker school in Lancashire. Every year, old pupils would gather and reminisce. They called themselves The Old Scholars, an incongruous title as my grandmother remembers much sport but less learning. Walking together in the Lake District, an Old Scholar confided in her friend, my grandmother, that she’d had two marriage proposals. One from a widower. One from a bachelor, 40 years old. Should she marry the widower or the bachelor? The widower, my grandmother advised. She imagined that the bachelor would be set in his ways. The widower was McKellen’s dad.

My grandmother is 99 years old now and I think she might be the last of the Old Scholars alive. “I never lost a race,” she tells me of her school days. “No-one would believe me now!” she says, indicating her legs, both bandaged, fragile skin aflame, recovering from an infection. “Don’t get old,” she has told me many times.

I don’t know where I am. I don’t know why I’m here … I don't know what it is, but I feel all wrong

Continue reading...