How do you avoid being a bed-blocker?

I’m fast approaching bed-blocker age, and it’s making me nervous. Nobody likes an elderly bed-blocker, especially now, with the NHS bursting at the seams. And nobody wants to be one. Imagine it – I do, all the time. What if I become seriously poorly, fall downstairs, break a limb, go to hospital and the daughter isn’t around to rescue me? I’ll be stuck there for months, not allowed home till they’ve “set up a care package”. Trickier, after years of coalition, than extracting sunshine out of cucumbers.

“It’s the geriatric ward I’m dreading,” says Rosemary. “That’s where they really ignore you. If you ask for anything twice they think you’ve got Alzheimer’s.” Her friend Angela managed to escape hospital by pointing at a visiting neighbour and saying: “She’ll look after me.” The poor neighbour didn’t dare say: “No I won’t,” in front of all those kind doctors and nurses, so Angela got home and stayed there, more or less alone, managing somehow.

So I’m planning to not fall over or be hospitalised, and to look competent and independent for as long as possible, without worrying Daughter, or alerting the authorities and being bundled off screaming to a care home. This may all be some way off, but I like to think ahead, plotting how to stay in my own flat till I fall off my perch. Because where else can one bang away at the piano and have a dog? Only in your own home.

I imagine myself being tremendously stoical, slowly struggling through the household tasks, going up and down stairs on my bum, crawling about the floor, hauling myself up to the sink or cooker, washing a few dishes at a time, stirring my porridge, and getting a motorised wheelchair, which the dog can sit on, and off we’ll go, shopping and for walkies.

How brave! I’m almost excited by my defiant plan. It may not work, of course. I’m not that foolish an optimist, so I have a fall-back scheme, in case I’m totally incapacitated. Let’s form a club, sharing the cost of stretcher-bearers and coach trips to Switzerland. One way only.