Gloriously Ordinary Sundays - 28th April 2024

I was at an event this week taking part in a panel discussion where somebody made a comment that didn’t sit very easily with me. They said that some people find it hard to make choices and, in that situation, we might need to limit choices for the person by just giving them a range of options to choose from. I felt uncomfortable and probably made an overly flippant response.

I had a conversation with a friend who told me there needs to be another test for Gloriously Ordinary Lives; the ability to make yourself a snack at 2 am. Fair play. My point to him was that this is what Test One is all about – choice, and the fact that we all choose to live our lives in gloriously different ways with different things that are vital to us, different things that we avoid like the plague and different things that make our heart sing. ‘Would I want that for me or someone I love?’ doesn’t mean ‘does that support work in ways that I would want to live my life?’, it’s the principle of paying attention to the detail of what each person wants. I can’t remember the last time I made a snack at 2 am but I’d defend anyone’s right to do so, just as I’d hope they’d defend my right to swim in a lake in December, be owned by more cats than is socially acceptable, or lie in the sun longer than is probably good for me. 

When The Girl and The Boy were both living at home and they had a big team of personal assistants, one of the things we did to see how well a potential new person might fit the team was to ask, ‘what if….?’ questions and my favourite was, ‘What if The Girl wants to go to Tesco at midnight?’. This was a fantastic question to separate the people who understood that their role was to support them both to live their Gloriously Ordinary Lives and those who saw it more as a protective/parenting role. Over the years of asking it, we’ve had every response from, ‘Of course – sometimes you just need ice cream at midnight’, to ‘No, absolutely not as that wouldn’t be appropriate’, with a middle ground of, ‘Well I’d try to persuade her that it wasn’t a good idea but if she absolutely wanted to go then I would have to.’ People who had never worked in social care before, tended to be more likely to get the need for ice cream at midnight, whereas if someone had experience, they often gave the last response – mainly I think because they didn’t want to be seen as unprofessional. 

In the world of social care, we get ourselves in a bit of a pickle around choice. We often talk about ‘offering choice’ which is interesting as personally I think I take choices or make choices. If we think about being offered a choice that already starts from a power imbalance. I could share endless examples from my family’s experience of social care that got the offering/taking of choice balance very wrong, often from a starting point of genuine human concern, but then missing the point. 

There is a long blog that I’m not qualified to write about Capacity and Best Interests and what we do when people find it hard to make good choices, our responsibilities, our need to safeguard, to meet our duty of care... yadda yadda. I have been supremely grateful to friends in my younger days for challenging me not to have that one last glass (bottle) of wine, or not to walk home on my own. I’ve appreciated people I love (and some trusted people paid to be in my life) telling me that perhaps my grasp of reality might be a bit off and that it really was time to take some time off work. All valid.

My slightly obvious challenge (and the whole point of Test One) is that we MUST start from the clear and overt assumption that people know what they want and can choose what a Gloriously Ordinary Life looks like for them when they need to draw on support from social care. No matter that it makes no sense to us, that it scares us or challenges us professionally. No ifs, no buts. There might be conversations to be had from that starting point, but unless we take that absolute bottom line, then we will fall into the odious trap of thinking we know best.

FYI, I do fully intend to be swimming in a lake in December should I be lucky enough to still be here when I’m 80 and will absolutely expect the support of friends and family, and even social care if necessary to do so (please). 

PS. Did you see? The Gloriously Ordinary Sundays Podcast episode three is here! I catch up with Angela Catley⁠ and ⁠Sian Lockwood⁠ about their fabulous new challenge, ⁠#WhenIGetOld⁠