I'll Die After Bingo: My unlikely life as a care home assistant

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It does for care workers what doctor-turned-comedian Adam Kay’s 2017 memoir This is Going to Hurt did for medics. But his “unsanitised, unsentimentalised” account of the decade he spent “wearing haemorrhoids as cufflinks”, spooning out yoghurt and hearing people’s most intimate (and sometimes final) confessions will leave readers in no doubt of the emotional, physical and financial pressures of the undersung and underpaid job. Why is it that we come to value to the care of those closest to us so little that it is farmed out to profit centres employing people on the lowest possible wages, who are forever leaving for easier ways to earn a crust? He ignores memos on the “proper” (actually, patronising) ways to converse with residents, opening with questions like: “Is everybody having a safe afternoon? I'll Die After Bingo is his tough yet hilarious, intelligent and honest account of 9 ½ years caring of for the elderly.

Old age is not easy, for the individual and for their relatives and carers we all know it but this book lays it out. Pope should have let someone else narrate, his style isn’t right for audio, it made me cringe at times.He has a wonderful turn of phrase, both serious and comic, realising that gallows humour is an essential release-valve in a demanding job witnessing decay and detachment. The book is fine, it doesn’t give any real insight into the profession other than it’s underpaid and hard.

Shame, for if his recollections are honest, he genuinely seemed to care for his residents and had a bond with many of them that would have made their last few months a little less brutal. In the creative industries (ergh) cultivating relationships is really important - and luckily Expectation is full of the nicest, most insightful and talented "TV people" you’ll ever find. One second I'm reading a funny memoir about an elderly man reminiscing about a time when he seduced a random woman and 'fucked her up the arse' and the next second I'm reading about hierarchical structures and the distribution of power and autonomy in the care system.The only problem is that he would read the sign and “then spend the next 14 hours… washing old knobs for minimum wage. I expected this to be more anecdotal and instead it felt like I was reading a text book with all the references. Pope Lonergan is a stand up comedian from Essex, a recovering drug addict, and was for over a decade a care assistant in a variety of Care Homes. Having visited a range of hospitals, respite care places and care homes in recent years for my dad, plus having had my own amusing catheter experiences in hospital stays of my own, I'm kind of inured to the various icky bodily topics involved when people are not capable of caring for themselves. And once we’ve seen what the job requires, we’ll all push for “wage increases, better training and more resources for the care home employees.