ABSTRACT
This chapter is the result of a series of interviews with people who are or have been residents, which I conducted towards the end of writing this book. Constraints of space have meant that I have had to select just four stories. Three are from people I have worked with who are now friends, two of them close friends. I do not claim that these four accounts of residential care represent what the majority of users would say if several hundred interviews were to be conducted in a major survey; that I do not know. But I am sure that they identify many of the issues which concern other residents I have heard from over the years. Nor do I discount the affects of my personal and (earlier) professional connection with my three friends, although they do not spare their criticisms of the care homes and social services in which I worked.
