This week Daniel Ramston asks: 'Do I put my mother in a home or do I trust home care under the new Direct Payments' scheme?

As you say in your letter that your mother is 79, I'm surprised you've left it so late to ask. I started trying to remove mine when I was about 15 because she didn't understand the significance of the latest Sex Pistols single.

My existing case notes on this situation consist largely in Philip Larkin's This be the Verse but I have examined your query further.

Homes are a simple system whereby you wheel her in, leave her there and go home. Finally you get to watch James Bond on Boxing Day without having to explain the plot over and over again or compare the activities of counter intelligence with having a bad Eccles cake in Blackpool, in 1952.

The disadvantage is that a 'care home' is a 'legal depositary' for all the sadistic, unhinged kids who weren't very good at school. They sometimes give them white coats as a disguise. This will remain a problem in care home systems, until they remove the toasters.

Care homes do provide more social interaction, but often only because you can't move away from people without assistance. So you spend your last years being friends with boring people you don't really like that much, who are obsessed with conspiracy theories involving Audrey Hepburn and Al Johnson.

In contrast, the new direct payment scheme, means your mother gets refunded for organising her own carer. She simply rings up a starving burglar in Croatia and invites them into her home to take care of her cooking and finances etc. Apart from that she doesn't have to talk to any tossers except the police when her house is resold.

In mitigation I should ask, 'does your mother drink? Obviously the option remains to sack the carer after an hour for some ridiculous misdemeanour such as talking in a foreign way, and spend the rest on sherry. That should at least keep her quiet.

If your mother wants to go ahead with direct payments, all she has to do is wait for the onset of alzheimers or severe arthritis and then spend forty hours on the internet accessing legislation. After which a burly woman comes round and keeps asking: 'did you pay me for today''? at ten minute intervals, until your mother's account is empty by tea-time.

If this doesn't reassure you, I offer three further words of medical expertise:

Cliff. Slope. Handbrake.

Use them wisely.