THE old man was confused and unable to say who he was. He was dumped at an Essex Hospital with the words "Please take care of him, we can't any more" scribbled on a note round his neck.

The people who left him there, believed to be his wife and daughter, are being hunted by police, and Help the Aged have described it as an "appalling indictment of our society". Naturally, the family have also been described as "cruel".

They very well may be. They may be a bunch of selfish chavs who couldn't care less and want to enjoy their lives unburdened by an old guy who has lost all his faculties and become a nuisance.

Or they may be decent, loving people who have reached the end of a very long tether, caring for a human disaster zone, with very little help or support on the horizon.

Thankfully, most care in this country is given willingly and there is love and patience on all sides, and humour when things go wrong. Equally, and I have witnessed it myself, oldsters can be breathtakingly rude, cantankerous, demanding and idle. Even those who aren't suffering mental decline.

Help the Aged claims that even in Victorian days, old people didn't suffer a fate like this. Of course they didn't. In the old days, people rarely reached an age where they could become senile. In the old days, doctors didn't have pro-life organisations poking their nose into medical affairs. In the old days, there wasn't the pressure to keep everyone alive for the sake of it, even when it was glaringly obvious there was no real quality of life. It's not just the old folks, either. Too many people are left horribly in the lurch, caring for relatives who should really be in a hospital or a secure mental unit.

Elderly Bill and Wendy Ainscow, worn down by years of caring for their adult daughter who had Asperger's syndrome, and bankrupted by her wanton spending, decided to take their own lives in Tenerife earlier this week.

Bill died, but Wendy was rescued, and now faces burying her husband in a foreign pauper's grave.

In their farewell letter they wrote: "The only way out is to end our own lives. We don't know what will become of our daughter but we can't cope any more."

Even while all this was going on, and the old gentleman was being quietly abandoned, the government and the opposition were trumpeting the money and the help they were going to make available to parents.

As a parent myself, I know I should be thrilled by all the effort they are pouring into this little vote-earner. But I'm more worried about the deafening silence all parties have maintained on the invisible and worrying problem of caring for older relatives.

And what I'd like to know is this; why is it wrong to dump an impossible older relative at a hospital to ensure they get the right care, but right to ship a younger one off to school, for more than 10 hours a day to ensure likewise?

What exactly is the difference?