Last week, I helped my friend Alison pack up her much-loved flat overlooking the river in Putney, South-West London, which she has just sold. She was in tears as we carefully wrapped mementoes gathered over two decades travelling the world as a freelance journalist. But her job, too, has gone now, along with her home.
Yet that’s not why she has had to move. She’s giving up her career and home because her elderly parents are too frail to look after themselves, and Alison, an only child with no family of her own, feels she has no choice but to move home to care for them.
Another friend, Gina, is juggling a full-time job with raising three teenage boys and looking after her widowed mother, who has Alzheimer’s and has just moved into a hospice…
