One of the key lessons of the pandemic is that we should rethink how we treat older people and learn to value them

Young, older, elderly. Three words but a world of difference, depending on where you land. As the unspeakable and continuing horror of avoidable deaths from the coronavirus unfolds in our care homes, the early weeks of the UK response to Covid-19 should be looked back on as the midwife of a national revelation about old people.

Old people.

I repeat the term because in recent years we’ve become accustomed to describing old people in ways which soften the facts, diminish our responsibility and blur the reality that being old means being physically weaker and, in any number of ways, more vulnerable. Old people are a gift too, of course, and I’ll come to that, but the dark stuff first.