Separating out hands-on care from the caring infrastructures necessary to enable it, including more indirect but interlinked sustaining practices, Bunting does not expand on the forms of community building, or radical municipalism, which are essential for repairing care.

The Initiative supported the All Party Parliamentary Group in their 10 month inquiry which led to a report Mindful Nation UK, published in October 2015.It introduces sterile bureaucratic accounting, measuring compliance, risk-avoidance, regulation and outcomes, all at odds with the flexible creativity genuine caring requires. I particularly enjoyed the section at the end of each chapter, where Bunting explores our changing understanding of the word “care” by offering definitions of associated words and examining their historical context. Paid or unpaid, the quality of care in our lives is nothing less than sociality itself: it is an index of how we survive as a society and a species. The alarm clock gives us a reason to get up in the morning, the expectations of colleagues or clients give us a reason to do our jobs well, the misery in developing countries .

They were working harder than ever, often still living with ‘in-work poverty’, their lives frequently at risk, and many already snuffed out by Covid-19. A deeply caring man, he gets patients with terminal cancer to smile and he washes the hair of the dead. This book made me feel alternately happy and sad - the idea of 'care' is bandied about so lightly as if it is easy to do, but Bunting makes clear that it is absolutely a skilled and technical job - just one that is undervalued and easy to misunderstand.

Bunting condemns the political dimensions of needlessly imposed austerity policies, with their disastrous outcomes for care. Humane, perceptive, honest, compassionate, wide-ranging, and erudite, it is a profound inquiry into the most important social issue of our time. It made me think about things about my life (and death) that I have never thought about and it made me feel things that I didn’t think were possible and more importantly it paints a picture of a crumbling system and the millions of lives that depend on it. Bunting’s book reveals a grim pattern: inadequate funding means inadequate staffing means inadequate care, sparking scandals such as the neglect that killed hundreds at a Mid Staffordshire hospital in the 2000s – which in turn ushers in well-meaning but burdensome bureaucracy.