The new year has begun uncomfortably on the domestic front and the relatively local has held the front pages over and above our continuing involvement in misconceived interventions abroad. Further discussion of potential bail out deals with private individuals for the Northern Rock Bank, especially with Richard Branson, Gordon Brown’s current travelling companion in China and India, has superseded much other news from the trip. In India you probably know more about our prime minister’s activities there than we do, in spite of half the British press corps apparently travelling on the same aeroplane. The impression here is of platitudinous statements delivered with ponderous intellectual weight and an unerring ability to be stultifyingly dull given none of the innate lightness of touch of our last prime minister, or ability — and perhaps this is a relief — to produce a snappy soundbite to order.

Northern Rock, foul weather and floods, dismal hospital facilities, a miraculously safe plane crash at Heathrow Airport, rising numbers of youth stabbings, leading to metal detectors at school gates, an unending and prurient inquest into Princess Diana’s death and a crashing stock market in anticipation of American recessions: January, the gloomiest month in any case, has the makings of several Greek tragedies and no shortage of chorus members, especially the tax payers who will undoubtedly lose out in the Northern Rock dealings and continue to lose out on the provision of education and health that we all pay for by default.

After an educational week touring old age residential dementia units for my mother-in-law, who has Alzheimers and who may not be able to stay for much longer in an annexe to our house due to her need for professional nursing care, I had thought to write about the provisions for old age in this country. Simply put, if you can afford it, there is terrific care available, if you can’t, god knows. Most probably, some member of your family will be forced to take on full-time caring in order to avoid the necessary and impossible expense, even at the lowest level, of putting an elderly relation into a far from happy institution. The amount of recognition their caring receives from the State will depend entirely on the area they live in.

My mother-in-law currently has a number of carers in rotation that she is able to pay for herself. I am certain that care within a family is the best thing for old people, while it is possible, but if I had to be the carer full-time, murder would undoubtedly be committed. The people who manage to care with the minimal help available from the State must be saints, and if I were to continue with this argument, I could not help but advocate some form of euthanasia, although in reality more for those in severe physical distress than for those who have no idea what is going on around them and may, for all I know, be quite happy, however destructive their possible contentment to those who care for them.

Musings over the horrors of old age — and I have made my children promise to push me over the nearest cliff at the first sign of dementia — have been superseded by habitual fury over the tyrannies of petty bureaucracy, both here and in India, both perpetrated by British bureaucrats, and both related to 15-year-old girls, one my daughter and one her friend from Ladakh. My extreme irritation was hardly abated by getting up at 3.30 am this morning in Wiltshire to speak to the British high commission visa office in Delhi at their opening. When I was on a visit with my daughter to a community-based project while doing research in 2006, she made friends with the daughter of one of the project directors, who has since been offered a scholarship term at my daughter’s boarding school in Dorset. The school feels, as do I, that this is an opportunity for a child who might not otherwise easily have the chance to experience a different culture, and hope that it might be the beginning of other such exchanges. It also fits well with the charitable status of private secondary schools in the United Kingdom, a status that is currently being debated in parliament and press.

Needless to say all plans were going swimmingly well until we applied for a visa with the usual and relevant documentation, only a tourist visa, because this girl will only be here for a few weeks in her school holidays. Clerks in the visa office have contrived to turn the issuing of a visa into a major saga, involving me, Bryanston School, the school this girl attends in Leh, her parents, my bank, land registry in the UK to prove I actually live somewhere, and half the staff in the high commission. Far worse, they put a 15-year-old through the sort of inquisitorial process that I had imagined was generally reserved for drug dealers in police cells.

Not altogether surprisingly, and whilst understanding the need for caution regarding child trafficking, illegal immigration and so on, I am irritated, even reduced to an attack of outrage from Tonbridge Wells. I have Criminal Record Bureau clearance as I am involved in work on child rights and children’s projects in India and other places, and object strongly to having my integrity and that of a major British school questioned by the British visa office, particularly as I hold long-term Indian visas and my children travel in and out of the country regularly with little difficulty beyond the lengthy queues at the Indian high commission in London. I think the situation may finally have been redeemed by the intervention of the British entry clearance officer, who has at last decided to believe that I am not engaging in the full-scale abduction of a child who is my daughter’s friend.

My daughter found herself on the wrong side of similar bureaucratic bullying yesterday on a train back to school from London, when the ticket collector refused to believe she was 15 and therefore still entitled to the child’s ticket that my husband had bought for her prior to putting her on the train. Carrying no identification beyond a bank card, she produced that to be informed that nobody under 16 had bank cards and she was therefore admitting her own guilt — completely untrue, as she has held a bank card since she was 14 like most of her friends, as the best way to get occasional pocket money at school. Apparently, this attack on her truthfulness went on until she was reduced to tears, whereupon the collector announced that he would “leave it this time”.

I am quite appalled that no other passenger saw fit to intervene, but far more that the person of greatest responsibility on the train, and the one to whom a child travelling alone would always be told to turn, should behave in this way. I most sincerely hope that the letters written by my husband to his chairman and directors this morning cause him at least as much distress as he caused my daughter.

I think I have morphed into Colonel Blimp overnight, but at least my rage may keep me warm when the heating oil runs out and increasing petty regulation of our already close-circuit-televised and proscribed existences reduces us all to gibbering impotent wrecks. I have made all my children promise that at least one will take it upon themselves to push me over the nearest cliff or otherwise fatally damage me if dementia sets in. It may be coming sooner than they realize.