To be more precise, it’s on Seafield Street, a relatively new build on part of the site of the old Eastern General hospital where, as it happens, my daughter was born about 40 years ago.

To describe as excellent the care and attention she was given hardly covers it. The staff were thoroughly professional and they were nice with it. You can’t ask for more. As an NHS it was free of charge.

And let’s be clear – many of the staff were not native Brits. The service would collapse without immigrants, of whatever status.

She was very frail when she was discharged. But it’s a rehab unit. When medical treatment doesn’t need to be delivered in a hospital, they are set up to get folk out the door. She couldn’t stay there for ever. She really needed supported accommodation, but places are scarce. She knew she was waiting to step into a dead woman’s shoes.

She was discharged to stay with family, which doesn’t suit anyone really. This is a snapshot of the much-discussed all-round pressures on old folk themselves, their families, and public provision.

It all raises many dilemmas with no easy answers. Medicine has changed. My relative had pneumonia at Christmas. Not many years ago it would have seen her off. But she was given a hefty dose of antibiotics, delivered intravenously. She’s had her Covid and another preventive jags.

The medical instinct is to keep you alive. It’s easy to see how an old person can worry about being a burden.

She said to me: “This is a shitty way to die. It would be neater if I had some active disease like cancer to see me off.” As a retired GP, she has seen dying and death all her career. This was no more than a sober evaluation of her circumstances.

Life is sweet because it is fragile and short. Living for ever would be a curse. Don’t wish it on anyone.

And let’s be clear: departure from this life is final. Other lives may be available, but that’s a matter of speculation or faith.

It brings us to the hot topic of the day that can’t be avoided: assisted dying. I am instinctively against it. I’m with Andy Burnham: let’s shelve it until we have the surrounding facilities on a better footing.

Care for the dependant elderly was not included in setting up the NHS and the welfare state in the 1940s because life expectancy didn’t go much beyond retirement age.

Hospitals are over-full of folk who have been ill, but on recovery there’s nowhere suitable to discharge them. Too many care homes are run by rip-off PLCs which run away with someone’s savings and assets. Modern housing doesn’t include granny flats.

For me, good palliative care is assisted dying. Years ago, I visited a friend in St Columba’s hospice. He was sitting up in bed, chatting away. He was tired and couldn’t take much. He died that night.

There must be more hospices, and they shouldn’t be relying on charity.

Nobody should be brought to feel that he’s a burden or a drain on resources. Just as all infants have a right to health care, so provision for old age and end-of-life care is a right and a public responsibility. Means-testing should be calibrated so that it doesn’t impoverish those with modest savings that are intended for surviving family, while those with more than enough should pay a fair contribution.

Not everyone is lucky enough to live to a ripe old age and be fit enough to enjoy it. You don’t get to my age without contemplating your own mortality. This doesn’t have to be morbid, or depressive, or anxious, or angry. There is a growing acceptance that the time comes to depart the field of play. The world will get on fine without you, just as we get on fine without our grandparents.

At my age, we’ve all been to plenty of funerals, many of them marking the end of folk younger than ourselves. The best way to finish a funeral is with this last line to the closing prayer: “May we who are left live what remains to us such that, when they come to our funerals, they’ll have some good things to say about us”.

We only get one shot at this.