Out Of Ireland, Out Of Wales, Of England

I married my way into the Irish diaspora. It is a nice place to be. I was born into the Welsh diaspora and, despite the turmoil in Welsh rugby, that is also a nice place to inhabit. I am though English and there are aspects of that that concern me. Let me illustrate.

On Friday I took a journey to the doctors surgery I have used since the Groupie and I first married. We have moved three times since then but have never felt any urge to transfer to a surgery that occupies the same supposedly rarified area as Casa Piggy. The service I receive from my doctors is superb and I can say that they have played a central part in keeping me alive. The National Health Service at its best is a thing of wonder. 

My drive to the surgery (I had requested a PSA test and they had readily agreed - no symptoms but I am of the age) takes me through Kingstanding Circle, a place with tender memories for us because we lived round the corner when first married in a lovely little house that cost us the princely sum of £15000. The Circle has been ambush-swathed in Union Flags and Crosses of St. George. I am at heart a patriot but this sort of display has come to feel threatening and somehow indicative of division and rancour. I cannot tell you how sad this all makes me feel as I hunker down in my middle class redout. I feel vaguely estranged from my own homeland.

After my blood sample had been given and I had admitted that, yes, my blood pressure remains stubbornly a bit too high, I drove on down Short Heath Road and up Station Road to Erdington to see my aged mater familias. As I waited for the temporary lights on Station Road to change I observed a slattern coming out of a convenience store dressed in pyjamas and a seedy dressing gown. It was half-ten in the morning. It may be a little thing and I may be a terrible snob, but really is this what we have come to?

Back to Ireland and a question springs to mind. How can that sainted isle produce two such contrasting products as Mrs Brown's Boys (which I'm sorry but I have to say this, is pitiful) and Leonard and Hungry Paul, which in case you haven't seen it is delightful, a sort of Napoleon Dynamite meets Derry Girls.

I don't usually approve of early Christmas trees but tomorrow is a working day for our decorator in chief (the Groupie of course) and next Saturday will be a tad late, so our trees have gone up this weekend and this afternoon I will mount the step-ladder and put up the outside lights (for switching on tomorrow) - all is well, mostly all anyway.

That blood pressure thing - I have been out running on both days since my test.           

2021: 7 - 8

We suffer from a lack of Faith? The capital F is deliberate, as is the question mark. Speaking for myself I find my own faith intellectually vexing but, at base, comforting. I wish that comfort on others but I know of people far more decent and happy than I who manage perfectly well without it.

I mention this because in July the NHS was awarded the George Cross - rather akin to the historical awards of that honour to the island of Malta and to the Royal Ulster Constabulary. All leave a rather icky feeling that the donor of the award is virtue-signalling. This may sound ungenerous but let me explain.

My first exposure to paid employment was as a student porter in the NHS. This was back in the good old, bad old, days before Thatcher had even become Prime Minister. The hospital was laughably over-staffed and was a hot-bed of job demarcation. Nonetheless there was an underlying feeling of comfort that the Service was there for all of us. In a (much) later business life I had to deal with the Service on a regular basis. Its administration was sclerotic and badly thought-out. But just as you reached the point of despair you would encounter someone who genuinely believed in the provision of services free at the point of delivery. To my shame I cannot remember his name but I negotiated a complex contract with a Procurement Officer at BEN NHS Trust. The two of us pushed it through, sometimes paying lip-service to the blocked but proper channels, more often making it up as we went along. I count it one of the handful of my best legal accomplishments.

All of which in a round-about way brings me to my point. The NHS is the closest thing we have to an established religion in modern Britain - and that state of affairs is to a large degree because so many of us lack any better faith. This veneration of the Health Service is not in fact good for us or for the Service itself. 

In August Panorama alleged that David Cameron had made (perfectly legally it would seem) £7 million for advising the bankrupt Greensill company. Now never mind that old shitbag Tiny Rowland, that really is the unacceptable face of capitalism and a good reason why it is so difficult to be an apologist for the modern Conservative Party - and God knows, I've tried.

An Ailing And Much Loved Family Member

I went to get my eyes tested last week. Nothing much to report on the general eyesight front - I'm getting some proper reading glasses but my distance sight is still fine, courtesy of the decade old laser surgery. Being me I managed to choose  a woundingly expensive pair of frames - Oakley don't you know, to go with my precious shades. The shades, as any fule kno, make me run faster so presumably this new pair will make me read more quickly. All good then.

Well not quite all good as it turned out. I mentioned to the optician (a very brisk and efficient young lady) that I had been suffering from a 'floater' in my right eye which had first appeared three weeks beforehand. So she had a a jolly good look and was concerned enough to write me a letter of referral and to despatch me post-haste to the Midland Eye Hospital at Dudley Road, there possibly being a retinal tear. And this is where the title of my piece today comes in - I'm not talking of myself but rather, figuratively, of the National Health Service. I read somewhere (I don't think it was me who coined it, but I have pilfered the phrase) that The dear old NHS is the nearest we thing we now have in this country to a shared religion. Now, let me be clear, my experience of dealing professionally with the NHS was often disspiriting - it has the nimbleness of an oil tanker (a bloody big one with a wonky rudder at that ) and I don't buy all that guff about its every employee being an angel. However it has safely delivered two children to us and it was there for me when I was at my lowest ebb. For all the inefficiency and waste it rather preferred that I should not harm myself when I was ambivalent (to say the least) on the subject. So God bless it.

My longish afternoon at the Eye Hospital confirmed that the service is creaking under the burden of demands but in the final anlaysis it just about got by. Despite the problem of patient numbers, the problem of multiple languages being spoken by patients and staff and the organisational demands consequent upon Covid, I was warned that it would take four hours for me to be diagnosed and that transpired to be spot on. I had expected as much and had a book with me, but this proved a false comfort once I had been triaged and had eye drops put in to dilate my pupils because I couldn't read a bloody thing. Anyway you will be relieved to know (well I am at least) that after a thorough examination (including with a rather creepy strong lens that actually skims the surface of the eye) I don't have a retinal tear. What I have is a posterior vitreous detachment which has stirred up the jelly in my eye. Time is the cure. So I felt relieved as I left the hospital and grateful to that much loved relative, for all its manifest faults. It remains a magnificent conception, though possibly one that can never be perfectly realised.