My love for The Times

I openly admit I read The Times, I always have.  I am a subscriber and over the years have enjoyed many many articles.  

One article I return too again and again is about the NHS and it appeared in The Sunday Times written by AA Gill.  

AA Gill used to think that being an NHS patient was like travelling second class on a train, grittier than first class, but in the end everyone ended up at the same destination. In his farewell piece back in 2016 he told of a discovery of a drug not available on the NHS . Below is a snippet from that article.

It seems unlikely, uncharacteristic, so un-“us” to have settled on sickness and bed rest as the votive altar and cornerstone of national politics. But there it is: every election, the National Health Service is the thermometer and the crutch of governments. The NHS represents everything we think is best about us. Everyone standing for whatever political persuasion has to lay a sterilised hand on an A&E revolving door and swear that the collective cradle-to-crematorium health service will be cherished on their watch.

The National Health Service is the best of us. You can’t walk into an NHS hospital and be a racist. That condition is cured instantly. But it’s almost impossible to walk into a private hospital and not fleetingly feel that you are one: a plush waiting room with entitled and bad-tempered health tourists.

You can’t be sexist on the NHS, nor patronising, and the care and the humour, the togetherness ranged against the teetering, chronic system by both the caring and the careworn is the Blitz, “back against the wall”, stern and sentimental best of us — and so we tell lies about it.

We say it’s the envy of the world. It isn’t. We say there’s nothing else like it. There is. We say it’s the best in the West. It’s not. We think it’s the cheapest. It isn’t. Either that or we think it’s the most expensive — it’s not that, either. You will live longer in France and Germany, get treated faster and more comfortably in Scandinavia, and everything costs more in America. 

While the abstract of the NHS is heart-warming, the truth for patients is often heart-stopping. And junior doctor strikes, executive pay, failing departments, slow-motion waiting times and outsourcing tell a different story.

AA Gill was diagnosed with Lung Cancer and was first seen at Charing Cross Hospital and these were his thoughts " you couldn't make up Charing Cross Hospital.  Well, not as hospital you couldn't.  It's a monstrous, hideous, crumbling patched up mess.  On the way in, I notice a couple of posters in the street saying "Save Charing Cross Hospital". They're stuck on a municipal noticeboard that is falling over. 

He went on to say 

" I love it: it's how I feel.  The lifts take hours to arrive, emphysemically, wheezingly opening their doors, and when they do it's without confidence or conviction.  A man going up to the cancer ward puts his hand in front of the door and gets out. "I'm too frightened to take this lift." 

In a waiting room, hundreds of us take numbers to sit like wilted potted plants in an autumn garden-centre sale, to take it in turns to meet the antiseptic face.  If this were a set for a film, all the actors and extras would be pulling looks of agony, sadness and fear, but the face of real cancer wipes our expressions to a pale neutral human ".