What would you do to support the NHS? My mother gave up her festive drink | Zoe Williams
It was the very end of the holiday season, and I was trying to get my mom to drink some whiskey, partly – no, sorry, entirely – because I had bought it for her and wanted to drink it. Although I am intensely relaxed about drinking alone, I still have a slight cultural taboo about drinking someone else's gift in front of them. I should have bought her a puzzle or something too.
She wouldn't have, because she didn't want to fall off and end up in the ER . God knows I don't want her to end up there either, but whiskey as he drinks it - in minute quantities, with boiling water added like a Lemsip - couldn't knock a person down any more than a gusty wind. I came to this point with strength, from many different directions, but she didn't budge and we solved the problem by finding another whiskey to drink that was a gift from someone else.
The list of things she won't do because she doesn't want to put extra pressure on the NHS also includes: getting her cataract done; take a duck out of the oven; using sharp knives.
The all-man-made crisis in the health service has reduced her quality of life by about 85%, and she's on the periphery, a person who doesn't didn't even have to use it. Follow the concentric circles - people with chronic illnesses, people with accident-prone young children (i.e. all young children), people living in high-density housing during a flu season, people who have to be in A&E because they work there - and the national stress level is too intense to understand.
It's all part of the Conservative game plan, people used to say: reduce the NHS to a state of inapplicability, then shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, that obviously isn't working." It seemed diabolical at the start of their ill-begotten reign, but, as it reaches its end, sane people come to a different, more obvious conclusion: it's broken because they broke it. We must not give up on socialized health care. We must abandon Tory governments.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
It was the very end of the holiday season, and I was trying to get my mom to drink some whiskey, partly – no, sorry, entirely – because I had bought it for her and wanted to drink it. Although I am intensely relaxed about drinking alone, I still have a slight cultural taboo about drinking someone else's gift in front of them. I should have bought her a puzzle or something too.
She wouldn't have, because she didn't want to fall off and end up in the ER . God knows I don't want her to end up there either, but whiskey as he drinks it - in minute quantities, with boiling water added like a Lemsip - couldn't knock a person down any more than a gusty wind. I came to this point with strength, from many different directions, but she didn't budge and we solved the problem by finding another whiskey to drink that was a gift from someone else.
The list of things she won't do because she doesn't want to put extra pressure on the NHS also includes: getting her cataract done; take a duck out of the oven; using sharp knives.
The all-man-made crisis in the health service has reduced her quality of life by about 85%, and she's on the periphery, a person who doesn't didn't even have to use it. Follow the concentric circles - people with chronic illnesses, people with accident-prone young children (i.e. all young children), people living in high-density housing during a flu season, people who have to be in A&E because they work there - and the national stress level is too intense to understand.
It's all part of the Conservative game plan, people used to say: reduce the NHS to a state of inapplicability, then shrug your shoulders and say, "Well, that obviously isn't working." It seemed diabolical at the start of their ill-begotten reign, but, as it reaches its end, sane people come to a different, more obvious conclusion: it's broken because they broke it. We must not give up on socialized health care. We must abandon Tory governments.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
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