Yep, me too Robert (seems I’m not the only freak):
Yes, my eyes prickled as Boris spoke — I know where he’s coming from
Robert Crampton
Tuesday April 14 2020, 12.01am, The Times
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I was struck by the emotional force — all the stronger for those emotions being suppressed, if only barely — of the prime minister’s message of gratitude to the health workers who saved his life last week. “Our NHS is the beating heart of this country,” said Boris Johnson. “It is the best of this country . . . it is powered by love.”
I don’t mind admitting that at those words I felt a distinct prickle in what Johnson in his previous incarnation as Bertie Wooster would no doubt have called “the old waterworks”. Waterworks as in tear duct, not urinary tract. Why so lachrymose? Because I agree with him. And because he obviously meant it.
Boris, child of privilege as he is, has made a career out of not bothering to hide — indeed flaunting — that privilege. At the same time, it’s often said of him that he is desperate to be liked. Deep down, our revivified prime minister has possibly gone through life suspecting that so-called ordinary people hate his guts.
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Boris Johnson thanks healthcare workers for saving his life
Then fate conveys him into a hospital, a London hospital moreover, the cradle of leftish immigrant Remainer sentiment, and not only do the staff there not hate him, they treat him with the loving care they would give to any patient, thereby saving his life. A man who (I’m guessing here) believed that the concept of shared humanity was so much waffle enters, in extremis, the warm embrace of the NHS and discovers that very concept made flesh.
Often that warm embrace is literal. Leaving aside various accidents and emergencies, I remember in particular a visit I paid not long ago to the Homerton in Hackney, east London, for a check-up, a straightforward gastroscopy. Except when a procedure involves a tube being inserted down your oesophagus, perilously close to your windpipe, nothing is straightforward. It’s uncomfortable bordering on painful. Invasive. Frightening. Frightening, mostly. Frightening enough to reduce a man to a whimpering wreck, a wreck who finds himself suddenly and desperately in need of the comforting presence of a nurse to stroke his hair, clutch him to her bosom and tell him it’s all going to be all right.
My gratitude to this woman, whom I hadn’t met five minutes earlier and would not recognise if I met again, is eternal. Seriously. And there wasn’t even anything wrong with me! That’s the way it is with those who step up and step in when you are weak and vulnerable. And health workers do that day after day, year after year. Ten minutes after I’d departed, that nurse would have been helping the next poor wimp get through the same ordeal.
From a broken wrist playing rugby aged 13 in 1977, through various illnesses and mishaps (mostly self-inflicted) up to a mysterious tropical ailment that confined me to Hull Royal Infirmary a few Christmasses ago, I’ve needed to be treated in hospital overnight seven or eight times. Through those episodes, and through the birth of my children to the death of my parents, I must have met hundreds of medics. I haven’t got a bad word to say about any of them. Quite the opposite. I know — we all know — exactly where the prime minister is coming from.
