Hitting pause

Sitting here on the first flight of our big adventure, with the remmenants of an in-flight Cannes film-festival movie warming my creative cockles, it is already much easier to reflect on the last decade of frontline work.

The cyclical nature of having an interview on your last day of work is almost impossible to consider now, but somehow this is how things fell. I leaned over the Covid Memorial wall outside the hospital, painted hearts fading, watching the Thames waters lapping under Big Ben. The horns and hoots of another strike breaking my concentration as I ran over interview answers again.

‘Hey, Heeeeey Rishi (ooh aah), 

      I wanna knooooooow when we’ll get fair pay’ 

That poor butchered song (DJ Otzi ruined it first) is enough to make anyone want to stop striking, stop fighting, immediately. Do I really want another job working in this sociologically charged environment with such terrible strike chants? Yes, somehow, yes.

The NHS is a wonderful beast. It has strong claws, gets its strength from sapping goodwill and playing with the guilt of kind people. The strikes are evidently conflicting; I tried one, found it too hard to be away and didn’t try again. In truth, it’d be great if they stopped - the weight of strikes on already battered morale is a straw/camel situation. We all fear the back is already broken, which brings it back to ‘last-ditch’ fighting. 

I didn’t get the job.

I did get a hell of a lot of great people in my life though. Almost everyone you meet in healthcare work is a good person, bar one or two, from one or two specialties [cough]. One of these excellent broken NHS workers is sitting next to me putting on his TED stockings (which he has just realised are not TED stockings, but in fact long ladies socks), 40,000 feet up as we fly out to Rio de Janeiro. We are a health service cliché. We are also now on an overseas Epic* so no more work chat.

See you in Rio!

*not the Apollo kind, sorry to those suffering