Matt wrote to us because he is profoundly angry over #partygate. He wondered whether he should take a deep breath and temper his outrage. We don’t think he should. He’s at the sharp end. We need to hear his voice. Johnson needs to hear his voice. We are sure you’ll agree. Ed
There’s something that leaves a nauseous feeling as valuable brain tissue is being starved of oxygen in a patient whilst you have to get into full PPE to commence CPR on them.
There’s something infuriating about the sweat and mist blurring the vision through your visor as you ventilate the clinically dead or pump on their chest.
When you look to hear where that ring tone is coming from and realise it’s a relative phoning on their mobile to get an update. A relative who has stayed at home after the terrifying ordeal of putting their parent on an ambulance and then staying home to wait for news.
There’s something heart-wrenchingly unprecedented that, here in the UK, a patient who prided themselves on keeping fit and active succumbs to failing health because they’ve stayed indoors and become sedentary to protect themselves and the ones they love at the request of our prime minister.
There’s something that tears at my conscience that the elderly sit on their own for nearly a year.
The quiver in the voice over the phone that betrays their loneliness, that their grieving for a partner, a child, relative is a storm made all the more tumultuous through isolation.
There’s something that appals in the knowledge that someone who would otherwise receive treatment for a curable cancer is having to stretch the boundaries of the margin of time within which they could survive because they now form part of a backlog.
There’s something unjust in it becoming the norm for nurses, doctors, receptionists, supermarket cashiers , bus drivers, and many more public workers having to face verbal and physical abuse over mask-wearing and compliance with the rules.
There is something perverse in the fact this country stood together momentarily on doorsteps up and down the land, saw beyond the narcissistic mop of hair and decided to take a chance that this might just be a defining moment for us as a society with him at the helm. For that brief time, we might have been forgiven for bestowing on him a Churchillian moment.
If it wasn’t so interlaced with tragedy I’d look back and laugh now at the gasps we voiced that Boris’s righthand man took a drive to Bernard Castle. So infuriated were we that we never imagined that now, viewed in comparison with our PM appearing to relish a Christmas quiz as 70 people in his house enjoy booze and tinsel, Cummings’ eye-test drive would seem almost benign.
If the pictures released by the fine journalism of Pippa Crerar do not dismantle the premiership of this over-privileged, self-serving anachronism of the upper class, then there is something inherently wrong with this country and its parliament.
Time to go now, Boris. Don’t you ever dare to condescend to us again with your rhetoric about sacrifice and loss. And, finally, unless your health or life depends on it, do not ever darken the doors of our NHS again or I and my many colleagues across the land will personally march you back out again.
