Real life | 11 June 2011

‘Every job we do starts by listening to you.’ I stand staring at this sign for a long time as I queue at St George’s Hospital, Tooting.

The waiting area of the X-ray unit is like the easyJet check-in zone at Gatwick when they’ve just cancelled a flight to Alicante. No, that’s not right. It’s like a bombed-out military airbase in a failed state mid Nato evacuation.

People of all creeds and nations are swarming about. The chatter of a dozen different languages makes an impenetrable din. Some are desperate. Others resigned. The more robust ones are trying to make the best of things. I’m sure I spy someone firing up a portable camping stove.

I could have misread it, of course. A David Koresh-style cult leader could have set up the headquarters of an end-of-days hippy camp. Old men sleep on chairs pushed together, women pace with babies on hips. There is absolutely no system. I bet David Koresh had a system. I bet he had someone standing on the door of Mount Carmel in Waco with a clipboard: ‘Do you have an appointment to set yourself on fire? Very good. Please take a seat. Mr Koresh will be handing out lighter fuel later.’

The NHS boasts no such discipline. The chaos starts at the main entrance where the welcome board bears no mention of an X-ray department. You ask at reception and they look at you like you’ve demanded a bowl of spaghetti bottarga.

When the hospital was built it must have occurred to someone that one of the things people might be wanting when they pitched up here was an X-ray. It’s not as if they didn’t give the place some thought. There is, for example, a very nice M&S Simply Food, so I probably could get the spaghetti.