‘Postcode lottery!’ people scream when one area feels less well treated than another in a public service — in this case, the rollout of the Covid vaccines. It is a silly phrase, if you believe in the devolution of power and the importance of locality. The point of local health trusts, councils and so on is to let local people run most of the things that matter to them. The logical result is that — even within a national set-up like the NHS — there will be differences. If there were no differences, it would not follow that everyone was getting the same high-quality service. It would much more likely show that the service was uniformly bad, because all convoys, to remain in convoy, must go at the speed of the slowest. Visible difference is a spur to improvement. In the case of the vaccine, however, one cannot help noticing that most of the good-news vaccine stories are coming from the north of England. Is that a ‘lottery’, or is some ‘levelling up’ involved from a central government obsessed with retaining a Tory ‘Red Wall’?
A doctor friend in a hospital currently crowded with Covid cases sends me these poignant words: ‘Sadly a few of our patients this past week have been colleagues. There is something unreal about treating someone who is supposed to be “one of us” but is now a patient. You can’t look at them the same and you can’t have the same level of detachment. They should be wearing scrubs, not a gown. They should be bright and joking, not grey and scared. It feels like a strange dream where a child is driving a car and everyone else acts like it’s normal.’
Netflix is about to release The Dig, a drama based on John Preston’s novel about the discovery of the Sutton Hoo Anglo-Saxon treasure just before the war.
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