Chelsey: Everything that’s right about this country

This week’s episode of 24 Hours in A&E had me in tears. Honestly, who would want to do a job in the NHS, especially with the dwindling resources they’re given? People who give a shit about people, that’s who. The entire programme is worth watching for the expertise of the staff and the tenderness shown by people toward each other, but there’s one particular section which cut right to the bone, starting at 35:04. The clip below should start there, but if it doesn’t, and you’ve only got a few minutes, skip to it. It’s worth sitting through four crappy adverts for. It’s a three-minute section in which an ordinary teenage girl called Chelsey is waiting in A&E and spots an old man waiting for treatment. He reminds her of her grandad, who she quit college to care for. He died of a stroke and she not only misses him, she misses caring for him. This is the sort of person that I think is the real essence of this country and who gives me hope that this crappy society, this appalling selfish austerity regime we’re currently living through, isn’t all there is. Chelsey has more humanity and compassion in her little finger than the David Camerons and George Osbornes and Iain Duncan Smiths and, especially, the Jeremy Hunts who – self-appointedly, self-righteously, without mandate – run this place have, or will ever have, in their entire pathetic, shitty, self-serving, privileged, posturing bodies. And I don’t mind them knowing it.

And yes I am also a bit in love with Chelsey, but anyone with a heart who watched that programme would be too.

(Badge of the day will be back soon…)