Last Christmas one of the best presents I received was a book of lyrics from a songwriter I've loved for almost 20 years.
Usually the best songs creep up on me, becoming earworms that linger for days. But hearing Australian musician Nick Cave's (Are You) The One That I've Been Waiting For? for the first time was different.
I was a bookish, painfully awkward teenager who listened to Radio Ulster's Across the Line every night while ploughing through hours of GCSE and A level revision at my grandmother's house. Many of the songs were just background music to conjugating French verbs and writing essays on 19th century British parliamentary acts but Cave’s was different.
The opening guitar chords came out of my cheap radio like a strange, subversive force, and then Cave's low grumble kicked in - less singing more a lament that mixed the sacred and profane.
Looking at that same book of lyrics this Christmas, I thought not of being a teenager but of my grandmother, who often sat beside me while I revised, who made endless cups of tea and warned me not to sit too close to the three-bar heater. Little did I appreciate, as a naive, selfish 17-year-old wrestling with the comparatively trivial problems of adolescence that it was those simple moments in her little bungalow that I will cherish for the rest of my life.
A proud Derry woman, granny lived through extreme poverty, terrible bereavements, two world wars, a global depression, the rise and fall of communism, bombs and bullets and still managed never to lose her faith in life.
Yet like all of us, as she grew older she became more susceptible to illness and more vulnerable. The news has been full of depressing statistics about lengthy A&E waits - hundreds of patients forced to spend hours on trolleys or chairs as they desperately hope for a free hospital bed. But behind each figure is a human being, most likely elderly, and their distressed families.
I've waited in hospital wards and cancer treatment centres for hours, hoping that loved ones will get the treatment that they need. Even outside the immediate pressures of A&E, it's clear that our nurses are overworked and under the type of constant, life-or-death pressure that few of us could withstand. My family was fortunate that when granny was seriously ill she didn’t have to endure the 12-hour waits that so many patients have experienced this Christmas. Yet without proper investment in our health service, it’s looking likely that we’ll all face a difficult old age.
Our population is ageing. Most of us can expect to live long past the Biblical three score years and ten. And with that comes inevitable health problems and pressures on the NHS. The north’s A&E departments treated 14 per cent more patients this Christmas compared to two years ago. The increase in patient numbers, combined with severe nursing shortages, has left our hospitals in crisis.
Before Stormont collapsed last year, then minister Michelle O’Neill said the health service was at “breaking point”. She unveiled an ambitious 10-year plan to shake up the system, including putting greater focus on care at GP surgeries. But with no executive, much of the work has stalled. And Ms O’Neill’s party Sinn Féin has argued that even with the restoration of power-sharing any new health minister would still be beset by severe funding cuts.
It’s difficult for politicians who rely on our votes to suggest policies which may prove unpopular. But surely increasing taxes for people who can afford to contribute more to the economy and reintroducing prescription charges for adults earning a reasonable wage could help plug some of the funding shortfall? The RHI scandal has shown that public funds must be better managed but any overhaul is likely to take several years - years which ill and elderly people don’t have.
In his song Nick Cave asks over and over “are you the one that I've been waiting for?” He doesn't really give an answer, singing "O we will know, won’t we?/ The stars will explode in the sky./ O but they don’t, do they?/ Stars have their moment and then they die”.
It is certain that we will all die. The lucky ones amongst us will reach a good age. We need to do more, much more, to give our elderly citizens the decent care they deserve.
