American NHS? Let’s call the whole thing off

For an institution widely believed to be on life support, the health service shows signs of vibrant health when it comes to inclusivity.

Take me, as the late Max Miller might have put it. Seldom does a month pass without the NHS – ‘our NHS’, technically, if only to Tory politicians with lavish private health insurance – graciously including me in one way or another.

Over the last couple of years, I have been such a regular at the Royal Free Hospital in north London that I anticipate the arrival of a loyalty card, entitling the bearer to free vinyl gloves and a two-for-one colonoscopy deal, any day.

In succession to impertinent inspections of the testes, kidneys and oesophagus, the latest act of inclusion concerns the heart. A 24-hour ECG having developed not necessarily to my advantage (an arrhythmia, cause as yet unknown), I was cordially invited for an echocardiogram. This procedure, for any medical ignoramuses, is an ultrasonic test to determine how well, or otherwise, blood is flowing to, through and from the organ.

The appointment was set for a morning a couple of weeks back, but the combination of a diary clash and the traditional FOFO (fear of finding out) dictated a postponement.

It was on my calling the cardiology department’s bespoke appointments phone line to rearrange that the extent of the NHS’s commitment to leaving no patient behind became plain.

If that notion seems bizarre in an age when nonagenarians can spend 18 refreshing hours nursing a broken hip on the street while awaiting an ambulance, consider the following.

On ringing the number, and being shocked to the precipice of ague on finding it unanswered by a human, I was treated to a recorded message. Among myriad options on offer was this: ‘Press the star button,’ the mechanical voice instructed, ‘for American English.’

So whenever next you hear of some tragic soul whose cancer metastasized (or rather metastasised, lest certain readers be perplexed) during the gaping temporal chasm between diagnosis and treatment, console yourself with this.

No one whose lingua franca is American English, but cannot speak a word of English English, will be let down by the Royal Free should they need to change an appointment.

Not, at least, if they have a heart condition. I cannot vouch for other departments. However, there’s no shred of evidence that these are any less accommodating towards this crucial linguistic sub-demographic of the unwell.

Should you ring gastroenterology, for example, and press the * button when prompted, there’s every chance of your hearing, ‘If during your consultation you are asked about the colour of your stools, please be reassured that the word “color” is brought to you without the letter u.’

As for orthopaedics, logic implies that pressing the button will bring forth ‘If you break a bone after falling on the sidewalk on the way to your appointment, don’t call us to cancel. Ring for an ambulance, and we’ll catch up with you in A&E when you arrive on Wednesday week.’

God knows what the * button leads to, American English-wise, in cardiology. It might be the simple substitution of ECG with EKG, or something less technical such as ‘If you think two flights of stairs could kill you – and with your heart, you might just be right – please take the elevator instead.’

It may even be something more playful, such as ‘If your appointment is scheduled for 2pm, please arrive 15 minutes early at … but, hey, you do the math.’

With hindsight, I suppose I should have pressed the * button, and found out. But news of this option’s existence induced such instant, violent palpitations that I feared another ounce of high excitement would provoke a myocardial infarction – and that on a day when my defibrillator paddles happened to be at the dry cleaners.

Reflecting on the matter now, I do find it extraordinary that this group is so abysmally ignored. We hear much about the exclusion of vulnerable minorities, but never a dickie bird about the battalions of American-English-speakers in grave peril of dying of thirst because no one has informed them that what they call a faucet is known here as a tap.

George Bernard Shaw was no dummy in the medical field. The Doctor’s Dilemma, a magnificent play, now reads less like a brutal satirical deconstruction of early-20th-century class-based health inequality than as an eerily prescient vision of what ‘our NHS’ would become.

But the old boy dropped something of a bollock when he famously described England and America as two countries divided by a common language. English English and American English have nothing in common whatever.

If you don’t believe me about that, check out the hordes of ailing tourists from Baltimore and Phoenix who are wandering endlessly around the ground floor of the Royal Free, desperately trying to get their prescriptions filled.

They are wholly unable to compute that the area with ‘Pharmacy’ above its entrance – the one with all the medicines prominently displayed on shelves – is in fact the drug store.

what were Teddy Boys?

Seventy years ago, Britain seemed under threat from menacing young men who favoured exaggerated frock coats and drainpipe trousers.

Savile Row devised the ‘Edwardian’ suits for their wealthy clientele in 1950, and working-class youths across Britain quickly adopted this look. A Daily Express article of 23rd September 1953 shortened the term and created the phrase Teddy Boy.

Jeff Nuttall wrote in Bomb Culture that Teddy Boys were ‘waiting for Elvis Presley’. Popular mythology associates them with frenzied bouts of cinema-seatslashing to the strains of Jailhouse Rock, but the first Teds jived to Ken Mackintosh’s The Creep at their local Palais.

The 1953 proto-Teddy Boy drama Cosh Boy, the first of a succession of cinematic Brylcreemed menaces, recommended thrashing to cure juvenile delinquency. In the following year, the Londonderry Sentinel complained that ‘no welldressed man would be seen dead’ in an Edwardian suit, thanks to ‘youths with more money than dress sense’.

Teddy Boy crime was a regular fixture in 1950s newspapers. The Daily Mirror headlined its account of the 1953 murder of John Beckley ‘Flick Knives, Dance Music and Edwardian Suits’. A ‘family doctor’ told the London Evening News that ‘what they need is rehabilitation in a psychopathic institution’.

Many teachers fervently hoped National Service would cure antisocial habits, while dance halls and fish-andchip parlours frequently banned Teds.

Lancashire’s assistant education officer suggested, ‘Well-chosen poetry, well-read in youth clubs, would make even Teddy Boys come to enjoy it.’

But many Teds were hard-working apprentices, while a few middle-class grammar-school boys, such as Vivian Stanshall and John Lennon, relished dressing as part-time delinquents. A BBC television Special Enquiry

what is ROMEO?

ROMEO stands for Retired Old Men Eating Out.

The ROMEO acronym originated in New York, where the first group was called Retired Old Men Eating Out Wednesdays – ROMEOW, which dampens the Shakespearean resonance.

It is a growing movement offering camaraderie and the conversation of kindred spirits for the retired or those on the brink of retirement.

I discovered ROMEO on a recent trip to Nevis when my brother-in-law (who lives there) invited me along as a guest to his ROMEO group lunch. Sat round the table were a retired dentist from New York, one or two who had been something ‘in finance’, a retired State administrator from California, a still-practising obs-and-gynae doctor and a retired NATO grandee.

Conversation ranged from the mundane (local airport expansion) to the intensely personal (‘It must be a year now since your wife died – how are you doing and how was the anniversary?’).

As a young shaver, I never sought out or much fancied all-male company. I didn’t like football and after just one pint of roguish beer I felt full to bursting. I preferred the company of women where wine, canapés and jollity might lead to romance.

But now north of 75 I realised that ROMEO lunches are a way of providing excellent male company, rooted in a group with centuries of life experience between them. There is also something about getting older that encourages honesty and helpfulness. So when I got home, I set about creating my own ROMEO group.

The Nevis ROMEO group meets once contained a priceless interview with the amiable ‘Pat’ and ‘Mike’, who tried – and failed – to look menacing.

The Daily Herald was still reporting ‘Yard orders “get tough on Teddies” ’ in 1957. However, the decade’s end saw the rise of ‘Italian style’ suits and the ‘Ton Up’ boys who combined quiffs with leather jackets and BSAs on hire purchase. Some diehard Teds now wore brightly coloured drape jackets with velvet pockets – the outfit’s last stage before its presumed demise.

But surviving Teddy Boys still haunted the provinces in the mid-1960s, bemoaning those long-haired Beatles. Then, a few years later, there was the first of a series of revivals, even if some original Teds regarded 1970s followers of Showaddywaddy as ‘plastics’.

Today, there are several Facebook groups, and this writer is proud to belong to the Teddyboys Appreciation Society.

George Melly saw Teddy Boys as a reaction against a grey, dismal realm ‘where good boys played ping-pong’.

The observation of a 1954 Mecca Dance Hall customer encapsulates their legacy: ‘Our dress is our answer to a dull world.’ The Ted anticipated future generations of British youth who created a costume to please themselves.

Andrew Roberts

a week; we are starting with once every two weeks or so and are planning ROMEO lunch 7. Our group includes a retired BBC editor, two people who worked on the Concorde air intake at Filton, a retired structural engineer, me and a man who makes and sells sausages.

A few basic requirements. We always find a restaurant that does a set lunch for under £25 or so and pay our own bills. The other essential is that we are all ‘up for it’; ‘it’ being meeting people whose paths ours might not normally cross.

In the group there are the eternally cheerful, the fairly silent, the effusive, the previously lonely, the rich, poor and in between, the widowed and never married.

I’d thoroughly recommend the concept.

Alan Ravenscroft

Alan Ravenscroft is author of From Here to Infirmity: A Beginner’s Guide to Retirement