Dear America, I love the NHS

Angelina Jolie has written about her double mastectomy for the New York Times. She had it because her mother died of breast cancer at 56, and she discovered that she was carrying the faulty gene, BRCA1, which meant she was at high risk of having breast cancer too. There's also a risk of ovarian cancer with BRCA1.

Angelina is a wealthy woman, as a successful screen actress and director, so finding the money to pay for the tests and surgery wouldn't have been a problem for her. She wrote,

Breast cancer alone kills some 458,000 people each year, according to the World Health Organization, mainly in low- and middle-income countries. It has got to be a priority to ensure that more women can access gene testing and lifesaving preventive treatment, whatever their means and background, wherever they live. The cost of testing for BRCA1 and BRCA2, at more than $3,000 in the United States, remains an obstacle for many women.

Since British woman Wendy Watson persuaded doctors that she should have preventative mastectomies 21 years ago, the operation has become available on the NHS, after genetic testing and counselling. It seems scandalous to me that, in a developed country like America, money should still be an obstacle to saving a life. Those who opposed Barack Obama's healthcare reforms referred to the NHS in derogatory terms, rejecting "socialism", which seems to them to be a worse threat than disease, so American women with a family history of breast cancer may die because they can't afford preventative surgery.

Among other health issues, America's infant mortality rate is more than twice that of Japan or Sweden, while its emergency departments struggle to cope with the consequences of gun crime, which costs the US economy $37billion+ a year. Yes, the NHS has its problems, which have been keenly debated over the last few years, but America seems to have far bigger ones.

I've had a mastectomy and a whole bunch of other surgery and treatment from the NHS. If I was American, I think I'd have died before now.

Michael Gove could never do this

This is inspiring stuff, but in spite of all those Hollywood films about teachers who win over their delinquent classes, you need more than just the constitution of an ox and the determination of a Miss Pierson to be a good teacher with kids who test you to extremes.

I started teaching in an under-funded, under-resourced secondary modern school in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, in what would later be known as a social priority area. I'd spent the summer desperately looking for a job after gaining my PGCE (Post-Graduate Certificate in Education) at Exeter University, after four years at art college and a year being seriously ill. I should have been suspicious about what awaited me when I was offered the job without an interview, and without even seeing the school, which turned out to be an old Victorian brick-built building with a Boys' entrance and a Girls' entrance, surrounded by a playground and old-fashioned outdoor toilet blocks. The first year was the only one that was co-educational. They planned to co-educate from the bottom up.

I was based in an art room. Soon after I started, I found a science teacher in the room opposite beating a boy with the tube off a bunsen burner. When I reported him for not using appropriate punishment or writing it in the punishment book (this was when physical punishment was still legal), the acting headteacher, a weary man waiting for retirement, said that the kids would make mincemeat of me when they realised that I wouldn't hit them. I was a member of an organisation opposed to physical punishment.

One boy, aged 11, used to flinch when I raised my arm. He was deliberately provocative. One day he asked, "Miss, why won't you hit me?" and I asked if it would make him behave better, and he said, "No." I said that there'd be no point then, would there? He used to wear the same clothes, every day, every week. He was one of several kids who came to my place at weekends, where they learned to cook and painted murals on our yard wall. My housemate got hold of some clothes for him, and suggested that we deliberately spilled a cup of tea over him, as an excuse to put his clothes in the washing machine and give him some new ones. So we did. I never heard from his mother about this. He became devoted to me, and would rush to defend me if any of the other kids was rude. He was just one of the kids whose backgrounds were terrible. One girl witnessed her father stab her mother to death. Another girl was locked in her room every day after school by her stepmother, until I found out about it and she was taken into care. They could all have done with a champion like Rita Pierson. I was newly qualified, totally out of my depth, with no professional or personal report, and I cracked up under the strain. I left after a year for an easier job. It wasn't that much easier, but there was less beating.

After a few years, during which time I did other jobs, I went back to teaching. I worked in the Oxford area for a while, as a supply teacher, before applying for work in Suffolk, to be near my family. Again, I was offered a job without an interview, without seeing the school, and should have known what to expect. It wasn't as bad as the school in Grimsby, but my head of department had been off sick for months with a "stress-related illness". My contract was for a term. I was offered a permanent job after Christmas, but turned it down. The colleague I'd worked closely with, who was in her probationary year, quit when I did, and never went back to teaching. She now runs a successful pottery.

I did more supply teaching after that. I'd learned a survival strategy by this time. Supply teachers will often find themselves covering for the teachers who are in the most stressful jobs. I can draw, and I used to bribe badly-behaved kids to behave with the prospect of a portrait to take home to mum at the end of the day. It worked a treat. I was frequently asked to work in the special needs department of an Ipswich school, where the head of department was fussy about which supply teachers he'd allow into his classrooms. Some of them were older people whose attitude towards the kids with multiple problems was unhelpful. They didn't like or understand children from the sort of deprived background that they knew nothing about, and the kids responded negatively to their crude discipline. My friend the head of department said that some of them could reverse a term's development with a few ill-chosen words. One day, I was sent to supervise two classrooms with a stationery cupboard in between, so I could hear what was going on in one while I was in the other, until another supply teacher arrived. Things were reasonably calm, with everyone settled, when a child came from the next room

to tell me that a strange man had arrived. I found a nervous-looking man in a suit with a briefcase. He didn't look like a teacher but it turned out he was. I told him what the children were supposed to be doing, and gave him a quick explanation of what to expect from some of the more challenging kids - a boy who became violent at the slightest provocation, so it was best to avoid confrontation, and a girl who had mild learning difficulties and struggled to remember anything for more than a few minutes, despite her best efforts, and so on. He showed little interest and waved me away. I'd been dismissed. Within five minutes, all hell broke loose next door. He'd yelled at the boy with the hair trigger, who'd thrown a chair at the window, and the girl who struggled to cope was in tears, after being told she was shamming. It turned out that the new supply teacher had just completed his training, it was his first day as a teacher after quitting an office job, and he'd imagined that he'd be a born educator. Oh, how wrong he was.

ME was prevalent among teachers and schoolkids, and I'd been covering for someone who had it. Not long afterwards, I was diagnosed with ME too. That was 27 years ago. You have to be fit to teach, especially in schools like the ones I've worked in. Every time I hear some idiot going on about how teachers have a cushy life, with long school holidays and all, I wish that he or she could see what it's really like at the chalkface. Michael Gove wouldn't last five minutes.

A little life

If you're not a cat lover, or an animal lover of any sort, you may not understand this. I'm grieving for a cat. This cat. Her name is Lucy. I didn't choose it. She came with a name. If you don't have much to do with animals, you may not realise that they're not all alike. Every cow, every horse, every dog or cat - they all have different personalities, fears, curious habits, and relationships. Like people, only in a far less complicated way.

Lucy's world, since she came to live with me, was a very small one; she never went further than my immediate neighbours' gardens, apart from occasionally coming to greet me in the street when she heard my car pull up outside. I tried to discourage that, but she was streetwise, having been raised in a city.

In the summer, Lucy liked to lie in the garden near the front door, where she was ready to greet visitors. I feared that some delivery person might fall over her, camouflaged as she was - a grey tabby on a shadowed concrete path - but no one ever did. Instead, she was rewarded with lots of fuss. The men who service the boiler, among others, were overheard talking to her.

Every Sunday at 3 o'clock an octogenarian friend visits for tea, cake, and a TV murder mystery. To begin with, Lucy was rather standoffish with him, but he won her over with cat treats. As soon as she and Audrey (our other cat) heard his voice, they were there, looking expectant. I provided my friend with a little fluffy mat for his knees, to protect his skinny shanks from her sharp claws, and Lucy hopped up and made herself comfortable for the whole of Midsomer Murders, or whatever we were watching, until about 5pm, when it was dinner-time. My friend doesn't have a TV or a cat, and he doesn't eat cake on weekdays. He regards Sundays as the highlight of his week, and the cats (and previously the dog, who died five years ago) as the main part of the treat. When Lucy lay on your lap and allowed you to stroke her (sometimes she let you know when to stop, with a clout), you'll believe all that stuff about how stroking a cat can lower your blood pressure.

Like most cats, Lucy liked to be warm. On sunny days, she'd sunbathe out of doors. If it was very hot, she trampled a little nest in long grass, in the shade, to doze away an afternoon. If I was pottering in the garden, she liked to sit on an old tree stump, and watch. In the winter, she appreciated the central heating. She'd lie on a window ledge above a radiator, or find a warm spot on the floor over the central heating pipes. Last winter, being so cold, she dozed her way through the worst months.

Not all cats like milk, but Lucy did. She didn't seem able to drink it without splashing some over the side of the saucer (the pretty one I bought from the charity shop just for her), so I had to mop up the splashes several times a week. The RSPCA advises that it is a cat owners' responsibility to entertain her cat, as well as feed it and care for its welfare. Cats can be very fussy about toys, I've found. A promising-looking toy with dangly things attached to a sort of glove was completely ignored. A skinny mouse on elastic, that dangles from a sort of fishing rod, amused her for about five minutes at a time. A pink sausage-shaped thing that smelt of catnip was occasionally hugged and rubbed, and once she even fell asleep with her chin resting on it.

Over the last couple of years, Lucy had to have most of her teeth removed, but she seemed to manage without them. A couple of months ago, she started losing weight. She'd been quite plump when she first came to live here. Now she was skin and bone. The vet took blood samples and speculated about a thyroid problem, but the medication he tried made things worse, so he tried steroids instead. She gained a little weight, but not much. She drove me mad, always pestering for food (I couldn't just leave it out, or greedy Audrey would steal it). I bought all sorts of expensive cat food to tempt her. She'd eat some enthusiastically for a day or two, then refuse it. Things seemed to be improving, and then, yesterday, just after she'd had some breakfast, I heard a horrible noise. It was Lucy, crying out in pain, and staggering around the kitchen. By the time the vet arrived, she had collapsed and was hardly breathing. It may have been a heart attack, the vet said, but whatever it was, and whatever she did, Lucy was unlikely to recover. She was given a lethal injection where she lay, on the floor at my feet, and was gone in seconds. It's funny how death changes you, human or animal. In an instant, you can tell that there's no one there. It's like snuffing out a flame.

I make no apology for being sad about my cat. I'm in good company. Doris Lessing, Brigid Brophy, Mervyn Peake, Mark Twain, Edith Sitwell, Garrison Keillor, W H Auden, and many other creative people, have loved cats. They'll all have felt the loss of their cats. Albert Schweitzer said, "There are two means of refuge from the miseries of life; music and cats." He was right.

Cat illustration © M Nelson 2013

Pass the remote

Whenever I see any of these people on TV, I usually change channels. I just wish there was some sort of automatic filter.

Tony Blair
Kelvin MacKenzie
Ed Miliband
Ed Balls
David Cameron
Eric Pickles
Bob Crow
Melanie Phillips
Ricky Gervais
Janet Daley
Sayeeda Warsi
Michael Gove
Vincent Nichols
Alison Ruoff
Chris Evans
Polly Toynbee
Nigel Farage

Evans is loud and annoying. Gervais is creepy and egotistical. I know what the rest of them are likely to say, and I don't want to hear it.

The list could be longer. It may get longer.

The meaning of life

Found on Facebook - American spelling! J

A couple of days ago, when my math teacher asked, "Any questions?”, I asked, "What is the meaning at life?". She replied, “The meaning of life is math."

Today, we realised that, in the alphabet, M is the 13th letter, A is the 1st letter, T is the 20th letter, and H is the 8th letter.

13+1+20+8=42

Multiplication

I shared a car the other week with two unrelated old people who were comparing notes about the size of their families. One had to do some arithmetic to work out how many great-grandchildren she had. Both had gone forth and multiplied, resulting in the birth of at least 30 people over 3 generations. Yet it didn't appear to occur to them that multiplying at this rate is unsustainable. Just do the maths.

From The Onion - We Must Preserve The Earth's Dwindling Resources For My Five Children.

Demand for school places driven by the birth rate rising more quickly than at any time since the 1950s.

Population Matters.

Save the Disabled Living Fund

"Disabled people with the greatest needs make up 2% of the population, and yet they are weathering 15% of the cuts. By 2015, the combination of measures targeting this group will amount to losing more than £8,000 each a year. It's the difference between being a trustee of one of the country's most dynamic charities, and having to go to bed at 5.45pm – because that's when your 15 minutes of care has been allocated." -- Zoe Williams, The Guardian, 13 March 2013

The Government's plan to scrap the Disabled Living Fund is being challenged in the High Court by a small group of severely disabled people who rely on it to maintain their dignity and standard of care. I've written to my MP about this:

Dear Mr Yeo,

Though I'm disabled, I fortunately don't need the ILF, but my niece Kate, who died a few years ago, did. I'm appalled at the thought of people like her being forced to manage without the support that it offered. Her sister, my niece Jenny, who's also severely disabled, wrote about the legal challenge to the scrapping of the ILF in the High Court:

"Anne Pridmore, who is and has been very active in the Disabled People's Movement, is one of those taking a case to the High Court to defend the Disabled Living Fund, which is necessary for disabled people with high care needs. I knew Anne from my days at the BCODP (British Council of Disabled People), as she was then on the Management Committee.

"My sister, the late Kathy Mitchell, used the ILF to help fund her 24-hour care needs. It makes me incandescent with rage to think that she, if she were still alive, would be expected to pee and shit into nappies in bed, with no assistance at night, meaning she wouldn't be able to shift positions either, leading to intense pain.

"I have serious problems shifting at night. 'Normals' do it naturally in their sleep. I have to wake up when it starts hurting and it's a real effort heaving myself around in the bed. I wake up alright!

"People all over the country need this for personal care and independence. It's a scandal that it's due to be scrapped by the Government."

Please prevail upon the DWP to withdraw this plan.

There have been several e-petitions about this (why don't campaigners co-ordinate their action?) but writing to your MP can be more effective. Let's hope the High Court puts a stop to this stupidity.

Click here to find your MP.