Britain needs a two-tiered health system – one for people in need, the other for morons

There is plenty about modern life to cause celebration and aggravation in equal measure. Thankfully, old hand Christopher Howse and young gun Guy Kelly are here to dissect the way we live now...

I’ve always felt there should be two A&Es: one for serious injuries and illnesses of grave concern, one for all those slightly embarrassed to be there. We could call it “Accident & Errrrr It’s a Bit of a Story, How Long Have You Got?”

I have been to the former once, though even that came with a clumsy anecdote (despicably hungover working in a hotel kitchen, I passed out and woke in a puddle of boiling-hot water, to the detriment of 20 per cent of my skin), and the latter three or four times. So far.

My most recent visit was wasp-related. Into Frimley Park Hospital I staggered, my brother trailing behind stifling a laugh, my tongue inflating to the size of an unfit manatee, as dozens of people looking far closer to death glared on.

“Yeth, hollo, I av ackthidentally dwunk a wathp an it thtung me on va tung,” I said to the receptionist, who leant closer. ‘Say again?’

“I woth dwinking a beer in my bwuvvas gardjin an it woth in va bottle, now my fwoat ith clothing up.”

She sighed and told me to take a seat. So I did, nodding to the sick and the broken lining the room, the floor and the corridors. They did not return the nod, for they had other things to think about.

I was eventually seen. “What seems to be the problem?” the doctor asked, looking up to meet the Violet Beauregarde that was now my tongue. “Ah, I see.” A jeroboam of intravenous antihistamines later and I was back, with beer in hand. Thank you, NHS.

But this is why we need the second A&E, to triage arrivals not only by urgency, but by idiocy. I could have freed up space in real A&E by joining a room full of people who’ve got their heads stuck in railings, drunkenly glued their XL Bullies to their groins and eaten Persil pods. We deserve to wait. Alone and in shame.

It’s the same place I could have gone when I impaled my eye on a needle-sharp sapling the one and only time I tried gardening. And when I decided I had malaria, only to be told it was a cold.

This is a political point. Let’s create a two-tiered health service. One for people in need, and one for morons. You know where you’ll find me. I hope.

In our bit of corridor, 10 trolleys were ranged at the sides, with just enough room to walk down the middle. Another 21 trolleys were round the corner, and three nurses had charge of them all.

I don’t much care for misery literature, but A&E at Whipps Cross Hospital a couple of Mondays ago resembled that Hitchcock film Lifeboat: random survivors crammed together, some dying, some raving, most in pain.

There are two A&E entry points at the hospital: one for the walking sick, who come in waves and sit for hours. The other, superior in suffering, is for those arriving by ambulance, and that was “our” bit. I wasn’t sick, but had come to see an old friend in his late 80s, already coping with cancer and now with a broken hip. He lay in pain on a trolley all day and into the small hours.

Of course the smell was appalling, but one became accustomed to that – and there was worse. It was a school of despair. An old lady behind me kept crying out that she wanted to go to the lavatory, but was all wired up to a drip. No one took any notice until the heroic wife of my old friend – let us call her Catherine – quietly made face-to-face contact with a nurse.

The most absurd and miserable moment came at twilight. A woman with a stainless-steel food wagon came to the end of the corridor and called out, “Hot food. Sandwiches. Tea and coffee.”

How could the wounded, aged and drugged answer from their trolleys? Most of them could not. Again, Catherine went forward, ferrying a milky coffee or an egg sandwich to those like chained lunatics behind her. Otherwise it would have been worse than feeding penguins with sprats at the zoo. At least penguins can catch.

I don’t blame the woman with the food wagon. Presumably no one had shown her a better way of feeding the lifeboat. But surely the daily ritual of agony endured with unmet hope can be better managed. This is not a political point. It has just become accepted that this happens to you if you call an ambulance.