WEDNESDAY December 2
– ‘Yea, Lord, we greet thee, born this happy morning!’ Christmas had come early; our saviour was born, except that he had come to earth as a glass vial stored at -70°C. The high priests of our national religion, ‘our beloved NHS’, had ushered in a new dawn and, singing our songs of praise, we worshipped at the altar of medicine.
This obsessive devotion seems to be the accepted norm in the UK, but its dangers and a concomitant unwillingness to deviate from the diktats of the authorities were identified in George Orwell’s prescient novel,
Nineteen Eighty-Four, particularly in two of the words used to create control of our thoughts by the authorities: