24 Monday April 4 2022 | the timesComment
urgent. That way you will iron more
quickly and the panic will make it
slightly exciting.
Deciding what to have for dinner:
boring. Have the same dinner most
nights. I go for aubergine, onion, red
pepper and vegetarian sausage
chopped up together in a pan and
fried with smoked paprika, garlic
puree and tomato puree. Stir in
Greek yoghurt at the end to make it
satisfyingly viscous.
Most emails: should be ignored.
Taking the bus: slow and
annoying. If you can possibly
spare the time, walk instead and
listen to a podcast.
Falling asleep: stressful. Read a
boring book on a Kindle. No need
to worry about turning the lights
out because the Kindle
illuminates itself and will
shut itself off when you
fall asleep. After a
couple of months you
accrue the added
bonus of having
read a dull book.
Prestige Netflix
dramas: don’t
watch out of
obligation. Everyone
will probably forget
about whatever it is soon.
Trashy TV is often more
soothing. A programme
called The Real Housewives
of Beverly Hills is good.Shaving, brushing teeth, having a
shower: these can be done
simultaneously.
Shopping: if possible live (as I do)
above a Tesco so you never have to
think about planning what you need
to buy in advance.
Entertainment: the cinema is the
least annoying form. Cheap enough
to be a sustainable habit but feels
sufficiently like an “event” to make
you feel like you’re doing something
with your life. Never truly boring the
way the theatre can be.
Most things: can be done
while listening to music or a
podcast, which makes them
about 20 per cent more
bearable.Insensitive view
M
y sister is being
kicked out of her
room in the Lake
District. The flat she
shares has been put up
for sale and will
probably be turned
into a holiday home.
It’s increasingly
impossible for
anyone young to
live there.
She says that
most of the
potential buyers who
come to view the flat are
remarkably insensitive.P
resident Obama wore the
same colour suit every day
to avoid “decision fatigue”.
You can take only a limited
number of effective
decisions per day, therefore you
should avoid the minor ones.
I realised recently that a version of
this strategy is a central principle of
my life. I call it “annoyance fatigue”.
Life is full of minor annoyances that
cumulatively degrade your
happiness. The good life consists of
eliminating annoyance and
concentrating on what makes you
happy — for me at the moment, this
is reading, drinking coffee and
listening to the podcast about the
Russian revolution that I have
become obsessed with. If you’re
interested in streamlining your own
life, here are some annoyances I
have managed to discard:
Ironing: should only be done at the
last possible minute, just before you
leave the house when it’s completelySeeking social care in a hostile environment
Time is running out and fundamental questions, about who pays and for what, need addressing
models. Japan is experimenting with
robots. The Netherlands has rolled
out its Buurtzorg (“neighbourhood
care”) community nursing system;
proponents claim that devolving
decision-making to local teams
reduces bureaucracy and cuts costs.
Our answer is to throw more money
we don’t have at a bankrupt model.
The National Audit Office
estimates that demand for adult
social care alone will rise by almost a
third in the next two decades. As
both Brexit and the pandemic have
revealed, there is a limit to how long
Britain can depend on importing
minimum wage healthcare assistants
from eastern Europe or the
developing world to feed our elderly
or to bathe our disabled children. In
the Caribbean culture where I grew
up, the notion of palming grandma
off to the state or a charity would
have been repugnant, but the price of
our family’s fastidiousness was paid
by aunts and sisters compelled to
stay close to home to mind those
who could not mind themselves.
In past times and in other societies
the slack would always have been
picked up by women. Even now
there are some 7.3 million carers in
England alone, mostly unpaid,
mostly relatives, mostly women. For
anyone who still finds it hard to
define what a woman is, a reasonable
rule of thumb might be to ask
yourself who in your family would
have been there to look after a
disabled child or incapable parent
when everyone else was busy. I
doubt whether the female majority
of our population is now prepared to
live with the answer we would have
given in the past.raised each year will be swallowed by
the backlog built up during the
pandemic. We have yet to hear how
the money is to be spent on social
care. As ever, the bold election
promise of fundamental reform has
dwindled to a scratchy row about
cash. But time is running out. Some
fundamental questions can no longer
be put off.
To start with, should the young
continue to pay for the care of the
old in the hope that they in turn will
be cared for by their children’s
earnings? Politics refuses to confront
the truth that the money is draining
out of this massive Ponzi scheme.
The suggestion that the value of
homes might be tapped to fund care
for the elderly torpedoed Theresa
May’s premiership beyond repair; but
even if the so-called “death tax” was
not the right answer, at least it asked
the correct questions: who pays and
for what?
For much of my adult life, most
homeowners’ bricks and mortar
earned more each year than they
did. Baby boomers feel entitled to
pass that extraordinary benison on
to their children; our tax regime
encourages the hoarding of such
opportunities. Yet there will come a
point where the social divisions will
become politically intolerable
between those who can hand on
their property knowing that the state
will have picked up the bill for their
ill health and those who have no
assets to bequeath.
More fundamentally, in our
current model of social care we
outsource the management of people
who cannot live independently.
Other societies are trying newU
ntil this week the only
thing most people outside
Westminster knew about
Liam Fox, the former
cabinet minister, was that
he once dated Natalie Imbruglia, the
former Neighbours star. In the sleeve
notes of the singer’s 1997 disc she
acknowledged the friendship but the
album’s title, Left of the Middle,
suggests this would never have been
a union of political soulmates.
Last week Fox will have gained a
small army of his own fans; his
Down’s syndrome bill became law,
requiring the government to issue
statutory guidance on the specific
housing, educational and social care
needs of people with the condition. It
is a world first; no other country has
taken this step. Fox’s law will give
40,000 families the right to choose
schools and homes that work for
them. Parents wading through
official bureaucracy will acquire a
new weapon with which to tackle
the jobsworths.
That perhaps is why, before this
week’s episode of Sky TV’s The Great
Debate on the future of social care,
we were sent tale after tale of
families battling with an
environment so hostile as to make
any Home Office official green with
envy at its ingenuity in denying
assistance to the most needy. Someof those seeking help are elderly, but
increasingly it is the young with
eating disorders, autism or Down’s
syndrome, for example, who need to
navigate the maze.
No one who meets Amy, our niece,
could fail to adore her. She is in her
early twenties and her disposition is
cheerful but her capacity is limited.
She would easily hold her own in the
specialist round of Mastermind, if her
topic were the lyrics of West End
musicals, but the alphabet remains a
mystery in her world and complete
sentences are rare. There is no time
of the day in which she does not
require someone to be close at hand.
Yet it took her mother, a
distinguished academic lawyer, manymonths and a special assessment to
persuade the local council that it was
unrealistic to expect a young woman
who still has to be assisted with
everyday hygiene to manage a solo
bus journey to a specialist college in
another town. The family receives
some help with paying a carer but
they had little assistance with finding
one. Our so-called welfare state
automatically provides hundreds of
pounds in benefits to healthy and
affluent old people, me included, but
cannot create a similarly frictionless
process for people such as Amy.
This week Britons start to pay a
levy of 1.25 per cent on wages to fund
the NHS and social care systems.
Initially the bulk of the £12 billionIncreasingly it is the
young, not the old,
who are seeking help
They all talk loudly about knocking
down walls and ripping up carpets
as they stomp around what is still
her home.
“You’ll miss the views,” one
remarked to her recently.
“Yes,” she said, “It’s really sad. I’m
going to have nowhere to live.”
“Hmm. Yes I’m sure you’ll really
miss this view.” Then turning to an
accompanying interior designer: “We
should really maximise this window... perhaps we need to take that wall
down.”
A weighty philosophy
I
recently subscribed to The New
York Times, the less good version of
the British Times that Americans
have to read. It has an occasional
enjoyable tendency to become
detached from reality. In it I read the
sentence: “I have lately wondered
how much my self-directed fatphobia
owes to my career as an academic
philosopher.” Which is the sort of
thing that makes you want to put
down your coffee, abandon your
liberal opinions, put on a Maga hat
and storm the Capitol to show those
metropolitan elites what for.
“Philosophy,” the author continues,
is a field dominated by “lean, rich
white men”. Are philosophers lean? I
have been collating a list of portly
philosophers. So far: David Hume,
Jeremy Bentham, Bishop Berkeley
and the Buddha.James Marriott Notebook
Streamline
daily life by
discarding
annoyances
Vulnerable people
will die unless NHS
data is improved
Sean O’Neill
A
fter two years of avoiding
the dreaded lurgy, with
the help of four armfuls of
Pfizer’s magic serum, I
finally succumbed on
February 23. The two red lines
caused immediate anxiety because,
as someone with leukaemia and a
compromised immune system, I have
been living as “extremely clinically
vulnerable” since 2020.
The NHS machine clicked into
action. I had been equipped with a
priority PCR test that was swiftly
dispatched. The positive result was
confirmed within 24 hours and two
days later I was sitting in St George’s
Hospital, London, hooked up to a
drip delivering an urgent dose of
monoclonal antibodies.
Despite these interventions the
next five weeks were rough. The
Covid was debilitating and lingered
on and on, morphing into a chest
infection and then a dizzying sinus-
centred festival of phlegm. Things
were so bad that my daily craving for
a pint or a gin was replaced by a
hankering for soothing cups of
ginger tea laced with honey. Despiteall that, I am one of the lucky ones.
Probably thanks to my multiple jabs
and swift access to new treatments I
avoided a stay in hospital.
Not everyone with a dodgy
immune system has been so lucky.
Even as the NHS starts the roll out
of the spring booster campaign,
hundreds of thousands of people are
still awaiting their fourth jab.
NHS data shows that as of March
24, only 45.5 per cent of the 561,000
people in England classed as
“severely immunosuppressed” had
received a fourth, or booster, dose of
a Covid-19 vaccine. That means
hundreds of thousands of people
have not received a jab they should
have had by now, which could
explain why one in 20 people
admitted to intensive care with
Covid are blood cancer patients with
weakened immune systems.
Anxious patients have pestered
their GPs for the extra jab. They’ve
badgered their hospital consultants
and even turned up at vaccination
centres pleading for one more layer
of protection. Sometimes the pleas
work, often they’re told to wait for a
booster invitation that never arrives.
Now that the government has
declared the pandemic over — while
Omicron still rages — the
immunosuppressed are more
vulnerable than ever. Will the
promises of fifth jabs and continued
free testing kits materialise? Unless
the NHS improves its data on who
and where the vulnerable are, and
radically improves communications,
there will be avoidable deaths.Hundreds of thousands
are still waiting to
receive their fourth jab
Trevor
Phillips@trevorptweets