The nurse fixed me with a disapproving stare: ‘Why is there such a gap between these prescriptions?’

I had gone for a blood pressure check so I could get my HRT, but when she looked at my notes she could see that they last prescribed it years ago.

The honest answer to her question was simple: ‘Because you were working from home.’ For this was the nurse who, when I last tried to get HRT from an NHS GP, was WFH.

During lockdown, I was told to buy a blood pressure machine online and send in a week of readings before they would repeat my prescription. The readings were high, as it happened, but they didn’t respond until I chased them, whereupon they told me the readings were of no interest, and they dispensed the medication anyway. The next time, therefore, I paid £80 to go private and actually see a doctor.

I looked at this nurse and weighed her up. I believe that when you prepare to row with someone you subconsciously assess the likely outcome of coming to blows.

Considering the size and scale of the woman, I determined I would be no match for her.

I said: ‘Oh, it’s just that I was in a hurry and couldn’t wait for an appointment. But I don’t mind at all.’

That wasn’t her concern. She minded. ‘Well, we can’t have you doing that!’ she harrumphed.

At which point I really should have said: ‘Now listen here. I didn’t get my prescription from the NHS because you lot were on your backsides Zooming.’

But I didn’t, because I was terrified. Hell hath no fury like an NHS scorned. You would think that a service so overloaded would be relieved when a patient pays to go elsewhere and not bother them. But no, they react with ill-disguised outrage.

When you opt out of the NHS they respond as though you have burned nurses’ uniforms on a pyre.

This particular hero may have been bravely shielding, unable or unwilling to take my blood pressure and dispense my HRT, but that does not mean she wanted me to get it from someone else who was brave enough to show up to his surgery.

If the NHS can’t have you, they don’t want anyone else to have you.

Such a relationship seems to me to be thoroughly toxic. To call it anything else, to flatter them, out of some misplaced sense of national pride, seems to me to be a form of denial.

I know others will disagree and say they are marvellous, etc. This is the point of view that persists in the majority of the population, no matter what happens.

A few weeks ago, my father called the ambulance for my mother at 9 p.m. and an ambulance came shortly after 9 a.m. the next morning.

In between, because he couldn’t move her, he had to lie down on the living room floor with her and they both slept there. They wouldn’t hear of me getting in the car and driving two hours north because at the point she collapsed we thought an ambulance was coming.

She was screaming in agony so I took the view that the two hours it would take me to get there would be longer than the time it would take an ambulance. Imagine how I feel now.

After the ambulance took her, she spent the entire day inside that ambulance, parked outside the hospital. But at least she had pain relief. And, as my father gratefully pointed out, they charged her phone.

They were marvellous, etc. In return for countless thousands of pounds of national insurance, and banging saucepans with wooden spoons on their doorstep when they were required to take part in the two minutes’ praise, my parents got my mother’s phone charged.

Nevertheless, her knee joint has been haemorrhaging for the best part of a year and that is their business too.

The NHS drained it, again, and sent her home. But, if she is brave enough to upset them by being so impatient a patient, she can always have her knee replaced privately, for £15,000.

My poor mum has never had more things go wrong with her than in the past year. Her knee is the second instance of sudden unexplained bleeding. Horrifying vertigo was another thing. Oh, and she got Covid as well.

‘The hospital was like a war zone,’ said a friend the other day, when his mother was taken in.

‘What were you expecting?’ I wanted to ask. We allowed the NHS to shut. We let them do what they did to stop Covid (only people got it anyway, and a lot more besides). Then they opened their doors back up, and a grateful nation poured through them, eager to take it all lying down.