My aunt was among the NHS workers recruited from the Caribbean in the Sixties.
When Britain desperately needed nurses she answered the call.
She would serve this country’s Health Service for 30 years among a tranche of foreign key workers proving their worth long before the coronavirus.
After a stroke in 2001, my mum was cared for at the Homerton Hospital in East London. The staff there were diligent, compassionate and caring to a fault.
When I clapped on that first Thursday I fought back the tears that actually shocked me by welling up as I reflected on what the NHS means to me.
It matters. Every doctor, nurse or ancillary worker could be my aunt for whom the patients were a priority and the job meant everything.
I’ve been clapping ever since.
Now though, I’d rather see action than clap again. I’d rather our everyday heroes were paid proper money than lip service, while those same doctors and nurses are doing their jobs without the equipment they need.
With a teacher wife, a headteacher sister and a brother-in-law who works in the emergency services, I see first hand the dedication of our key workers.
One friend of mine sleeps at the hospital where he works to reduce the coronavirus risk to his family.
Yet clapping now has become the thing some people do on auto-pilot.
The exhausted Facebook mum shamed by her neighbours for sleeping through it last week is an example of the social pressure that has overtaken a well-meaning act of appreciation.
How does abandoning social distancing and massing on Waterloo Bridge at 8pm on a Thursday night help our NHS?
When the clapping is led by politicians and critics who supported doctors and nurses being denied pay rises then you know you’d rather find another way.
I’d prefer to contribute financially, volunteer, do something more substantive than an act likely to be forgotten once the UK succeeds in its indecent haste to return to some kind of normality.
The NHS dead include people who came out of retirement to save lives.
We can’t bring them back but we can properly appreciate the living in their memory.
