Save a life in 20   minutes — while eating a biscuit

Times

a day ago

We are told, all the time, to be grateful. To practise gratitude. To keep a gratitude journal, to list all we are thankful for.
In my later years I have started to augment all this with something else. Something a little more fundamental. I do grateful, as well. I do it here, in this church hall — which smells, as all church halls do, of old radiators, hot dust, floor polish and tea.
Tea: a huge samovar clanks quietly at the back. Today it is in constant use. For while all church halls need a constant production of tea — for the mother-and-child groups, for the OAP yoga lessons, for the tea stall of a jumble sale — today, tea is needed on another level entirely. Today, the tea is literally medical. Today, north London is giving its blood.
'Name, age and address, please?'
The car park outside is full of massive lorries. It looks like a film crew have parked up. You almost expect to see eg Emma Thompson coming out of a trailer in a crinoline with her hair in curlers, or maybe a couple of alien extras, wagging their tentacles, from Doctor Who.
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But this isn't a film crew: it's the blood donation service. The story we are telling is: the continuing, shambolic miracle of the NHS. Coming, through the year, to every neighbourhood in turn, to see who wants to join in with one of the most miraculous things we ever invented: the ability to send our blood to someone who is dying.
I take the clipboard and go and sit on a chair. I enjoy ticking 'no' on every question: I do not have a heart condition. I have not been pregnant in the past six months. I have not been tattooed, I do not have a cough or an active cold sore, and I haven't had unprotected sex with a new partner in the past six months: all things to be grateful for. My life is wonderfully boring. I would not like to have had unprotected sex with a new partner in the past six months. Imagine having to learn a new willy, from scratch, at my age. It would be harder than breaking in new boots.
'Let's take you through for your blood test.'
They need to check if I'm anaemic. I have been, before. I didn't realise that if you take your iron supplements in the morning, then have — as is only right and proper! — a massive mug of tea, for breakfast, the tea counteracts the iron. Three times I came here only to be sent away, because my blood was too spindly. Too wan.
Today, they prick my fingertip — then squeeze a blood-drop into a small glass phial of copper sulphate. The blood drop looks like a solid thing: a glass bead; a tiny red world, hanging in the liquid. It is an interesting thing to watch, the silent, simple chemistry telling the nurse if my blood is good enough — if it's heavy enough, with good iron — to sink to the bottom and qualify my blood as useful.
Slowly, it sinks. I feel absurdly proud.
'Someone's been eating their spinach!'
I have! I have been eating my spinach! But, more usefully, taking my iron supplement at night, before withdrawing from tea — or, as it's otherwise known, 'sleeping'.
I get to go through into the main room, to give my pint. This room is always fascinating. Everyone has come here to do A Good Thing — to literally give a part of themselves to someone they will never meet.
There's a father in his mid-thirties who has brought his toddler: she sits in her buggy while he talks her through what's happening. He is doing that most north London of things — being a fruitlessly overqualified parent.
'… and so the blood is made of white platelets and red platelets!' he says pointlessly: no two-year-old has ever cared about white platelets. 'If you want to separate them out, you put them in a centrifuge, Miranda. Remember when we went to see the centrifuge — at Farnham air museum?'
The two-year-old continues, inevitably and correctly, to ignore him. I'm fairly sure she would have hated Farnham air museum.
Next to the dad is a Busy Businessman. He has the air of being, in every other circumstance life gives him, utterly dreadful. The cut of his suit, the angle of his shoulder, the repeatedly compressed thinness of his upper lip suggests this is a man who spends a lot of time shouting things like, 'We need to circle back and kick his ass!' on his mobile.
But today, he has given himself the day off from being an arsehole. For whatever reason or backstory — whatever tender, noble or terrified moment in his life — the Busy Businessman has walked out of his office, turned off his phone and come here.
I always forget that I cry when I'm here. And I always do. For, as I take my place on my bed and watch the needle — thin as an eyelash, an eyelash made of steel — go into my vein, and the blood jumping from inside me down the artery-thin tubing and into the collection bag, I marvel all over again at what this room is. At what this place is.
Because this is the place where you are asked to give love. Not to someone or something specific — you never look into someone's eyes and respond to their call for help.
No — here you give love freely, and unconditionally, to the world. You prove, practically and physically, that you buy into this whole planet, after all. You deal yourself back into the game. You indicate that you are a fan of your species. That, despite every disappointment, you still believe something elemental: you would never let someone die in front of you.
Somewhere out there, one day soon, one of your fellow confused, well-meaning, frangible mammals will suddenly have their life explode. There will be a crash, a clutching of the heart, a fall — and then: blue lights and wailing sirens. Machines bleeping, and screaming. And loved ones sitting next to them, fists clenched tight, offering anything — everything — to God to make it better. For the universe to send something, anything, to keep them here.
And the thing that will make it better, the thing that is sent, is you. You, on some distant day, will be someone's astonishing, life-saving miracle.
I lie on the chair in the church hall, watching the dust motes catch the sunlight as I lie, quietly draining, and think of what an extraordinary thing it is: to give so easily so something utterly magical. How often can we really make someone's day better, let alone save their lives? Young boys and girls dream of being heroes, of saving a comrade on the battlefield, of giving the speech that starts the righteous revolution. In the end, hardly anyone ever does this. We are all so ready to be tested — to give — but in the modern world the call doesn't come.
But, in all honesty, this will probably be the greatest thing you ever do. Fill out some paperwork, lie on a bed, watch a father try to give a toddler a biscuit without tangling her arms up in his tubing, then eat a biscuit. Your true effect on the world will almost certainly not be measured in the size of your efforts but in how smart they were instead. What's the inflection point? Where are you most needed?
Here.Here, where shuffling nurses in cardigans quietly build up the blood banks for when a train crashes, or a bomb explodes, or there's just a medium-to-hard day in A&E. The only universal bank — a blood bank. One you too may be a borrower from, one day. You cannot know if you will live your life entirely on this side of the donation. When you give, you're giving to everyone — including, potentially, yourself.
On the way home I allow myself a pleasurable dwell on how wonderful the world always looks when you have left a good, useful place. This is the same high I get when I leave a museum, or cathedral, or festival: all the places where humans are at their best. How magical that we have all these places dedicated, simply, to how inventive, clever and kind we can be. If you want to be hopeful, give blood. Save a life in 20 minutes, while eating a biscuit. Be the most relaxed hero it's possible to be.
Three weeks later, I get a text — right after the one that tells me the spade I ordered from Argos, Wood Green, is ready for collection. 'Your blood donation was used today at Addenbrooke's Hospital, Cambridge. Thank you.'
There will be no better text this year. I am grateful. I do grateful.Find out how to become a blood donor at blood.co.uk