In a nation where we can spend billions on redundant aircraft carriers, why can't we pay care workers more?

When you get into your 70s, or, as some would say, your dotage, the question of health becomes the principal topic of conversation.

The once polite greeting “how are you?” becomes an all-consuming issue, being both concern for your wellbeing and a veiled reproach if you say “I’m OK.”

How can you be OK? You’re old and doddery and should be in lockdown, or lock up, or simply under house arrest.

A few years ago I started noticing that things were starting to go wrong with my finely-toned body and needle-sharp intellect.

Ailments started to occur with depressing regularity. At first it was the tubby man’s friend, diabetes, then along came sundry cancers, then a minor stroke, then some balance problems and, latterly, a new friend called shingles.

If you add on top of that sight problems and hearing difficulties, I am starting to understand what this business of ageing is all about.

The NGH is a wonderful tolerant institution for the marginally bewildered. Over the recent past I’ve visited many departments, all staffed with unfailingly nice people.

I have recently become a client of what was first called ‘geriatric medicine’, but is now called ‘elderly medicine’. I’m not sure if that’s much of a difference, but I suppose it’s better than ‘Heaven’s Waiting Room’.

It perhaps shows how far I’ve come. As a student back in the 1960s, I once carried a banner outside the Senate House: ‘Combat bureaucratic gerontocracy’. And that was directed at the 40-year-old university administrators!

What bothers me most, however, is the news broadcasts. Forgive me,but it rarely seems like news, there is only one topic... health, featuring the NHS, care homes, death rates and the symptoms that precede death rates, and hundreds of diagrams showing where the death rates are and what to look for.

It is not reassuring.

All it does for me is to remind me of my own mortality. And worse, as a fully paid-up hypochondriac, it means I can detect the symptoms at the flick of a thermometer.

A slight cough is now an obvious sign of impending doom; like vultures hovering over Marefair, a pain in the ankle is an obvious symptom of advancing plague and when the phone rings and a solemn voice asks if I’ve arranged my funeral (why do they do that ?), I stretch for the single malt.

I know, like the rest of the world, we are living through a pandemic and I may be in the vulnerable group, but I ain’t going to stretch for the bottle of Dettol just yet.

I trust implicitly those wonderful people in the health service, the supply industries, the public services and all those folk who are working to keep this show on the road.

And for the years of austerity, those are the people who have been consistently underpaid and understaffed.

I don’t want to hear the prime minister pretend to make sub-Churchillian rallying calls.

I want a government that will pledge to pay a decent wage now for the workers involved.

I have a niece who works in a care home at the sharp end of this outbreak. She has been offered a pay rise of 30p an hour. Her pay will just reach the national minimum.

It seems to me, geriatric old soul that I am, that if we are a nation that can afford many billions on a couple of aircraft carriers that are already redundant then there is something far wrong here.

There is an irony about my almost professional hypochondriac tendencies.

Despite all my best efforts to capture a clutch of ailments, those brilliant doctors at NGH have, over the last few weeks, ascertained that I no longer need to take insulin for the diabetes and the cancer has not bothered to return.

I’ve just got a few things left to worry about!