A welcome birthday present and a very sobering conversation
Later this month, I’m 65 (I know – I don’t look old enough!). As a result. the National Health Service invited me to a screening for something called abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) which is a weakening of the main blood vessel that supplies blood to your body. The appointment was this morning.
Not surprisingly for the NHS in London, both the staff who attended to me were foreign-born and, as I always do when I meet such people, i asked them where they were from. The assistant was from Poland, so I practised my half dozen words of Polish. The guy who actually carried out the screening was from Sierra Leone, so I asked him about the civil war in that country from 1991-2002.
He told me that he had lived in the UK for 18 years, so he came her in the middle of the war. I learned that his father had been a member of parliament for the governing party and had been executed by the rebels.
He was immensely grateful to Tony Blair for his political courage as Prime Minister at that time in sending British troops into Sierra Leone to end the civil war. He said that, without such decisive intervention, the war could still be going on.
I found this a very sobering conversation. It was a very personal reminder of the good that can be done by foreign interventions in a war zone when the cause is just, the circumstances are right, and the objectives are thought through.
As for my AAA test, i was advised that my aorta is “perfectly normal” which was a welcome birthday present.