Hospital(ity)

What happens when angels of mercy go walkabout, leaving patients bereft? Why, the boss of the Royal College of Nursing weighs straight in. If his angels are too busy, Dr Peter Carter wants patients' families on the ward and on the job as well, looking after lonely grannies in distress. "Somehow we have sleepwalked, in some parts of society, into assuming this is someone else's responsibility." Cue predictable outrage over this NHS betrayal, plus even more predictable warnings about lowered standards. It's a hospital's job to care and tend, we're told. It's what nurses are for. And the last thing we want is upmarket union leaders passing the buck. But pause: let's take a short trip.

Three times in the last 12 years I've seen what happens in Spanish hospitals when my grandchildren are born. What's that at the side near my daughter's bed? It's a bunk. Her husband isn't merely there for the birth; he's on the spot night and day, bringing this, fetching that, always on hand while she recovers. That's normal, totally expected. Active paternity service, not paternity leave. And now my Spanish grandson has broken his arm rather badly in two places. He's in pain. And, in quite another hospital, the bunk is there again. His mother spends two nights with him, comforting, reassuring, nipping out to buy food, a stabilising presence in an unsettling world.

Which means I too remember how, a few years back, I was in trouble myself, bleeding internally and causing manifest alarm. A Spanish ambulance shrieks through the night. Another hospital to the collection. I'm dosed and monitored non-stop behind curtains in A&E. And there's an airline-type seat beside the bed there. My wife can try to sleep close by. The next morning I'm wheeled upstairs to a small ward – and of course there's another recliner seat close by. The guy to my left, just recovering from open heart surgery, has visitors almost 24/7. They're a bit noisy; they come and go constantly – but hey, join the party. What's the point lying around feeling sorry for yourself? The gang's all here.

And the deeper point, revealed time and again, has absolutely nothing to do with cost-saving – or with graduate angels too proud to plump a pillow. The Spanish experience is instinctive and positive. It doesn't make family involvement a passed parcel of sneaky budget savings. It says, simply, that this is what family life is all about. Hospitals aren't carved up between them and us. Hospitals are more joint community centres in a society used to doing the right thing.

Long ago, as a child, I was in a faraway Nottinghamshire hospital for well over a year: visiting hours, on Saturday and Sunday, 2.30pm to 5pm. My mother, a widow without any hope of a car, had to travel 20 miles via three separate bus journeys to see me. Get there for two-thirty. Get out at five. That's your lot. In retrospect it seems cruel and pointless – but still somehow natural. The mystique of medicine says life is a waiting room. Doctor knows best. Nurses have duties: please keep out of their way.

Of course you can produce due justifications as required. But in fact there's a more fundamental chasm opened here. We pay for and bang on about the NHS because it has almost god-like status. Leave your flowers on the altar and go. Family care ends at the hospital door. Busy professionals are taking over now. Thank you, and good night.

That's a generalisation, of course: it can't wrap millions of cases in a single bundle of blame. But how does any society go truly big on compassion or cohesion when families are deemed a nuisance, a fact without a function? And what does it say about families when they not only accept that divide – but bristle at the thought of bridging it?

In Praise Of... Up

Say it's a tradition. Explain to your children – or your nieces or nephews or grandkids – that half-term must, as a matter of faith or ancient custom, include a trip to the cinema. Say whatever you have to or, if that fails, then go alone. Just make sure you see Up.

It's the latest animated feature from Pixar, the studio with a claim to being one of the more insightful chroniclers of our times. There's plenty there for kids to enjoy – some nice gags and wonderful pictures – but that does it little justice. Yes, it's sentimental, but it's also elegiac, touching and oddly brave. It is a film that reveals the gaps in the rest of popular culture, exposing those areas where others fear to tread.

For Up has the unlikeliest of protagonists, a grumpy, lonely widower, Mr Fredricksen. It deals, matter-of-factly, with questions that rarely arise in any movie, let alone one aimed chiefly at children. So within the opening few scenes, we have not just the solitude of the elderly but the pressure on them to give up their independence and move into old-age homes. This is not ground covered in High School Musical.

Admirable though it is to raise issues normally confined to the pages of the Guardian's Society section, Up digs deeper. The film starts by showing Mr Fredricksen as a little boy, walking the 1930s streets of his neighbourhood, then staring wide-eyed at the black-and-white newsreels that brought word of Charles F Muntz, the Lindbergh-style heroic explorer who soared above the globe in an airship. This simple act of recollection sends a powerful message: it says that the elderly of today once had their own pop culture, their own celebrities, their own "new media". They are not just old people, those we might brush aside. They were children once, too.

There are regular, often acerbic, observations of the way we live now. The small, charming wooden house the old man has lived in for most of his life is under threat from developers, men in Matrix-style suits and shades, who are surrounding it with looming steel-and-glass skyscrapers. When Mr Fredricksen decides he's had enough, tying his home to a thousand balloons and heading for the skies, he is joined by a young boy scout whose father has given him all kinds of electronic gizmos – he has given him everything, in fact, except time.

Some will detect hypocrisy in a US entertainment giant such as Disney – which owns Pixar – making a target of both corporate greed and the marketing of consumer electronics to kids. But these are asides in what is a much larger story. Up deals with themes that are timeless and universal. In the most outstanding sequence, a wordless montage follows Mr Fredricksen and his childhood sweetheart from their infancy to adolescence, marriage and eventually her death. Silently, and movingly, we see the disappointment of childlessness and the deferral of dreams – in this case a long yearned for voyage to Venezuela – because reality always intrudes. Up shows us the truth of John Lennon's pithy observation: life is what happens when you're busy making other plans.

This is becoming typical of Pixar. Its last feature, Wall-E, asked whether waste and rampant consumption were choking our planet, so that eventually human beings would have to find somewhere else to live, while telling an eternal story about the need for companionship. The protagonists of their most recent films – a rat, a rusty robot, a curmudgeon – are not designed with one eye on the merchandising product line. Pixar is instead doing the work of great storytellers, holding up a mirror to the world even as it reminds us of those fundamental traits, and needs, that make us human. And Pixar manages to do all that while telling a funny, exciting yarn that appeals to the widest possible audience. How many of our literary giants can say the same?

The Ballad Of Reading Gaol

(To my beloved friend M)

I know not whether laws be right,
or whether laws be wrong;
all that we know who lie in gaol
is that the walls are strong;
and that each day is like a year,
a year whose days are long.


Each narrow cell in which we dwell
is a foul and dark latrine,
and the fetid breath of living Death
chokes up each grated screen,
and all, but Lust, is turned to dust
in Humanity´s machine.


With midnight always in one´s heart,
and twilight in one´s cell,
we turn the crank, or tear the rope,
each in his separate Hell,
and the silence is more awful far
than the sound of a brazen bell.