AA Gill Faces Up To His Cancer

Yesterday the prolific writer and restaurant reviewer AA Gill died. 2016 has been a torture to many and just when you thought it couldn’t get worse, it took away another loved human being. The cycle of life and death is of course inevitable but even that resounding truth doesn’t make it any better. (someone please please put Sir David Attenborough in a bubble or something).

I actually first came across AA Gill when I was quite young and had just moved to the UK, my mom would read the Sunday times leave it lying on the dining room table after she finished. I would come in and pick through the various smaller newspapers and magazines in search for sports, motoring or kids sections and briefly read about the rugby scores or some fantastic gadget that will come out in the future (can you believe this iPhone gadget!). As I was flicking through the pages looking at the pictures of far off paradises in the travel section and the contrasting war torn battlegrounds in the Sunday Times magazine as I usually would, my mom came in once and pointed out I should actually READ the paper and not just look at the pictures. Of course I wasn’t interested in Tony Blair or The Foot and Mouth crisis but defiantly I decided to read something and one of the many articles I read that day was by the late great AA Gill.

Today I read his final piece in the Sunday Time magazine, a fantastically written and honest piece about his cancer and experiences with the NHS. I highly recommend reading it. 

The article: “More life with your kids, more life with yourfriends, more life spent on earth — but only if you pay” AA Gill.

He points out that the UK shockingly has some of the worse cancer survival rates in Europe, a third the percentage as Sweden in some instances. This is primarily due to the late diagnosis of cancer propagated by waiting times and turtle paced referral. The NHS, The jewel of the british isles, the pride the UK, might not be so brilliant after all, AA Gill writes:

“We say it’s the envy of the world. It isn’t. We say there’s nothing else like it. There is. We say it’s the best in the West. It’s not. We think it’s the cheapest. It isn’t. Either that or we think it’s the most expensive — it’s not that, either. You will live longer in France and Germany, get treated faster and more comfortably in Scandinavia, and everything costs more in America.”

RIP Mr Gill 

Picture: pic.twitter.com/A7WI9o8jWX @jenbalcombe