Graham Norton

Graham Norton

I avoid the news. Stay Home. Protect the NHS. Save Lives. This is all I need to know. Anything else just increases the mysterious weight pressing against my chest. An unnamed dread, a sense of doom. Even the bright spring weather, normally so cheering and welcome, doesn’t help. I feel as if we have laid out a beautifully prepared banquet but inadvertently used the wonky trestle table, the one that collapses if you put any weight on it. We are all staring helplessly at quivering jellies and glistening bowls of coronation chicken, hoping against hope that the table holds.

I can’t avoid the news. I wake to see a tweet from a nurse. She describes her day at work and how she had to hold up a phone to the ear of not one, not two, but four patients, so that their loved ones could say goodbye. I begin my day in tears. A virus so cruel that it doesn’t just kill, but first finds brutal and unexpected ways of punishing people. No doctor, no nurse is trained for this.

I find it impossible to imagine what it must be like for those working on the front line. Happily, my experience of hospitals, thus far, is very limited. I’ve visited friends, of course, and surely in the thirty-six years I’ve lived in this country I must have sat in an A&E department at some point, but I genuinely can’t recall doing so. My only extended visit to hospital took place in the summer of 1998.

There had been a party at my drama school in Swiss Cottage in North London. Afterwards, the drunk me had a choice: get a taxi home or walk and spend the taxi fare on fried chicken. Chicken won the day. I stumbled down the hill towards Kilburn and then headed across to Queen’s Park, where I had a flat. Licking my greasy fingers, I didn’t notice the point at which I began to be followed.

I was very close to home, on the street that edged the north side of the park, when I noticed a man walking on the pavement opposite me. He crossed the road and began walking in front of me. Suddenly he turned and seemed to be brandishing something. A bat, a bar? I wasn’t sure.

Turning to get away, I ran straight into his accomplice, who had been right behind me. I heard a strange hollow banging sound, like someone hitting a large plastic pipe. It was only afterwards I realised that was the sound of my skull being beaten. After I handed over my empty wallet, they made me lie on the ground as they emptied my rucksack. A dog-eared copy of The Winter’s Tale flopped in the gutter beside me.

They ordered me to stay on the ground as they made their getaway. I heard their footsteps echo as they ran away through the deserted streets of Queen’s Park. As I waited for them to leave, I noticed a cut on my right hand. They must have had a knife. How strange that I hadn’t noticed. Oh well, it was just a nick.

I pushed myself off the ground to stand. Odd. It felt as if I was almost peeling my T-shirt off the pavement. I looked down to discover that I was covered in blood. I pulled my top away from my body and saw that I had a hole in my chest. Even in my drunken state I knew that this was serious. I collected my belongings and put them back in my bag, because it takes a moment to understand what matters. I felt very tired. I wanted to lie down. That would be a bad idea.

I stumbled on, calling for help. The houses that lined the leafy street were in darkness. I rang a doorbell, but no one came. Back on the street I walked a little further and then, to my right, there was a light. An old man in a dressing gown stood framed in his front doorway. His wife was huddled behind him. I stood at their gate. Obviously an explanation was required. I lifted up my T-shirt and pointed at the open wound in my chest. ‘I’ve been stabbed.’ It had echoes of ‘I am run through’ from Shakespeare or John Lennon’s ‘I’ve been shot.’ Something so obvious, but it still needs to be articulated because it is so surprising.

I am not sure if the elderly couple said anything, but I felt I had been rescued. I walked down the tiled garden path and lay bleeding on their doormat. The man must have gone to phone an ambulance because I recall being left alone with the old lady. Weariness overtook me. All I wanted to do was sleep. No. That wasn’t true. There was one more thing I needed. I looked up at the lady in her dressing gown and asked, ‘Will you hold my hand?’ Clearly taken aback by the request, she hesitated, before kneeling down and taking my hand. She was the nurse in that tweet holding the phone up. The contact that meant I was not alone, at that moment when nobody should be alone.

I was taken to the St Charles Hospital in Ladbroke Grove. It transpired that I had lost over half my blood. Even after I was informed of this, I still didn’t fully understand the seriousness of the situation. I was still the boy in the street with a hole in his chest, stopping to gather up his books. It was only when a nurse asked me if I wanted the hospital to contact my parents that I got an inkling of how touch-and-go things were. I thought about her question. I didn’t want to worry them unnecessarily, but equally I knew how annoyed they’d be if they didn’t get to say goodbye, so I simply asked the nurse, ‘Am I going to die?’ The long pause before she gave her uncertain response, ‘No,’ made my flesh hug my bones.

The recovery from a violent mugging takes a long time. It’s not just physical, but also mental. Your lungs regain their strength long before you stop flinching when a stranger gets too close on the street. Oddly, the very existence of the NHS helps.

My father would never have said such a thing, but he must have felt vindicated by what had happened. London was a very dangerous place and so of course I had been stabbed. He couldn’t understand why I would stay in such a death trap. I was one of those farmers who continue to live and work on Mount Etna. What I found hard to explain to him was how my two-week stay in hospital hadn’t made me more fearful about life, it had reassured me, made me feel safer. When I was a boy learning to ride a two-wheeler, I had been frightened and excited, but I knew that right by my side was my father waiting to catch me if I fell. That is living in the UK with the NHS. They are always there to catch us.

As I write this, I have no idea how long our current situation will last, or what life will be like in the world that comes after this, but of one thing I am confident. We will gather together again, pass plates, break bread, raise glasses. The feast will still be there to be enjoyed, because, despite our fear and our doubts, the table will hold.

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