Caitlin Moran

Caitlin Moran

A ll church halls smell the same – a combination of hot dust, floor polish and tea. All church halls sound the same, whether they’re holding a jumble sale or collecting votes on polling day: a polite British murmur, occasionally punctured by a baby yelling and the noise of the pensionable samovar clanking into action.

But today – today, the church hall looks different. Today is an event that, in this place, comes around three times a year – because it’s Blood Donation Day. And so there are signs in the street that read ‘DONATE BLOOD HERE TODAY’ and two huge blood donation vans in the car park. And, when you enter the hall, there are nurses in blue tabards servicing the twelve reclining chairs where people lie giving blood; as those who wait murmur, a baby occasionally yells and the pensionable samovar clanks into action.

Outside, it’s beautiful, a beautiful day – shoals of swifts screaming as they chase insects; horse chestnuts in full bloom. But in here, people have cheerfully given up their picnics, their walks, their lunch hours and their housework to give a pint of blood. To just fill a 500ml, clear plastic bag, which is then carefully labelled and stored in refrigerated units until needed.

One man has brought his toddler – with one hand he keeps a bottle jammed in her mouth, while the other arm is tethered by a needle. Another man, in a suit, turns up. He looks like he spends most of his day shouting at people on the phone, making big things happen. He has an air of peevishness – as if, in his time, he has sent back a lot of soup.

Today, however, he sits patiently on a chair, waiting. He is greeted as a regular. Here, he’s taking a holiday from being a bit of a bastard. It looks like a relief to him. As if perhaps most of the time he has too much blood, from all the red wine and steak, and it’s quite calming to have it drained away and put to use inside someone less … driven.

I haven’t given blood for – God – eighteen years? First there were babies, then work and then, on three pivotal occasions, I was drunk. I feel ashamed I have left it this long. Giving blood is something I believe in – like I believe in libraries, and council housing, and David Bowie. So I guess I’d become a … lapsed blood donor? But today, I am coming back into the faith.

I know why I want to give blood – for donation feels like an act of thankfulness. It acknowledges that you are alive, and grateful for it, and wish to share the gift of living with someone else for whom living has become, suddenly, perilous. It is the most useful thing you can do in just twenty minutes. It is fascinating to be this useful. To see how something you can spare – a pint of blood – is so treasured that this whole room has assembled to take it from you.

I go into a booth with a nurse and she does a finger prick – dropping a bead of blood into copper sulphate.

‘Iron test,’ she says. The bead sinks. My blood is heavy with iron. How amazing to be full of metal. To see it.

On the reclining chair, the needle is bigger than I remember it – hollow, like a tunnel being pushed into a ring-road of arteries and veins. I make myself watch, because this is interesting, too. It hurts as much as pulling out a single eyebrow hair. That’s the exact amount of hurt. I look around at everyone – all calmly lying back as they donate, as Tony Hancock put it, nearly an armful.

I’m very surprised when I start to cry. It’s one of those cries that just enters with no warning – like when Rik Mayall makes a cameo in Blackadder.

It’s because, in the last few years, we have been led to believe that we are a little bit harried, a little bit unyielding – that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and the smart thing to do is harden your heart and look out for yourself. We’ve split into camps, tribes – to begin to talk is to fall into an argument and reveal yourself as someone else’s problem, or enemy. Baby boomers are pitted against millennials, Leavers against Remainers – and yet, even in our furiously bonded groups, we’ve never felt more anxious or alone. Along with sparrows, bees and skylarks, it feels as if love is in decline too. You do not see it around so much any more. You do not open the door and hear it singing.

But here, this room is full of the least talked-about love – love for someone you’ve never met. Here is a system set up, without profit or material reward, based on a simple idea of a country never wanting to see someone bleed out on a table when there were a thousand people out there who would have given their blood in a literal heartbeat, if they’d been asked.

This, then, is where you are asked. This is where you can lie on the bed and scrunch your hand into a fist, over and over, sending all the luck in the world to the team who will, one day – one terrible, unlucky, critical day for someone – break open the seal on your bag and try to keep someone alive. Maybe this heartbeat will turn someone’s lips from blue to pink again. Or this beat bring back a mother, or a father, or a child. All the calmness and love in this room is being sent into some furious, terrified future in A&E that you will never know about – but where you will be the magic that stops a life from being undone. Perhaps the life of someone you know. Perhaps your own. Perhaps you are not donating at all – but lending. As others once, maybe, lent to you.

The church hall, the vans, the nurses, the donors, the samovar, clunking; Britain thinks it is having an identity crisis but a country is, simply, what is does – and it does this. It has an NHS where people donate their blood for free. Where they come and put 500ml of love in a clear plastic bag, which is carefully labelled and stored against future terror.

In church halls, like this, in every county, smelling of hot dust and love.

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