On those rare occasions when I do something unselfish, I try to keep quiet about it. The Bible warns against boasting of how charitable we are – wise advice.
But in one thing I break this rule. I go on and on about giving blood. This is because I want people to know how enjoyable it is, and to start doing it.
It is partly the ritual of arriving, having your blood tested. It is partly the knowledge that you will get nothing material out of it at all. Here, for once, in a small busy room you can do something only because you want to do it. There’s no bargain, no pressure, no payment.
There is always the charm, patience and good humour of the staff. Yes, there is a small sharp pain as the needle goes in, but it really is not very much. The problem is that most people have no idea that this is so, and have never considered doing it.
Blood donation was once much more a part of normal life. Large workplaces, which are so much less common, would hold donor sessions in nearby church halls, which are also less common.
It is more than 60 years since the comedian Tony Hancock recorded his sketch about donating blood, in which he ends up getting his own back after wounding himself with his bread knife.
The programme is a historical archive from a vanished world, in which Hancock wears a trench coat and a pork pie hat and the doctor wears a white coat and severe glasses and speaks like a caricature wartime professional of the upper classes.
Hancock is required to donate a British pint (‘nearly an armful!’, as he says) instead of the metric 500 millilitres today.
This air of nostalgia may be the problem. Millions may regard blood donation as an old-fashioned middle-aged suburban activity, dating from wartime and post-war austerity which has somehow ceased to be necessary.
Blood donation seems to come from the same era as mass radiography and TB hospitals, iron lungs and wooden crutches.
When I first gave blood, at York University in the 1970s, the process was marvellously archaic, with nurses in starched caps and aprons, a reverent silence during the procedure, blood stored in glass bottles, and recovery rooms with iron-framed beds covered in grey blankets with red stripes.
I was never offered (as some claim to have been) a restorative pint of Guinness afterwards, but there was strong tea in a china cup and a plate of Huntley & Palmers biscuits.
The event changed my life for the better in a surprising way.
Donors were issued with a large paper packet of iron pills and instructed to take them for two weeks afterwards, with a good breakfast, every day.
Thanks to this instruction I began getting up early for breakfast as a matter of course, unlike almost all my fellow students who tended to snooze till noon.
I found I enjoyed the early starts and the breakfasts, and have never gone back to lie-ins.
There may have been other reasons why students did not give blood much in those days.
At Oxford in the 1960s, according to a widely believed legend which I have never tracked down but which seems entirely credible to me, a special donor session was held so revolutionary undergraduates could give blood to the Viet Cong guerrillas then fighting the Americans in Vietnam.
Many gallons of Trotskyist gore were collected, and then driven to East Berlin for processing. The story goes that when the East German medics tested for impurities, the Oxford blood was so infused with marijuana that it all had to be poured down the drain and so never reached North Vietnam.
The blood people do, after all, have to be careful that what they put into sick and injured patients is not contaminated.
These days the donor is confronted with a fearsome form in which he or she must confess, before giving blood, to drug abuse, some rather liberated types of sexual activity, or moderately exotic travel (you’d be surprised how many rather ordinary places are suspect thanks to such insect-borne diseases as West Nile Fever). Dental work can be a risk.
I am sometimes frowned at when I admit to having taken paracetamol for a headache some days before, but generally they stretch a point. This might also put some people off, but it is necessary.
It was almost certainly a shortage of donors which led to the horrific scandal of blood contaminated with hepatitis C and HIV which endured from the 1970s to the 1990s. In an effort to treat and help people with haemophilia, Britain obtained supplies of blood products from the US, many of which came from blood which had been paid for and so should never have been used.
Paid-for blood or blood products are appallingly likely to have been provided by people with infected or otherwise dangerous blood. Tens of thousands of men and women were, as a result, infected with hepatitis C and HIV thanks to tainted blood or infected clotting factor products. It has been estimated that more than 30,000 patients received contaminated blood, resulting in at least 3,000 deaths. Any study of this case will make you deeply angry.
The best response would be to start giving blood as soon as you can – it will make a repeat of this shameful tragedy far less likely.
But now something else has gone wrong. During the summer, the NHS appealed for people with O-type blood (which can be given to anyone) to donate urgently, after stocks dropped to unprecedently low levels in England. The shortage followed a crisis caused by unfilled appointments at donor centres and increased demand after a cyber-attack affected services in London.
And, last week, NHS England asked blood donors rather plaintively to book and stick to their appointments – last Christmas saw the lowest monthly total of donations since 2020.
It has urged donors to book over the next six weeks to ensure the nation has the blood needed by hospitals this Christmas.
Last December, NHS England collected around 108,000 donations, ten per cent below the monthly average.
About 47,500 donors give blood each week, and hospitals need about 113,000 donations a month. But blood has a shelf-life of just 35 days, so stocks need to be refreshed all the time.
None of these shortages would happen if there were more regular donors. And you cannot assume that the existing ageing donors will keep going for ever.
There’s a limit on how often donors can give blood – men can donate every 12 weeks, women every 16 weeks.
Donors aged 17–24 make up just 7 per cent of the donor base. And an extra 200,000 new donors are needed to sign up each year to meet demand.
If you are not one of them, consider becoming one this Christmas. Once you have provided your first armful, don’t be surprised if you can’t stop doing so.
