Because I have a perversely nocturnal brain I often write late into the night. So I had only just gone to bed last Thursday when the phone rang. My bedside clock said 3.11am. I answered with a sense of foreboding. Aside from the odd wrong number, any call we get between three and seven in the morning usually means that someone we know well is in some sort of trouble.

So it proved. We had been called by a service called Lifeline. If you are old, infirm or housebound and live by yourself, you wear an electronic device like a pendant round your neck. Should you take a tumble and can’t get up, you press it to speak to a central operator who has the phone numbers of your nearest and dearest. It’s a reasonable system, though I can’t help thinking guiltily that if we — we as individuals, and we as society — really cared about our elderly we wouldn’t leave them quite so much to fend for themselves.

Anyway, we flung on pullovers and whizzed two miles up the road to see what had happened to the lady concerned: a close relative, aged 86. The sight that greeted us was shocking. She had fallen on her way to the loo, opened up an ulcer, was shivering and half-conscious. Her skin was a ghastly blue. Worst of all, she was crumpled into a pool of her own blood. To my untutored eye, she seemed to have lost pints.

It was just after 3.30am. I dialled 999. When I described the old lady’s condition the operator gave clear, concise first-aid instructions and said an ambulance was on its way. We found blankets, made her as comfortable as we could, and prayed that help wouldn’t arrive too late.

Expert View

Labour’s early failures in health were as a consequence of suggesting, before 1997, that just by changing a policy (in Mr Blair’s case, the internal market), and spending a bit, lots of resource would be made available for patient care

David Aaronovitch

Alas, this is Britain, 2007. At around 3.45am the phone rang. It was the London Ambulance Service. The essence of the call was: we’re a bit busy tonight, sorry; can you cope? We said we would do our best. Seven minutes later our patient lost consciousness. Panicking, we called 999 again. Hang on in there, we were told. More agonising minutes passed. There is no helplessness worse than watching someone’s life slip away for lack of prompt medical care in the middle of one of the richest, most sophisticated cities on the planet.

At 4.05am we heard a noise outside and glimpsed a flashing blue light coming along the road. I raced down the stairs to guide the ambulance to the flat. But the surreal sight that greeted me almost made me keel over with amazement.

It was a fire engine.

The crew were already running towards me, breathing-gear and hoses at the ready. “Where’s the incident?” one shouted.

“What incident?” I replied. “The incident at this address,” he said. “Someone phoned 999 for the fire service.”

“We called for an ambulance,” I said. “An old lady’s had a bad fall.”

The firemen looked bemused but undaunted. They leapt up the stairs with every bit of medical clobber they could find. But I sensed that the spectacle in the flat alarmed them almost as much as it terrified us. By now the pool of blood stretched a couple of feet in every direction from where the woman lay. It was 4.10am — 40 minutes after we had made the 999 call. Luckily, skilled help was soon on hand. A paramedic turned up in a car. She administered oxygen and issued an urgent request for an ambulance on her radio. Only then did it transpire that there were no ambulances available in our area: a huge swath of northwest London. One would have to be despatched from Islington. “Eight minutes max, this time of night,” said one of the firemen, trying to be reassuring.

It took 25. At 4.35am, about 65 minutes after we had made the first call, the ambulance arrived. The old lady finally got to hospital more than two hours after she had pressed her alarm.

Interestingly, A&E was virtually empty. There had been — surprise, surprise — no horrific incident tying up all the ambulances in North London in the early hours of last Thursday morning. The truth, it seemed, was that there was only one manned ambulance covering the entire area that night. Why? Because (we were informally told) the authority concerned had suspended ambulance crews’ overtime, presumably in an attempt to alleviate its well-publicised financial problems.

Once again, as so often in Blair’s Britain, we had encountered a colossal gap between what the politicians tell us is right with the country, and what our own eyes and brains tell us is wrong. More than £92 billion of our taxes is poured into the health service annually. That’s around £1,800 a year for every man, woman and child in England and Wales. We are assured that things are getting better all the time. The NHS certainly boasts more bureaucrats and fancy computer programs than ever before. Yet a semiconscious 86-year-old lies in a pool of her blood for 65 minutes waiting for an ambulance. In what sense is that progress? What are the NHS’s priorities, if not for dealing with that?

The old lady, you will be pleased to know, is slowly recovering. Those Blitz-generation Londoners are as tough as nails. I’m the one who’s still in shock. Where on earth did that fire engine come from?

Hip-hip who knows?

William Rees-Mogg’s delightful article in The Times yesterday about the quotations once learnt by heart in British schools struck a weird chord with me, because one of the lines he cited has puzzled me since I was a callow youth of 12. It comes in that thrilling passage in Macaulay’s epic poem Horatius when the Roman hero, having held off the Tuscan invaders until the bridge into Rome could be demolished behind him, flings himself into the foaming Tiber — reaching the safety of the opposite bank almost with his last gasp. At which point, according to Macaulay, “even the ranks of Tuscany could scarce forbear to cheer”.

Well, what I want to know is: did they cheer or didn’t they? Read literally, “could scarce forbear” surely means that they suppressed the urge to let out a sporting “hip hip hoorah” for their gallant foe. But I’m convinced that Macaulay meant to convey the impression that they did cheer. Could some pedantic grammarian put me out of my misery? After 40 years of pondering this dilemma, I crave what the Americans call “closure”.

Copacaban anyone?

The Portuguese ambassador is up in arms over Cambridge’s proposal to cut the teaching of Portuguese at the university. With just 37 students learning the language, the course is deemed uneconomic. And most other British universities don’t offer it at all.

Hmm. Portuguese is a fine language, but it strikes me that there’s only one way to resurrect interest in it. Rename it “Brazilian”, or better still “Copacaban” — just to remind students that it’s the mother-tongue of the world’s most beautiful babes and bronzed hunks.

timesonline.co.uk/richardmorrison

Times Recommends

• Care in old age: we won’t pay, the State can’t
• Viewers’ choice: our talentless Everyman
• Memo to the poor: go forth and don’t multiply