I See Red (Red!)

Let’s talk blood.

It was the eighties, meaning Margaret Thatcher and bad haircuts. I was sporting a cross between an afro and a mullet, but I was young enough not to notice and my parents were kind enough not to point it out.

And it appeared. A little protein, spreading its microscopic nucleoli like tiny wings, ready to fly in the face of the pickets and punks. Its name was bovine spongiform encephalopathy, a mouthful to be sure. You might know it as mad cow disease.

England still shivers at its memory. I was too young to know, being more interested in discussing Princess Leia in a two-piece with my friends, but what would you expect, I was a kid in Churchend Primary School at the time. It just happens that the school was in Reading, England.

I grew up. My hair exploded into a curly mop, my parents kind enough not to point it out. Then we moved to New Zealand.

When I hit eighteen I went to a blood bank to do my civic duty and make a blood donation. I was denied. The following year I went back to the blood bank, my veins coursing with reddy goodness. Struck out, yet again. It became a tradition, my annual foray.

“I would like to donate my blood.” I would say.

“Oh lovely dear.” The nurse would naturally respond.

“But wait! If perchance I happened to have lived in England about a decade prior, would I be rendered ineligible from donating my otherwise healthy and much needed haemoglobin?”

“What, you’re saying you lived in England in the eighties?”

“More or less.”

“No. No you can’t give blood.”

“That is all. Thank you.”

For the record, I do not have a heart condition. I have never suffered from any chronic illness, exotic disease or biological agent. I don’t smoke, don’t do drugs, don’t even drink too much, all of which must make me morbidly boring on a night out.

But that isn’t exactly an infectious disease. Yet twenty years on I am considered a medical risk, a walking time bomb according to the good doctors who made this law. And all because I lived in England in the eighties.

Well I’m back in England and I hear they need blood. I’ve lost the afro, which is a shame. I blame my parents’ kindness.