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I’ve just driven into town for some A4 paper. It’s a 14-mile round trip to civilisation, but no matter.

In town, I bought some milk, a loaf of bread, the newspaper, some shortcake biscuits, a bunch of bananas, a pizza for the freezer, two bottles of red burgundy reduced to £3.79 (that’s dinner sorted) and some petrol.

I did not buy A4 paper.

I realised this only when I pulled up back outside my house.

Bugger.

The business of getting older. I am never without it, now. On the way home, in the lanes, I had to reverse, as usual. Now, these days my wonky eyes are wonkier than ever. One of them is long-sighted, one short, so I have glasses for driving which have a stronger lens on the right eye, to stop it giving up, squinting at my nose and leaving all the work to the ‘good’ left eye, though the ‘good’ left eye can’t see anything much if it gets too close.

When I look back over my left shoulder to reverse the car, this causes optical chaos. Repositioned, neither eye knows quite what to do for the best. When I mentioned this to my optician at the last eye test, he had a scientific solution: “Close one of your eyes”.

So now, when I reverse, I do it one-eyed, my face in a sort of grim rictus as I force one eye shut. It’s usually the right, which is the one facing the oncoming motorist. So, to the oncoming motorist it looks exactly like I have closed both my eyes in order to reverse or, worse, that I am winking at him or her in a sort of leering Benny Hill manner.

I am rarely thanked for reversing.

Terrible, this relentless, hesitantly squinting advance into late middle age.

But this I see

I may not be able to see to reverse with both eyes, but in other areas my sight is crystal clear. It can spot the difference between right and wrong with 20/20 clarity.

For example, further to my comments, two weeks ago, about the National Health Service and the need for a cap on the prices paid to giant pharmaceutical corporations for their drugs.

Roche, the Swiss-based pharmaceutical giant, was in the news last week when its £90,000 price for a drug treatment that can prolong the life of terminal breast cancer sufferers for six months or so was deemed too high by Britain’s NHS.

Sally Greenbrook, senior policy officer at Breakthrough Breast Cancer, criticised Roche, saying with admirable brevity: “It’s impossible to put a price on life’s precious moments. But it’s not impossible to put a fair price on drugs.”

Roche made profits of £7.4 billion in the last financial year.

These levels of profit bring great satisfaction to the boards of pharmaceutical corporations, some of which have Tory MPs among them or retain Tory MPs as expensive consultants, even though such profits play a large part in bankrupting the health service and are denying care to patients.

In India, the government uses compulsory licensing to bring down the costs of what it defines as essential medicines, a move that is of course deeply unpopular with the profiteering pharmaceutical corporations.

Among these is Bayer, whose chief executive Marijn Dekkers has called the Indian system, that makes vital health care available to millions of poor people, “essentially theft”. Bloomberg Businessweek quoted him: “We did not develop this medicine for Indians. We developed it for Western patients who can afford it.”

Talk about giving the game away! (I am not aware how much Roche is preparing to charge to treat breast cancer patients in India or Africa, by the way).

Cap drug prices. Cap drug prices now.

Defending the indefensible

Roche defended its price by saying people in other parts of Europe – Sweden, Norway, Switzerland – were prepared to pay it, and asking why it should put any different value on the life of a British woman. The company’s spokesperson Jennifer Cozzone said the affair showed the system in Britain was broken.

Well, no it’s not. The system that’s broken, Jennifer, is the system that enables you to defend profiteering to the extent of £7.4billion. What’s broken is a system that permits your masters and mistresses to have the power of life and death over women, and over the children who cry for every minute they can have with their mum. That’s what’s fucking broken.

Imagine being Jennifer. Imagine that for a moment. Imagine somebody asked you to talk about the value you should place on a woman’s life. Imagine taking your boss’s money to spout that filth when you know the same TV news report is bound to contain a doomed mum saying that six months’ more life means a great deal to her and her children. Imagine your life turning out like that.

I would grovel naked, starving and beaten in the world’s worst gutters rather than whore my soul in that way. How can anybody live with themselves when their wealth is dependent on defending the sort of human scum that puts prices on lives and profits from misery?

Well, we all pay prices, I suppose.

I’ve seen a great many people down the years prepared to defend the indefensible on one scale or another. The gentle – or not-so-gentle – art of self-delusion, persuading yourself that the world’s very worst people are worth befriending – Rupert Murdoch, Netenyahu, any religious fundamentalist, Iain Duncan Smith – and the world’s weakest people are worth bullying in order to feather your own nest, in this world or the mythical next. But I still don’t understand it.

I don’t mean to single out poor Jennifer for abuse. She has made her decisions and she is presumably content that her life’s work is to be a mouthpiece for a pharmaceutical corporation that makes billions in profit each year but refuses to drop its prices. She has possibly even persuaded herself that it is a good thing to defend such people, for their drugs help millions. The idea that cheaper drugs that mean less profit would help more people, even poor people, possibly doesn’t get permission to cross her mind.

And she is a person of great power, for as long as there are Jennifers prepared to defend the indefensible on behalf of the wealthy, injustices live on.

Cap drug prices. Cap drug prices now.

 Join the queue

The Roches of this world count their billions for their pills, while the elderly wait in ambulances outside the doors of the hospitals.

Figures obtained this week by the Labour Party under the Freedom of Information Act from ambulance trusts show that last year 300,000 patients had to wait in queues of ambulances outside hospital doors because the hospitals were too full to let them in.

Now I know this was only one of the many proposals I had for curing the NHS, but I do suggest this: cap drug prices. Cap drug prices now.