Her name is Tracey. She’s in her early 50s and works in the insurance business, mostly from her flat. She had plans, once her son finished uni. “I thought it was going to be a time to focus on me, on the things I wanted to do.” Her diction is crisp in that proper English way. Every consonant clear. She wears the pageboy cut that singer Dinah Lee sported in the 1960s, fringe and all.

“Are you American?” she asked.

“Yes,” I replied.

“It’s a bad day for America,” she said, referring to the tragic loss of life due to American airplane and military helicopter crash that had occurred just hours prior.

“Yes,” I agreed. “It’s a bad day in a bad month in a couple of bad months for America, which is why I am here and not there. At least you all had the good sense to get rid of Boris Johnson.”

“Well, not sure it was us,” she said. “His own party did him in, didn’t they?”

“I wish that would happen in our country.”

“I admit that reading the news about your country makes me feel better about my country,” she said.

“I get it,” I said, wincing a bit at the reality of that. They feel sorry for Americans here in the UK, especially those of us who fled the country in the wake of TFG’s election.

Tracey told me to be sure and visit the gardens on my walk through town.

“It is a beautiful day for a walk,” I said. The sun, while hardly warm, was at least shining.

“We have to do what we can while we can,” she said. “Since my cancer diagnosis I have been on probably a dozen holidays, mostly on ships so I get to see more than one country at a time.”

“Is it true what they say about the healthcare in the UK?” I asked. “Was it a long time between your diagnosis and your treatment?”

“No,” Tracey said. “I went in for my mammogram on Tuesday. Just a regular check-up following Covid. They called me on Thursday with the diagnosis. I was shocked. I had no idea. I wasn’t expecting it. I had surgery two weeks later, followed up by chemo and radiation.”

“So the rumors we hear about how bad the healthcare system in the UK aren’t true?”

“No,” Tracey said. “I had great care. I was lucky it was caught early and I was treated immediately. I would have had the surgery a week earlier if it hadn’t been a bank holiday. It doesn’t even seem like something that happened to me. I think of it as a Netflix documentary, like I watched it happen to someone else.”

“Really?” I said, thinking of my own sister’s cancer journey. “And nobody in the UK is going bankrupt paying for care.”

“No. I have a card and I pick up my meds and they don’t cost me a penny.”

Of course they do cost by way of taxes for every Brit but it was good to hear something other than the propaganda Americans are sold about universal healthcare. Tracey has enough monies to go on holidays with her son, rather than having to figure out how to pay for the meds she takes as a result of her breast cancer.

As a reporter, I covered many a story of people trying to get treatment for various illnesses. Recently I had a friend whose husband died by suicide. I wonder had he been able to access the in-hospital treatment he needed if she might not be living with a different outcome right now.

As Trump and Elon seek to loot the US government to deny more people life-saving care and even housing, I worry about how many more people must die before American voters care enough to take to the streets and demand a better way of life.