Rebecca Moore gets ready to take a trip to America and thanks her lucky stars for the great British health service

It’s been a bizarre few weeks: a plane vanished into (actual) thin air, March has been hot enough for barbeques and vest tops and Russia is getting rapped on the knuckles for wooing Crimea right under everybody’s noses.

But the most amazing thing I’ve learned this week is that I need to skip off to California for a break: to be fair, free accommodation and a subsidised flight are the main reasons for this need. A gal’s gotta do what a gal’s gotta do.

However, it has meant sorting out all kinds of boring things – including my passport (which is lost) and my travel insurance (which is not lost and rather expensive).

I’ve had my passport for nearly ten years and it has happily transported me around the world. With six months remaining, it seems to have disappeared, in a last ditch effort to go it alone. I phoned home (meaning that I phoned my mother’s home, which I simply can’t refrain from calling Home) and asked her whether I’d left it there.

In truth, I knew I’d left it there. I can’t see it, came her response after less than one hour of searching. No, it definitely should be there, I replied calmly, when what I really wanted to do was scream: “GET THEE UPSTAIRS WENCH AND DON’T COME DOWN UNTIL YOU HAVE RETRIEVED IT!”

Another two hours slipped by before the phone rang again.

It’s definitely not here.

It definitely is.

We back and forthed like this for the next few hours until I finally conceded defeat.

Cue: frantic telephone calls and emails with Her Majesty’s Passport office to acquire an interview in Newport, of all places. £103 worse off, I stumbled from their office, birth certificate clutched dejectedly in my hand while sending a small prayer up to the universe willing the passport to come on time so that I may board my already booked flight in two weeks’ time.

Then there’s travel insurance, something it is so easy to forget – as a now-bankrupt friend lamented.

The thing is, living in a country where we have health treatment on tap, you forget that America misses out on this superior luxury. You forget that Americans – while dying from a heart attack on the sidewalk – have pleaded with their helpers not to phone for an ambulance because they simply can’t afford to pay the hospital bill. You forget how amazingly lucky we are.

And then on Newsnight I hear people hinting that we should perhaps invest less in the NHS. As though the other options (death – or at the very least, destitution by way of medical bills) might genuinely be a promising one.

Just when I thought the world couldn’t get any weirder, are we seriously even talking about cutting money to the NHS? Because let’s face it – once the plane disappearances intensify due to alien invasions (that was one person’s genuine theory) and when World War III breaks out over the latest barbecue spat, we’ll need medical care more than ever.