So we break from our usually scheduled coverage for a brief report:

We’re in the process of wrapping up our annual summer sojourn to the UK. We love London, even if it’s rained, and we think this is actually true, every day for the last 300. (It’s raining right now, as a matter of fact.) Anyway, we’ve had a cold, and last night we tried to do that thing where you pop your stuffy ears—we’ll spare the details because they make our attempt at a medical remedy sound even stupider than it actually was. In any case, we came to believe we had destroyed our own eardrum. (This was in fact reinforced by our perusal of medical-advice websites, which either repeated the fact that we were very, very stupid to have done this to our ears or provided helpful information like one commenter’s report that he had “**** my pants while popping my ears.” That’s so gross we can’t even think it without asterisks.) We went to sleep hoping our eardrum would spontaneously repair itself, but it hurt so badly that we woke up at seven a.m. This is a difficult time to wake up as an American in London, because all your east coast friends are asleep and all your west coast friends are at bars. (And don’t know about eardrums, anyway, because you met them in art school.)

Bereft of the advice of friends, family, or our own medical professionals, we thought of that scene in Michael Moore’s Sicko, where the idiot American who like broke his head on Abbey Road ended up in a National Health Service clinic and walked out, basically fixed, without paying a dime. Now, we love Michael Moore, even if we think he can be a bully sometimes. We’ve never understood the criticism that his documentaries are overly opinionated: a newspaper has room for news stories and opinion pieces, and documentary films, in our opinion, should have more than enough room for news pieces and films advancing an argument. But even though we’re big MM fans, we saw that scene, with the American at the NHS, and we were like: really? Really? We know the NHS isn’t perfect; our ex-boyfriend complained about it mercilessly when he had to wait 12 weeks for an appointment once, and we think some of their decisions, widely reported here, are heartbreaking. (Some cancer drugs commonly available on medical plans in the US, for example, aren’t available through the NHS—and patients who pay for them privately here risk losing all of their NHS coverage, which obviously would be a debacle for them.)

We were trepidatious, then, when we set off for a local walk-in clinic, designed to treat minor illnesses and injuries. We packed two books, our laptop and a lunch, just in case we were there for the day. We were wondering if we should have perhaps brought a couple DVDs when we walked into the clinic, which was empty, well lit and well thought out, with rows of chairs in front of three public bathrooms. We filled out some paperwork—less paperwork than we do at our own doctor’s office in Manhattan, where we are somehow endlessly writing in our Oxford group number—and before we’d finished the chapter of the Bill Bryson book we’re reading, we were being seen by a nurse named Magda. Long story short: We did not destroy our own ear, but we are going to be on amoxicillin for the next seven days. Except for the pharmacy bill (£7.10) we didn’t pay for anything.

We left having come to two conclusions: First, our NHS experience—and obviously this is nothing but anecdotal, but there it is—was even better than the one in Sicko. And second: We walked out of the clinic being, like, Why don’t we have this? We went to a walk-in clinic at home once, to provide a urine sample for some job we ended up hating, and we spent four hours in this terrible basement with our hand over our mouth as protection against avian flu, which was the only possible diagnosis we could come up with for some of the coughing in the room. This morning, we left feeling like we were very literally in the debt of the United Kingdom, and we were like: How do we repay this? And then we thought: by providing the same service to idiot Britons who are traveling in New York, and decide they’ve come up with an amazing home remedy to clear their stuffy ears, or surf poorly and don’t want to go home with a $100,000 hospital bill.

We believe in universal health care; it was the main reason we were such supporters of John Edwards—don’t get us started on that nefarious personality—and then Hillary Clinton, both of whose health care plans we preferred to Barack Obama’s. All we know is that as soon as we got back to our apartment, we did two things: We re-requested our absentee ballot, just in case the first one got lost, and we gave Barack’s campaign $15, which these days is a significant portion of our discretionary spending. We probably would have done the latter anyway, given the events of the last few days, but all we can say is that we can’t wait to get our hands on that ballot and cast our vote, crossing our fingers for a better tomorrow.

Above: Urban Outfitters UK wool tote, about $67