The amazing non-business of blood donation. From the Mail on Sunday, 16th October 2022

Donating blood is one of the loveliest things we do, and one of the most frightening. I suppose that is why I have been doing it for more than 50 years.

I started in the days when they collected it in imperial pints, and donors lay in silence on iron beds with grey blankets in church halls, tended by starched nurses of the old school.

I was never offered a post-donation pint of stout, as some claim happened to them in those days. But I was given iron pills, a procedure now regarded as rank her...