We don’t like to remember the difficult moments – neither personally and politically.

Many of us will know the older person who comes out of hospital after a major heart attack and heads straight for a cigarette in the doorway of their local pub, “I dodged a bullet there.”

And politically.

Many UK political decisions are constrained by talk about huge debts and “balancing the books.”

But in analysing the 2010 election and the ‘need’ for austerity we forgot about having to pay for the 2007-08 financial crash; and now in the 2024 election we forget about having to pay for the 2019-22 pandemic with its loans and grants as well as things like the notorious PPE contracts.

One factor here is that politicians in opposition during an election have learnt that there are more votes in blaming the other guy rather than in explaining why the increase in debt happened.

And politicians in power see no benefit in building up reserves ‘for a rainy day’ so when the crash, pandemic, crisis … arrives we will always be fiscally unprepared.

In terms of healthcare, it also means we (as a country) don’t want to talk about long covid, nor why we have so few intensive care units compared with other countries.

Dodging bullets is a curious human trait, but no way to properly run a country.