What did you do this Christmas? Gorge on turkey with family, friends and loved ones? Engage in passive-aggressive political debates about Nigel Farage and UKIP with distant relatives? Test to the limit the human body’s ability to break down alcohol? Well, in between doing some or all of those things, a huge number of Britons also found the time to take to social media and publicly declare their love for one particular public service. The object of their affections is, of course, the National Health Service, about which only positive things can be said and to whom we must all be seen to pay sufficient homage.

For the past month, your blogger’s Twitter feed has been inundated with schmaltzy love letters to the NHS, shared and retweeted countless times by people in the grip of a dangerous herd mentality and the gnawing fear that failure to participate in the semi-compulsory Christmas love-in will lead others to believe that they are secretly in favour of cancer, or that they really Hate the Nurses.

Fortunately for these people, but less so for the rest of us, there are countless ways in which they can publicly display their unthinking fidelity to one very specific model of universal healthcare provision dreamed up in 1948.

They can post pseudo-inspirational images on our Twitter and Facebook timelines, like this one:

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