\n<\/p>\n
I<\/span>\u2019ve flexed before about having the world\u2019s best blood type: O-negative. For some reason, all niceties around boasting vanish in the face of this natural-born superiority. If the \u201cfirst-responder\u201d rubber bracelet they sent me matched any of my clothes (how could it? It\u2019s the colour of blood), I would definitely wear it everywhere I go.<\/p>\n Last week, though, for the third time, I got turned away from donating because my iron wasn\u2019t high enough. It was low only by a margin, and this is normally acknowledged as just natural human variation, but they operate quite a strict three-strikes rule, and now I can\u2019t even present my (also pretty superior) veins again for a full two years.<\/p>\n The nurse shook her head. \u201cIt\u2019s such a shame, what with you being \u2026\u201d \u201cRight? O-negative! How many people could you say that about?\u201d \u201cWell, a fair amount,\u201d she said, \u201cprobably everyone else in here; you\u2019re the ones we\u2019re always calling. Do you sleep well?\u201d I considered this. I sleep incredibly well, but not for very long, preferring, broadly speaking, the time I spend awake. You can\u2019t grow up in a Thatcherite era without imbibing some ideas, and I decided as a teenager that five hours a night was the right amount. It\u2019s relatively harmless; at least I don\u2019t want to privatise anything.<\/p>\n \u201cWhat about your diet, are you eating enough vegetables?\u201d Again, I reflected on this, impartially, as if I were regarding the habits of a stranger. I do <\/em>eat vegetables, in the sense that there\u2019s none I don\u2019t like \u2013 but I also eat a lot of crisps, and there must be some displacement there, some nutritional events that could have been kale but instead were flavoured cheese and onion.<\/p>\n \u201cStop eating crisps!\u201d the nurse said, exasperated. \u201cYou\u2019re O-negative.\u201d I never really saw it as an issue of custodianship, this blood I have. I just thought it was a thing I was good at.<\/p>\n Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve flexed before about having the world\u2019s best blood type: O-negative. For some reason, all niceties around boasting vanish in the face of this natural-born superiority. If the \u201cfirst-responder\u201d rubber bracelet they sent me matched any of my clothes (how could it? It\u2019s the colour of blood), I would definitely wear it everywhere I go.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":23279,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[1453,14203,12883,7526,4259,14202,195,8148],"class_list":{"0":"post-23278","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-blood","9":"tag-crisps","10":"tag-donor","11":"tag-superhero","12":"tag-type","13":"tag-weakness","14":"tag-williams","15":"tag-zoe"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23278","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=23278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23278\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/23279"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=23278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=23278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=23278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}