On Good Things and Doctors.

Over the past few days the ratio of good things to bad things happening in my benighted little world has made the dizzying score of 5:1. This is unprecedented and I can’t help worrying that I’m going to have to pay for it somehow, but for now I’ll take the slightly better mood it has engendered and hope the wind has shifted.

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And today I met Dr Claire, one of the panel of GPs at my surgery who I’ve never seen before. I was told in advance that she is lovely, and so she is. She seemed a little less concerned about the severity of my elevated blood pressure and conceived a sensible plan (not particularly cunning, but sensible) to address it. I liked Dr Claire, and that can’t be a bad thing when a chap is trying to get his blood pressure down.

But then I got to thinking about how medical care has changed during my lifetime. It’s all about large practices with panels of doctors now, and sometimes you can have five different issues and be treated by five different doctors. When I was a boy, every family had its family doctor who attended your needs from birth until he or she either retired or fell off the conveyor belt.

Ours was a man called Dr Day and he operated from a practice of one. If you needed to see a doctor, you saw Dr Day. No alternatives. And what was interesting was my mother’s reaction to him. He walked with a pronounced forward lean, you see, so when she saw him walking up the garden path she would always say: The doctor’s arrived. Ere’s me ’ead, me arse is coming. But as soon as he walked through the door, her manner changed from jocular to reverential.

He wore a suit and drove the latest model Citroen, and to see a new Citroen driving up a road where only three of the fifty or so dwellings had a car at all was a matter of considerable note. Here was a man of august status, the sort of man to whose tea you would have to add sugar if he so wished. I never saw my mother curtsey to him, but I was usually out of sight of the front door when she opened it.

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So now I’m going to try to read some more of Shirley Jackson’s The Sundial and hope I can manage more than two pages before I fall asleep. That’s not a comment on Jackson’s writing, but a consequence of getting up two hours earlier than usual to have the pleasure of meeting Dr Claire. Getting up two hours earlier than usual has a disturbing feeling of unreality about it, and it depresses me. I’m not used to the quality of daylight being so unfamiliar.