Being a child of the NHS, I was brought up to laud and praise it, in the way Victorian patriarchs taught their children and servants to laud and praise the Church’s one foundation. Actually, that’s not true. As a young woman, I took the National Health Service completely for granted and never took a view about whether or not it was a good or bad thing, nor why new prime ministers always made such a song and dance about it. Why would I? I never went near a doctor except in A&E that one time (accidently stabbed self with two Indian glass bangles).  In my prime, I was given extremely generous medical insurance by my employers and I never was ill much, or needed operating on. So it is only in my declining years, now that I’ve been to America enough times to know how very scary an insurance-based health care system can be, that I praise the sainted name of Clement Attlee. I imagine this pattern is not unusual.  Since I needed an operation last week for something they have to put you to sleep for, I looked up my surgeon on the web, because it seemed daft not to. I looked up both his private website and his bit of the NHS website. He looked OK to me, by which I mean that I’m no judge of excellence in surgeons, but he ticked both my “unreasonable prejudice” boxes.  First, number of years since qualifying: 20. Tick! I like a doctor who is both young enough to appreciate new developments in the field, and old enough to have qualified long, long before that pestiferous late-Labour reforming madness brought in by Patricia Hewitt: Modernising Medical Careers (MMC). Telegraph readers with offspring in training as junior doctors will remember MMC was glossed as Murdering My Career by desperate sons and daughters. Second, number of years in current post: 16. I admire stickability.  I looked up my hospital, Basingstoke, which you might have seen on the telly if you watched Green Wing, though I never did. I found that Nicola Horlick has been a non-executive director of the hospital board since January 2008 while continuing to be CEO of Bramdean Asset Management, the company she launched in 2005. Fancy, eh? She’s as impressive as ever, that Nicola.  Basingstoke’s website speaks that woolly public-services English that no one can parse, e.g. “Providing excellent health care to our community”. You can only think: who is providing? If it’s Basingstoke Hospital, why don’t you write we are providing? Then you realise that simply using the present participle without a pronoun can be read as meaning either “We are providing excellent health care” or “We wish we were”, depending on what the last report said about such provision.  All I really wanted to know was if Basingstoke was heaving with C Diff and/or MRSA, but you need all day and great patience to sit maundering from link to link. And they swabbed each nostril with a cotton bud to see if I was bringing MRSA in with me.  What I found on the ward, the real-world ward, was that it was heaving with staff nurses and everything was clean. (Which is so flipping cheering.) At shift change on the second morning, which is at twenty to eight, one of the day nurses made a showbizzy entrance into the ward, singing and bopping about in a very lively manner. “Guess who was at Wembley last night, watching Take That!” she bubbled, milking the chorus of oohs and Look at yous! for precisely 10 seconds.  Then she made straight for the first bed opposite me and began to deal, very tenderly, quickly and quietly with a dressing-change on a patient who’d had surgery two days before. When she got to the last bed – me – she was still smiley but very crisp and firm in her clear instructions to her pupil, a young Polish woman. It was all very old-fashioned. Not to say retro. Deeply pleasing.
A top-flight surgeon, clean wards and a nurse who sings Take That. There's    nothing quite like the NHS.