To start with it turned out to be a truly enjoyable nostalgia trawl through ‘60s television satire, of which David Frost was the principle pioneer. Showing some evocative clips from That Was The Week That Was, and the Frost Report, he was obviously relishing his role in bringing so much great and subsequently famous talent to the screen for the first time – like Roy Kinnear, Willie Rushton, John Cleese, Ronnies Corbett and Barker.

Frost is also a natural stand up comedian, and he was clearly enjoying himself; he must love it – why else would he trail out to Ludlow the night before he was due on an early plane next day to the US to host a conference for the Al Jazeera TV network? He was an unstoppable, bubbling geyser of witty, close-up observations of some of the extraordinary people he’s interviewed, all delivered with a knowing smile that draws his audience right in.

In the second half of the show, he took questions and gave great value, sometimes a good five minutes’ worth of answer. He was asked, intriguingly, who he most liked being interviewed by.

One of the best, he said, was Peter Florence, director of the Hay Festival, who talked to him there this year, and asked him questions he hadn’t been asked before. Peter Florence has developed significantly as an interviewer over the years he’s been running Hay Festival. He has developed both in gravitas and in introducing insightful new perspectives on his subjects. I was especially impressed this year with his Stephen Fry interview, which was well-balanced, witty and gently probing, in a way that Fry could not but relax and answer with engaging candour.  I predict that, if he wants to, Peter Florence will go on to become a major television interviewer, and Frost’s commendation won’t get in the way of that.

So far, then, Ludlow Festival has thrown up some gems, despite the disparate nature of its programme. And tomorrow night I am putting on a small fringe event of my own, when, with guitarist Simon King and pianist Liam Dunachie, I will be performing music from the Great American Songbook at the Globe Bar in Ludlow, in aid of Miracles, Bosnia Herzegovina, a charity concerned with child victims of the Bosnian Conflict.

Anyone in South Shropshire who isn’t going to see Jo Brand (with whom I inconveniently clash) assures me they will be there. Better get there early if you want a good table.

I’ve always been attracted to the musical subtleties and sheer physicality of flamenco music and dance and I have regularly promised myself a short sojourn in Seville, to be spent in small, smoky bars where guttural singing and harsh guitar chords echo off low vaulted ceilings – a promise which I have so far failed to keep. With a strongly held view that raw peasant culture like this doesn’t export easily, I had doubts that this powerful musical form would convince when performed on the stage of a provincial English theatre.

I was delighted to find that I was wrong, for despite lacking the tang of gitana sweat, tapas and fino, Jaleo put on a show of brilliantly excuted dancing and singing that was real, energetic and exciting.  The troupe consists of six performers: two guitarists, a classic male flamenco singer (Juan Reina), two lovely women dancers (one who also sang with vivid gypsy intensity) and a splendid male dancer (Adolfo Vega). One of the guitarists, billed as El Ingles, gave a solo performance of an astonishing virtuosity that I’d never seen before.

They staged the show in way that cleverly conveyed the impression they were in a small, intimate bar – even, as they finished their two sets, performing without any artificial amplification. Although the auditorium was only two thirds full, they were ecstatically received and applauded.  If Jaleo are coming your way in their current tour, and you like that sort of vigorous, sweaty and highly skilled music-making, I urge you to make the effort to see them while you can.

Walcot is now owned by Robin Parish, whose family bought it fifty years ago.  Six years ago Robin took the risk of inviting a touring company, Opera à la Carte to stage a production of a classic Opera in the ballroom. The audience were encouraged to dress up and bring elegant picnics, in the manner made popular by the Glyndebourne operati, to lay out in the handsome grounds between the hall and the lake. As productions of opera of any kind are thin on the ground in Shropshire, the initiative was enthusiastically endorsed by local lovers of the genre, and the event has become an annual must-do. There is also an option to dine inside the house, and this year I was kindly invited by Ivor and Caroline Windsor to join them in the front row and for dinner.

The production on offer was Cosi Fan Tutte, a work baffling in the disparity between its piffling plot and sublime music.  What was it, I wonder, that prompted Mozart to devote such creative genius to a story that wouldn’t make it past first base in the Mills and Boon editorial office?

Set by Opera à la Carte in the days of the Raj during the early 1920’s, Mozart’s mischievous lampoon of gender stereotyping tells of two sisters,  Fiordiligi and Dorabella whose partners test their fidelity. Encouraged by incorrigible bachelor, Don Alfonso (sung by a slightly unconvincing Thomas Barnard), the sisters’ suitors Ferrando and Guglielmo lay his wager that the girls would fall in love with any man who turned up. The men tell their girlfriends that they’ve been called to military service, but come back disguised as young, heavily moustachioed Indian nabobs to test this theory on each other’s partner.

Fortunately, the frustrations of this fatuous plot become irrelevant.  In fact, one is almost glad not to know quite what the performers are saying, for the quality of the singing did ample justice to Mozart’s wonderful score.  That producer/director Nicholas Heath was able to sign up six such superb singers is testament to the extraordinary standard of operatic talent in this country. Peter Wilman (tenor) as Ferrando, and Canadian soprano, Lynn Boudreau as Despina I especially enjoyed.

The work was simply and imaginatively staged and performed in a way that held the attention and evoked the appreciation of a full but intimate house. Certainly I enjoyed the evening, dinner, and drinks afterwards with the chance to meet the cast and producer, as much as any at the Royal Opera House.

While Women’s Beach Volleyball is my spectator sport of choice, I have also watched on television innumerable sessions of young men in shorts engaged in vigorous body contact at the Millenium Stadium, and it has always seemed to me a vast space – a verdant savannah surrounded by a mighty wall of Welsh persons in national dress of red rugby shirts, waving daffodils and leeks, and singing a lot.  But, bizarrely, the place turns out– like Her Majesty the Queen and Sylvester Stallone – to be a great deal smaller in real life than you’d imagined.

It’s impressive, nevertheless, as the North Gate is opened after 3 hours’ waiting (and wondering what the hell I’m doing) and a crocodile of now mute and frustrated Cymraeg songsters are issued with a sticky label bearing a discouraging six-figure number, crawl into the hallowed space and head straight for the loos, to be immediately rerouted by liveried stewards, presumably foreseeing a potential flashpoint developing, towards seating in the ground level section of the north stand.

Suppressing the urgent urge to deal with a pot of coffee drunk at five thirty, followed by two hours on Arriva Trains Wales and three hours corralled on the walkway by the Taff, I grab a seat beside a confused, morose-looking family from Port Talbot. I engage them, as is my habit, in affable banter while spending a few minutes trying to guess which of them is the prospective performer – for none look like obvious candidates. It turns out to be a long-faced girl with bright red lips in startling contrast to the eau-de-nil complexion that a winter spent in Port Talbot tends to produce. There is something in her demeanour and the way she moves that suggests her only chance of being selected to confront Simon, Cheryl, that Irish bloke and Daniiiii will be as one of the small number of disaster acts brought in to add comic relief and make the viewing punters feel better about themselves.

I give the girl an encouraging smile; she is not visibly moved.

By now my own normally robust sanguineness is showing signs of failure; paranoia grows; I’m convinced that my only chance of reaching the high altar lies in being picked for the ‘strange-old-git’ category, and the doubtful glory of featuring in an obscure YouTube clip for a while – and even this is beginning to look hotly competitive – it seems that there are many stout little Welshman who harbour a secret Harry Secombe within, itching to get out – and they’re all here.

What are they thinking of – I think. How can they have the gall to expect to be taken seriously? Then, with a stomach-churning jolt, I see the eau-de-nil and red lipped girl looking at me – that’s just what she’s thinking about me.

I need a change of scene. The Port Talbot granny – the most grounded member of her party, I guess – consents to guard my space while I penetrate the concrete intestines of the Millennium Stadium and find the men’s loos.

It’s all hustle and bustle in there, with young guys inexplicably changing their clothes and teasing up gelled and spiked hair into the random disarray first made popular by Mr Ken Dodd. More are singing earnestly at the urinals, while a cacophony of Welsh warblers warms up in the broad concrete corridors.

Feeling more comfortable now, and fairly hungry, I look for food. All that’s on offer are giant frankfurters, the size, colour, texture (I’m guessing now) and smell of an Orangutan’s phallus, dished up with scarlet sauce in a doughy torpedo. I remain unfed.

Heading back for my seat I look for the friends I’ve made outside while shuffling down the Taff, Alisha and soul-singer Wade. I spot them, wave and wish them luck. I need it more than they do.

A new cheerleader and acolytes have appeared down at the edge of the turf. They are waving their arms expansively in an effort to work up the punters into a vocal frenzy with the arrival of a real live camera that swoops and zooms on the end of an elongated multi-directional boom. A wave of ecstasy passes through the crowd as the possibility of actually being on the telly looks suddenly real. I sink with uncharacteristic discretion into my seat, conscious of the merciless ridicule to which my fastidious offspring will subject me if they spot me displaying any enthusiasm on what I have designated a research activity.

There is a surge in excitement level as one of the high priests of Xfactor makes an appearance in the stadium. It is the small, pointless and enigmatic Dermot O’Leary – enigmatic for a lack of any identifiable skill, talent, wit or personal attribute (apart from a kind of aggressive blandness) to explain his presence on our screens. Wearing a tight-fitting shirt and clean jeans he bounds up and down the aisle closest to me while the camera tracks him and he grins insipidly, shrugging off terms of endearment from attention-seeking Emmas and Kylies.

Down below in the margin by the grass, fifteen or so small black booths like old-fashioned military field latrines are being erected, as more loud bursts of X-Factor theme are released to raise a desultory cheer from the 2,000+ aspirant stars and their connections, who have now worked out that they have a less than one in twenty chance of ever getting to sing in front of Simon and the gang next day. The cheerleader tells the punters that they have just the one chance, so get it right, and if not given a golden ticket which is a passport to the inner sanctum tomorrow, to accept their rejection and get out without arguing. It seems there’s a team of junior producers and A&R people lurking in the booths. A queue forms outside each of them – the filtering process has begun – and it’s very efficient. Soon each booth is spitting out disgruntled performers who have been rejected, followed by the very occasional whoop and leap for joy from one of those accepted to join the handful allowed to appear in front of the Gods and Goddesses of XFactor.

I don’t want to prolong the experience and, frankly I’m beginning to get a little bored. I skilfully jump a convenient queue outside audition booth 6, remembering to insert the earpiece of my phone and play the opening bars of my song’s backing track, which (wise virgin that I am) I’ve had the forethought to download so I would perform in a key that matched my vocal range.

After a quick burst of the synthetic strings that lead into the ballad I am about to assassinate, I extract the earphone, eject a small gathering of grenouilles from my throat and amble into the what turns out to be an open-fronted field latrine facing out across the hallowed turf.

The big shock, apart from recognising at once that the key I went to so much trouble to embed in my head has already fled (could be the beginnings of a rap here) is that there is a geezer sitting on a high stool in front of the X-spot. For some reason (my natural sanguineness, perhaps) I’ve been expecting a female, not a surly, bored, cynical-looking bloke. I feel a tightening in my larynx, and I know as soon as the first notes have squeezed their way out through my arid throat that it’s going to be the disaster act or nothing for me.

‘Fraid it’s a “no”,’ the auditor says, and waits for me to burst into tears or hit him.

Bravely, I do neither. I grin knowingly and retreat from the latrine to have my number crossed out by a pretty girl with thick marker pen (to deter second chancers). I make my way up the aisle down which O’Leary has been strutting, quietly dealing with the natural resentment that comes with rejection, and I remind myself that there is some consolation in knowing I wasn’t bad enough to be selected for the public ridicule category. I can’t find Wade and Alisha to see how they got on. I’ll just have to wait until the Cardiff session is on TV.

I exit the Stadium and after a brisk stroll across Cardiff Bus Station, leave that city stronger and wiser – sort of. I apologise for failing to produce first hand observations of confrontation with Simon Cowell and flirtation with Cheryl. But I shan’t be trying again.

For those who now feel they must see the real thing (minus grenouilles), I’ll be performing on a date to be finalised, some time in late June at the Globe in Ludlow, during the town’s Shakespeare Fest.

Naturally I attended incognito, adopting the name ‘Harry Harvey’ for the event.

At 6.oo am on Saturday morning ‘Harry’ strolls across to Platform 2 on a deserted Ludlow station. It is a clear morning filled with spring bird song, rudely interrupted by a disembodied female voice from under the telly screen that shows which trains have been cancelled. “Please be aware…” it says, with irritating (and now ubiquitous) superfluity “…that the whole of this station is designated a no-smoking area.”

Presumably some omniscient CCTV device has spotted me and, consulting its database, found that I was once a deeply committed smoker, although it is evidently unaware that on April 25th 1995 (14 years ago to the day), I cut my cigarette habit from 3-4 packs a day to zero.

I’ve just propped my videocamera on top of a rubbish bin and switched it on so that I can address a few discreet words to it about my plans for the day when an unmistakeable whiff of cigarette smoke reaches me, and I glance round to see I’ve been joined on the platform by a small white-haired lady in jeans who is sucking away vigorously (and oblivious to the advice of the electronic watcher) at her first gasper of the day. And I will say that, committed non-smoker though I now am, I don’t mind. I’ve always felt it would be fair to allow uncontrollable fumeurs at least a small segregated and distant section of the platform to carry out their self-destructive habit (which raises so much revenue for governments of all persuasions) where they could be joined by people eating foul-smelling Big Macs (which should, but don’t yet produce any revenue to fund their consumers’ later hospitalisation).

By the time the 4.54am from Crewe to Milford Haven reaches Ludlow, it contains only a scattering of dozers with their heads on the tables. I find an unoccupied table, on the west side of the train so that after we’ve passed Hereford I can enjoy the sight of the Black Mountains in the morning sun.

Crossing in to Wales and reaching Abergaveny at 7.20, the train begins to fill with noisy Welsh families, all bound for Cardiff and the stardom that awaits them at the Millennium Stadium, joined by more at Pontypool, Cwmbran and Newport. Their enthusiasm and commitment makes me think that if education were run as a reality TV show… well, you can imagine, how well-informed the late St Jade might have been.

As the train pulls out of what the station announcers call Casnewydd towards Cardiff on a stretch of line I seldom take, I’m beginning to wonder if I’m not being more intrepid than the calls of my profession demand in exposing myself to possible ridicule. But I allow my qualms to be displaced by the thought that although Newport is traditionally considered one of the ugliest towns in Britain, it does have one distinctive and handsome building, the 1930s art deco Town Hall and Tower that stand on the northern slope of that unfortunate conurbation. Cardiff station, too, I notice, has a few art deco brush strokes about it, of which more could be made, in subtle contrast to the spiky, bulging beauty of the Stadiwm y Mileniwm.

I leap down from the train, now quite at ease about confronting those X-factor naysayers. The sun still shines (although the Guardian has plonked a black cloud the size of large raisin over South Wales in their weather forecast), I’m wearing a sharp retro blue-checked jacket, which I bought for £20 from the Zani Lady Flea Market in Ludlow, and a neckerchief of fine Liberty silk is flapping around my neck. I hum a few bars of My Foolish Heart, the song I’ve selected as my victim for the day, and stride off briskly towards the Shrine of Welsh Rugby.

As I approach the nearest entrance, a steward in an ill-fitting, orange reflective garment approaches me. ‘Are you singing alone, sir?’

I’m surprised. How does he know that this grey-haired man in a dodgy plaid jacket c1975 has come to sing? I look nothing like Des O’Connor. And, unlike other contestants beginning to converge on the Stadium from every direction (and it’s still only 8am), I’ve brought no support team.

I admit that, yes, I am singing alone and I’m directed to cross the River Taff, which oozes gently down the west flank of the Stadium. I stroll with a few dozen other humming proto-stars for a quarter of a mile up the west bank, recrossing the river to enter by a north gate, where a crowd of several thousand has preceded me – some tell me they have been there since the night before – which turns out to be a pointless gesture.

Only now do I take the trouble to work out that the sessions you see on TV, in which Simon Cowell mentally destroys a few deluded wannabes and Louis Walsh has water thrown at him, can’t possibly be happening that day. Cowell and his lieutenants, I’m told, are coming tomorrow (Sunday), and will be presented with no more than 100 of the 2,000+ hopefuls who’ve turned up this morning. It’s obvious really; Simon and Cheryl and the others couldn’t be expected to hang around and give 2 or 3 minutes each to 1,900 no-hopers; working 8 hours a day (and without coffee breaks – which I couldn’t see Cheryl putting up with) the process would take 8½ days.

The next three hours soon drag as we zig-zag like lost escargots along the walkway above the river towards Stadium Gate One. The punters are sporadically encouraged by an unidentifiable cheer-leader and bursts of X-Factor theme music to shout and scream and look excited, although most of them by now are looking knackered and nervous as hell. A lot are still squeezing in a little late rehearsal of their songs, perhaps so they won’t forget their key once it comes to performing, but I have a secret weapon – a backing track for my song in my preferred key which I’ve bought as an MP3 from Backing Tracks Online and downloaded to my phone. I’ll stuff in the earphones and play a quick blast of it just before going in (or so I think) to my a capella audition.

While we wait and the rest of the hopefuls wonder what this strange looking, not very youthful geezer is doing in their midst, I discuss prospects with other contestants – Emmas and Kylies mostly – and their devoted families. Wade and Alisha have come along from Casnewydd; they’re going to sing as individual artistes, but it’s soul singer Wade, a quiet, reflective man, who is the serious contender. Regrettably, I don’t hear him sing but he looks like he can. Nearby a group of Cardiff girls, taller, blonder, slimmer than Charlotte Church sing a cappella in close harmony, and all around are bursts of Beyonce muezzin calls and tremulous Enrique Iglesias warbles. It’s very discouraging. My song, I’ve discovered, was first published in 1920. I was born in 1948.These things are going to count against me, I feel, in so far as I have any serious ambition, but I am looking forward to being insulted by Cowell and winking at Cheryl Tweedy and my chances of being among 100 out of 2,000 are looking, frankly, pathetic.

But, I tell myself, I’m here to observe, not to win, and hummed a few bars of My Foolish Heart – not too loud; I don’t want to discourage the others as we shuffle minutely closer to the mighty stadium and a life of singing stardom.

[next time.... I tell you how it feels.]

I don’t suppose many of the viewers ever knew or, if they did, cared, and it broke up the visuals a bit, which was better than one continuous head shot. Because most of the people who make television assume Mr and Mrs J Public are less intelligent or sophisticated than themselves – i.e.: total morons with IQs that barely make it into double figures – they’d been doing this sort of thing for years, despite its blatant bogusness.

In some recently broadcast, quaint archive footage of Alan Whicker wandering around his World in 1957 with shiny hair, proto-Caine glasses and black-market-spiv’s ‘tache, there were instances of it even back then. Standing on the heights in Hong Kong, Whicker pointed out how a plane, even as he spoke, was making the tricky landing below him between the mountains onto the colony’s airport in a clumsily inserted piece of film, which had obviously been shot earlier. (We already knew he had a production team of only two – and certainly only one camera.) I suppose even back then the thick viewers didn’t notice and the savvy ones thought it rather endearing.

However, after the short burst of newspaper outrage a couple of years ago, several TV grandees (some, like A Yentob, guilty of doing it themselves, in his case at long distance) said all this fakery would stop. Obviously it hasn’t, and indeed, crass fabrication on non-fiction TV is as active as ever.

Take Simon Cowell’s reaction to the arrival on the stage of the not especially glamorous Susan Boyle for Britain’s Got Talent (and if you haven’t seen it, head for You-Tube as soon as you’ve finished reading this).

Obviously, as the owner, operator, producer and star of the show, Cowell knows perfectly well what acts are going to be broadcast. They’ve been heard, matched to their backing tracks, and presumably to some degree rehearsed.

Cowell’s sarky, cynical derision as this jovial, friendly woman walked on to the stage did not, of course, reflect his certain knowledge that we were about to witness the birth of a spectacularly unlikely star – a 46 year old virgin from a remote Scottish village. Being the kind of entertainer he has become, he was simply (and cleverly) increasing the lack of expectation, so that when the little Scot opened her mouth to sing, the audience (and possibly Piers Morgan and Amanda Holden as well) were utterly amazed by her performance.

Not surprisingly, when it came to deciding which bits of footage to air, the producers made much of finding shots of members of the audience looking scornful and sneering at the effrontery of this slightly frumpy creature in hoping to emulate Elaine Paige. The edit was good enough to fool, for instance, Tanya Gold, who complained in the Guardian about the ugliness of the reaction of the audience and the judges to the appearance of this ‘ugly’ woman – though, as it happens, she wasn’t that bad – no less glamorous than, say Jacquie Smith and, as became clear, with a far greater gift to entertain.

But if a (presumably) sophisticated Guardian columnist can be taken in by Cowell’s unsubtle pretence and crude editing, what hope is there for the rest of the punters? She (Tanya Gold) was trying to make the point that because the woman wasn’t glamorous, the public didn’t think she had a right to aspire to Elaine Paigeness – as if there were anything new about popular performers being more endowed with physical allure than artistic talent!

But, when it came to it, the audience loved her for how she sang, not what she looked like, and I found that very heartening.

To give Cowell credit, the very essence of the show and the reason for its success is that most of us love to see an ‘ordinary’ person demonstrating an extraordinary talent. It offers us all the chance to believe in ourselves, and there’s nothing wrong with that.

And in the meantime, I’ll let you know how my very ordinary friend, Henry Harvey gets on at the Xfactor auditions at the Millenium Stadium next weekend.

But we do see films there, too, a rich eclectic mix – Classic, World, dense soporific Francais, and, like last week, ‘local interest’.

I knew not much about Faintheart before I saw it, beyond that a lot of it was filmed in and around Ludlow; I knew it was a rom-com made on a modest budget, partially cast and (aagh!) collaboratively written on My Space – enough, you might think, to keep the discerning moviegoer at home. But I’ve always lacked judgement in these things, and this time, I was glad. I handed over my 4 quid to see a warm, funny film that could end up being a big hit, at least in Britain.

Richard (Eddie Marsan) is a man who seeks significance in his life by intense role-playing in his leisure time. His best nerdy friend Julian (in a great performance by Ewen Bremner) is an avid Trekkie and a weekend Klingon, while Richard, when he’s not working in a DIY store, is a warring Viking obsessed with recreating battles from the Dark Ages.

The script, even if an online collaboration (which I suspect it wasn’t much) is ring-mastered so well by writer David Lemon, it’s as tight as any Richard Curtis, and tighter than some. Before this picture, director Vito Rocco has so far made only two short movies (both to some acclaim) but he handles this script, its fair share of truly funny one-liners and visual gags, with a sure touch.

Against the so far underused backdrop of battle re-enactment (which is a few notches above Morris dancing on the nerdy scale) it dwells sympathetically on the use of role-play as an exit from a mundane day job; even, in an unexpected way, on how the values of the alter-ego can enhance aspirations in real life.

When Richard gets a call on his mobile (to the disgust of his fellow Vikings advancing on the Norman enemy in the Mortimer Forest above Ludlow), he rushes off, late for his father-in-law’s funeral, and arrives still in his chain mail and horned helmet.  His wife, Cath (Jessica Hynes lovely in this straightish role) chucks him out, and after a period of rejection of his warrior life, he returns to it, determined, in the manner of the parfit knight to win back his ‘fair maiden’, and the esteem of his embarrassed and bullied son (in another of several outstanding performance).

Such an unsophisticated idea could easily have slithered into a kind of dismal mish-mash of ‘Carry On’ farce and TV sitcom cliché.  But it doesn’t; the long haul back into Cath’s affections takes unexpected, heart-warming turns, and produces a movie that could become a minor classic.

On release: 27th January 2009.

Like many who have lain in a hospital bed for a few weeks, anticipating then recovering from the incision of a surgeon’s knife, I have found the sojourn rich in reflective material.

But relax; this is not a preamble to a self-indulgent exposé of those personal and abstract thoughts that appear so much richer in semi-delirium than they ever do on the page.

More immediate and practical topics also arose.

It is a curious irony that shortly before I was consigned by my GP, Dr Yarham (with instant and accurate diagnosis of a nasty lung infection called Plural Empyema) to Shrewsbury Hospital, I had drafted a post for this blog about the connection between medical progress and global warming. It was intended to stimulate debate around personal health versus the health of the world.

Now, however, finding myself quite seriously ill for the first time in my life, my objectivity has inevitably been skewed; I’ve had to look more closely at what I personally should hope/expect/demand from our much wrangled over NHS. Like most people in these circumstances, I want to be made well as efficiently as possible, to be dealt with quickly, comfortably, painlessly and compassionately.

This is my hope; but I do not feel it is my right. I think very few things are mine by right. I think the public hunger – I could say greed – for rights has warped the meaning of the word. But I am, in Britain, in a minority.

In the extra sensitive heart/lung department in which I was lodged in the architecturally disappointing surroundings of the North Staffs Hospital in Stoke-on-Trent, many patients or their supporters arrive on the offensive, determined to fight vigorously for their perceived rights, tuned to identify shortcomings in treatment. The wards become places of recrimination where the staff’s default position is defensive. And yet the vast majority of this staff have entered the profession with a vocation to cure and nurse their fellow citizens; they work staggeringly long hours, with a very demanding schedule of patient monitoring (some, I think, mainly to protect themselves from any subsequent claims of negligence or incompetence). At times wandering around in the small hours, I felt invisible, as no one would make eye-contact with me, presumably to avoid any complaints that might be brewing. But I had nothing to complain about.

I can truly say that I felt privileged and deeply grateful that so many dedicated skilled, hardworking, and often bravely cheerful people were giving me the benefit of their attention – in my case, the lovely Jenni and Debbie, the warm-hearted gentle Philippinas, Cherry and Joyce, and Mr Shilajit Ghosh, the confidence-inspiring thoracic surgeon who wielded the knife.

As I now slowly recover, I should like to express to them and all their colleagues my warmest thanks.