I gather that I have been personally attacked by name in a meeting of an Anonymous Fellowship. The recovery, and therefore the judgement, of someone who would do that is obviously questionable.

Even if there were an opportunity to defend myself it that particular forum, I would not take it. Robert may be present in a meeting but Dr Robert Lefever is not.

As a general principle I buy only what I need. Meg and I have our flat in London and our cottage in Kent because we work four days from one and three days from the other each week. For the same reason we have two pianos, one in each home. We have only one car. That’s enough. The exception to all this is my books. I don’t suppose I absolutely need any of them but my life would be infinitely poorer without them, even the ones I shall never get round to reading. They are my friends, my comforters. I like having them.

‘Locate in Kent’ is a government-funded body whose purpose is to attract new jobs to the area of high unemployment in which the Recovery Centre is situated. Since the coal mines closed, PROMIS is the major employer in our local area and we are expanding. However, the government functionaries told me that jobs in the private medical sector are considered to be the wrong sort of jobs for them to encourage. Our ground staff, catering staff and housekeepers are almost all from mining families. They don’t complain when we pay the wages.

I allow myself to feel sad sometimes. My life is tough on occasions but I have amazing support from my wife and family and also from my staff and the vast majority of my patients. Even the people who attack me don’t really upset me. Sometimes they may be right and in that case they are doing me a favour in helping me to change.

What gets me down occasionally is the feeling that my ideas and everything I have created will be inexorably destroyed by the march of socialism and by the failure of the current Conservative leadership and the press to attack ideas rather than personalities. Who cares what the Deputy Prime Minister has done? He can be removed from office and will probably resign fairly soon anyway rather than wait to be pushed. Who cares about the disasters in the Home Office, The Department of Health and the even the Treasury, the worst run department of all? It is the ideas behind all these calamities, not the people or the mechanisms of bureaucracy that are primarily at fault.

In socialist terms I am nothing but a cog in a wheel. I have virtually no chance – other than on this blog and in the work that I do in the private sector – to influence the direction in which that wheel is going. I don’t mind if my life is tough. I do mind if it is pointless.

As a result of taking out new mortgages in order to fund our building work over the last year years, I have had to go through an extraordinary range of medical tests. I have had an exercise cardiograph, an echocardiograph, a thallium scan to test the muscular activity of my heart, an abdominal ultrasound scan for my arteries, liver, kidneys, adrenals and pancreas, a colonoscopy, a fibroptic cystoscopy, a remarkable range of blood tests and even an MRI scan of my brain (when one of the blood tests – which is notoriously unreliable – showed a low ACTH, the puiturity hormone that regulates the adrenal gland function). The MRI scan at least made some sense to me: anyone running a treatment centre needs his head examined.

I remember Spike Milligan saying that what he wanted to be written on his tomb stone was “I told them I wasn’t feeling well”. In my case I keep telling them the opposite: I’m fine. One day one of these tests will kill me. The result of that test will be negative, as all the others will be (except for the ACTH) but there will be no reassurance for me from beyond the grave.

He isn’t drinking but he might just as well be. He has all the ism without the alcohol. He is full of blame, self pity and resentment and he is constantly on the attack. He needs a drink to calm him down – or, better still, he needs to go to Alcoholics Anonymous. But as he says with some considerable force, that’s the last thing he wants to do. Maybe so, but he will get there in the end, unless he dies first – which would be sad.

Here we are at the end of October and the countryside is still bright green. Even after the tremendous storm last night, the leaves on the trees are only just beginning to fall.

Diego is incredible. I doubt that there is anything that he cannot do. He is worth his weight in spanners, screwdrivers, strippers and sanders. We should be so fortunate to have him on our staff. He plans to return to his native Columbia in two year’s time. That’s bad news.

“I am worried about you, Robert. We’re the same age. You work too hard.”

I worry for him. He doesn’t work at all. Early retirement (even excluding for health reasons) has a high mortality risk.

One of our counselling staff represented PROMIS at a government-sponsored discussion at a meeting today and came out with a cracker: “I don’t know why you are all so impressed with the Maudsley Hospital [the Institute of Psychiatry]. I’ve been in the place”.