I gave them my ideas and showed them how I would put them into practice. I taught them management principles. Now they’ve moved on. No matter. Good luck, in fact. If they are any good they will be able to achieve something and I shall be proud of having contributed. If not, they won’t and I shall have lost nothing.

First I get the basic idea. Then I jot down all the things that occur to me on the subject. Then I work out what I really want to say and summarise this in chapter headings. Then I divide up the jottings between the chapter headings. Then I put the jottings in order within each chapter heading. Then I dictate the script, with new ideas popping in as I go along. Then the manuscript is typed. (This is the half way point in time). Then I correct it and reshape it. Then I correct it again. Then I get my editor to proof read it and make suggestions. Then I incorporate those suggestions. Then I send it off to my (former) agent. Then she rejects it. Then I publish it myself. Then I write another.

All that palaver last year about leaving snooker’s favourite competition venue. Yet here we are this year (under new sponsorship) back in the old haunt. Tradition and common sense prevailed. Good.

I know first class treatment when I get it and this was it. The consultant specialists were the only white faces I met. The rest of the staff were as cosmopolitan as those in any NHS hospital in London but the whole approach of all the staff was utterly professional. I was asked how I would like to be addressed. I was kept informed. I was made comfortable. I was cared for. And, of course most important of all, the whole place was crispy clean and therefore I survived.

The NHS is flooded with staff and flooded with money (20 cigarettes a day for two years would pay for my stay in the Cromwell). It is the ideas and principles of practice that are wrong in the NHS. It really has to go. A responsible government must find ways of ensuring that anyone can get the service I got when the chips were down. But that means that there are a lot of incompetent staff that have to be dismissed, exceedingly wasteful and downright stupid clinical practices that have to be stopped and fundamental ideas that absolutely must be re-thought.

Doctors For Reform are a group of doctors who want to preserve the NHS as it is rather than expose it to further market forces. They are on the wrong side. The owners of the Cromwell Hospital know how to run something. They should take over the entire NHS – and I bet they would make a far better job of geriatrics and psychiatry in the process.

If I’d eaten anything substantial this week it would have come straight back. I’ve lost six pounds.

I’ve just doubled the total amount of time I’ve taken off through illness in my seven day working week for the last thirty years. Persistent renal colic wiped out Friday. I managed to work all right on Saturday and Sunday morning but couldn’t cope in the afternoons as the symptoms came back (it isn’t good form to go white in front of patients). On Monday I had surgery. Three days of enforced absence was quite enough and I was back in full swing on Tuesday. To call me a workaholic may well be true – but I just love what I do: I don’t want time off.

A CT scan of my left kidney showed that the reason that that it was so swollen and painful was that a 9mm diameter stone was blocking the ureter, the outflow tube to the bladder. Stone? At that size I’d call it something else.

There was no need to lie to me about what he planned to do. I wish him well whatever he does.

Going over to The Recovery Centre at nine o’clock on a Saturday evening to admit three new patients is a privilege, not a bore. They’re paying for service and they deserve to get it.

There is so much I want to learn: Motivational Enhancement, Neuro-Linguistic Programming and Hypnotherapy for a start. I shall cut back on my post-graduate reading on medical conditions I rarely see (I am happy to refer to specialists when I don’t know something) so that I can spend time on things that really can be helpful to my patients.