We’ve had quite a few retirements at work recently, and several colleagues have slipped away quietly into the darkness, saying that they “didn’t want any fuss”.
Well, blow that! It’s my turn soon and I want it clearly understood that I shall expect a great deal of fuss when I go.
I want to see strong men in tears, and women wailing, gnashing their teeth and (hopefully) rending their garments in good Biblical fashion. I want the biggest display of public grief since Princess Di bought it (but without the flowers - I don’t want all those flowers). A present would be nice, too. I shall place a list with Harvey Nicks.
It’s surprising how much more bearable work is, once you can see an end in sight, largely because you can ignore any ‘initiative’ (don’t you just hate initiatives?) with a timescale longer than six months, and smile serenely as threats are made to cap pensions, abolish merit awards (sorry, CEAs) or introduce uniforms for consultants.
OK, I made the last one up, but I’ve never had a problem with uniforms, largely due to the 16 years I spent in the RAF Medical Branch, and I’ve always thought it would be a good idea for doctors to wear them. At least patients would know who we were, and we could make sure that all those over-promoted ‘nurse consultants’ with stethoscopes ostentatiously draped around their necks could be clearly differentiated from proper consultants by the colour of their uniforms (they’d have muddy brown, we would have nice red ones, with gold piping and those big gold epaulettes like South American dictators, or commissionaires at the Odeon).
Still, it’s too late for me now. I’ll have to serve out my time tieless and ‘bare below the elbow’ (which, if you think about it, means that you should also be bare below the waist, unless you have unduly long arms; not something I’d like to inflict on patients or colleagues, come to that).
Incidentally, in an earlier blog I talked about Henrik Thomsen, the Danish radiologist who was being sued for libel by GE Healthcare. That case has been settled out of court, and I assume it will have been a condition that Henrik says nothing more about it in public. And that, of course, is the problem with the libel law as it currently stands - victims, or should I say defendants, can’t afford to take their case to the judges if their accuser offers an out of court settlement which is anything less than ruinous. I just hope that GE realised that they had slipped up by pressing the case, and accepted nominal damages.
Simon Singh, on the other hand, did have his day in court recently, and it seems to have gone well. However, it is not unknown for judges to sound sympathetic, and then deliver a contrary verdict, so we have to wait, hopefully not too long, for the outcome.

