One of Dr No’s retired medical friends, not teetotal, but almost, inherited an adequate wine cellar, mostly reds, from a relative. Given a science backed consensus that small amounts of red wine would be good for him, he decided not to dispose of the cellar on favourable terms to Dr No – Dr No is always happy to help an old friend out – but to indulge in a spot of self prescribing: ℞ vinum rubeum, 1-2 glasses nocte.
Elsewhere, an old biddy friend of Dr No’s mother, bereaved last year, has taken to keeping a bottle of sweet sherry in with the tea cosies, and of an evening she warms her soul as she dozes in front of the television with a tipple or two. Not so long ago, a grandad patient of Dr No’s asked: ‘No harm in an evening sharpener? Just scotch and water, you understand.’ Dr No knew it would be a large tumbler, and a generous slop, but still he answered ‘not at all’ – and didn’t even caution against excess. This chap had survived the not only the horror of Burma in the Second World War, but the long years of following memories as well, and the last thing he needed was a ticking off from Dr No.
The Nazis – OK, it’s reductio ad Hitlerum time again, and why not – weren’t shy when it came to abusing words. Arrivals at the deaths camps were encouraged to keep their peckers up by a slogan emblazoned over the camp gates. ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – ‘Work Makes You Free’. It is hard to conceive of a more gratuitous exhortation on a gate that led not to freedom but to extermination: yet there it was, in all its mocking irony.
Electronic braying noises. A Tardis appears. Out step Drs Crippen and Grumble. They stand side by side, surveying the scene. Dr Crippen has aged, and now looks like the first Doctor Who.
Believe it or not, Dr No is not a natural cynic. Indeed, when you think about it most doctors are not natural cynics. Much of our professional work requires the triumph of hope over experience. We have to see the best in people, and be optimistic about what we do: otherwise, our world, and then our minds, would fall apart.
The thing about orthopaedic surgeons is they like to throw things about. When not throwing prostheses at pretty nurses, or scalpels at pesky students, they like to throw prime ministers off wards. Mr Cameron and his retinue were excised from Guy’s Hospital the other day, as swiftly and effectively as a bunion from Miss Marple’s foot. The only thing missing in the drama was a red flashing light at the centre of the surgeon’s bow tie.
Last night, the Incredible Dement shocked the nation. Appearing on BBC2, armed with only a Euro-Rover ticket and a large hat, he toured the Continent, boldly seeking out destinations where others fear to tread. Everywhere he went, it was either raining or snowing, for these were the lands that God forgot. Soon it became apparent that, when the ID was on the road, all roads led, not to sun and the Eternal City, but to snow, and an another altogether different type of Eternity. They led to Zurich, to a dapper blue house tucked away on an industrial estate – a planning requirement, you understand – where a Mr Peter Smedley, late of the canning concern, was about to do to himself what his family had spent decades doing to peas. The only difference was that Smedley would emerge not in a can, but an urn. He had come to Dignitas, to die.
Amazingly, roboNick this morning wiped the Vaseline from his glasses, and 
Dr Clare Gerada, the well-known suicide cyclist, and Chair for the time being of the Royal College of General Practitioners, appeared on the SuperMarr show this morning. She was in fiery mood, with short cut red hair and a dress so red that it might itself have been on fire. Beside her, Mr Stephen Dorrell MP, one-time Health Secretary in the Major government, smouldered in a grey brown wood-ash jacket. When Clare appeared on the verge of bursting into flames, Stephen puffed political smoke. Had a mirror been at hand, he would no doubt have flashed political semaphore too. For all Dr No knows, he may even have done so, but Dr No’s Sunday sensibilities had at the start been rudely corrupted, and his eyes fixed, by a rogue cameraman who had spotted the stage was set not for the SuperMarr show but for Basic Instinct III. The camera lingered hopefully. At one point, Clare raised her hands from her lap. The cameraman’s basic instincts twitched palpably, his finger on zoom; but it wasn’t to be. The only flashes, were there to be any, would come from Stephen’s mirror, or the dying embers in his wood-ash jacket. We were back on easy, like Sunday morning.
David ‘Ozymandias’ Cameron’s five NHS pledges – worthy of only the briefest flash in the news-pan yesterday – are already showing all the substance of five brown ballerinas. Even as he made his speech, the smart finger was on the money. PCTs have been running rings round the fixed national tariff for months, allowing private providers to compete on price.
The Today programme this morning fingered Jimbo as an Anglo-Sassenach. There wasn’t much he could do about it, except take a side-swipe at Humph by declaring that at least he wasn’t a Boyo, because the Sassenach evidence was in his DNA. It was the kind of case that Police Constables are wont to refer to as an open-and-shut case. The Bannock was laid bare, a faggot dressed as haggis. Auntie, on health and safety advice, thoughtfully provided a counsellor, in case it all proved to much for Jimbo. It was certainly too much for Humph, who could be heard in the distance cackling and laughing all the way to the allotment.