Having just had my back fixed in the Cheltenham General (rated top of the range, with three stars), I am convinced that the NHS can work if the management is any good.
The hospital from hell must be the one my husband, post-heart attack and with pneumonia, once attended. I know three GPs who won't send patients there. Some patients won't go there, either. My husband discharged himself, saying he'd rather die in the car park than stay another hour in the place. They had refused to feed him or give him a drip, although he was too weak to hold a cup; they didn't change his sheets, although soiled, for his entire stay, and left him stark naked with the ward doors open. Among other things. We checked him into the Cheltenham General, which is clean, with efficient, cheerful nursing, good food and where everyone we met, from consultant to porter, liked working there.
My surgeon, Donald Ainscow, is a down-to-earth, modest bloke. He said trimming the discs in my back was like picking lobster out of the shell: difficult but routine. That he, and surgeons generally, don't walk around like puffed-up gods is a miracle. If three or four times a day, you save or change lives completely, a swelled head would be forgivable.
I was cheered by six lots of flowers, all from companies or organisations with which I'm involved. Not one from friend or family. Does this mean I've got my life all wrong? Five weeks at home certainly makes me think so. I'm 62. I could retire. I could wake up in the Cotswolds every morning, and pick beans and breathe real air. But I spend the week in London.
This, my last week of freedom, has been spent taking box cuttings - 2,000 of them, destined to border 24 beds in the veg garden, which, since I no longer have restaurants and children to force the veg upon, I want to convert to posh, floral parterre. I sit in front of the telly, scattering tiny leaves and spiders all over the sofa. I had planned to buy box plants but discovered that all the big growers no longer send out bare-rooted, inexpensive plants in the winter. They are now geared entirely to the garden centre trade, sending out expensive plants in pots, and then only when in flower. How can I plan the replacement of carrots and leeks with perennials, co-ordinating height, colour and texture a la Gertrude Jekyll, if I have to buy them piecemeal over the year?
For all I'm meant to be an independent career woman, I'm not above "female" reasoning: since I'm saving so much money on 2,000 box plants, I can spend the savings on returfing the lawn, can't I? My husband is not impressed. I'll have to give him the new lawn for Christmas. Devious or what?
Next week, it's back to work. I've got to write a speech for the Chartered Institute of Company Secretaries about the non-executive director's role, post-Enron. A few weeks back, I was at a lunch given by Peter and Lucy Chadlington. Most of the other guests were House of Lords grandees who get asked to join PLC boards all the time. Most said they were now refusing all job offers, and some that they were actively shedding ones they had. They agreed that no non-executive director has a hope in hell of forestalling skulduggery by crooks. And that the more you have to act as policeman and box-ticking regulator, the less trust there will be on the board, and the less hope of wise counsel being given or received.
Next week also means finding out if my publisher likes draft two of my latest novel any more than she liked draft one. Having written two moderately successful "beach reads", I wanted to move up a gear and suggested that this one be the story of the uncovering of a historic garden, with archive material and literary allusions, etc. She suggested, reasonably, I thought, that since I was still a novice novelist, I should establish myself in the genre readers expected. She didn't quite say, "forget literature, stick to bonking", but I got the message and delivered a straightforward love story. Whereupon she summons me to Penguin's terrifying glass office and says: "This is fine. Just like the others. But, you know, if you made the garden more central, really got into the history . . ."
And next week, the educational company 3Es (which I chair) opens the first of the government's City Academies, to replace the old Thamesmead Community College. The vision (awful, overused word!) is for a 21st-century school: building by Norman Foster, complete with "trading floor" to learn how the City works; flexible-space classrooms; state of the art IT, links with universities and industry; serious arts and sports programme - in fact, a blueprint for David Miliband's education "diamond" of empowerment, teaching and learning, partnerships and specialisation. Valerie Bragg, 3Es's chief executive, is confident that crumbling buildings, disaffected students and demoralised staff will all be a thing of the past. I believe her. She's done it before - this is the third state school we have overhauled in two years.
It's not rocket science. It's hiring great staff, providing good facilities, never tolerating bad behaviour, treating students politely and expecting them to return the compliment, promoting an ethos that allows teachers to teach and students to learn. I'm not saying it's easy. Indeed, it's incredibly hard.
But it's the one thing I'll not give up till they sack me.
