The tyranny of unsolicited demands 

From gardening advice to ‘requests’ from hospital doctors, I’m rarely short of people telling me what to do.

Whenever I meet him, we ask each other how our gardens are. Even though my day was busy, we went through the quick enquiry. Then he went off script.

“Do you know what they are talking about?” he said, throwing his head in the general direction of the waiting room. I didn’t.

“They are saying you should turn the back into a car park.”

I am blessed I know, having a large window in my office overlooking a garden.

I would call it a small Ark: A place of biodiversity with long grass, unruly bushes, and free-range trees. I have lost count of the number of men (they are always men) who look out and say: “I should have brought the lawnmower.”

I could have told him that I find him and his tribe incomprehensible. They see the lawn as an unruly beast that must be tamed on a weekly basis, or the country’s done for.

The few days of the week they are not in the car, they sit on mini-tractors and might as well be on the M50. Do I tell them what to do? Sometimes. And sometimes we get to the business of their health or lack of it.

The urge to advise somebody how to do something you know sod all about is strong in us. Every seasoned publican has been told they should put out more tables, or fewer, open an extension, or close one, open late, open early, or open somewhere else.

In fact, you can spot a hardened publican because they will contradict everything you say. If you remark we were lucky to win last Sunday, he will tell you we were by far the better team. And they will tell the next punter, who extols the team that we were rubbish. They have heard it all: You should have a session, a holy hour, serve cocktails. That the music should be turned up, or down, or off. So they have evolved a talent for disagreeing with you, just in case.

Nobody, not even a publican, likes less to be told what to do than a GP. We are fey spirits, happy to ply our craft among the people, like a Gypsy Scholar. We are roving traditional musicians, making sweet sounds among the poor and the sick, while the orchestras in the hospitals make extravagant and loud noises.

Yet when we settle into our computers with a contented sigh, we are assaulted with demands and requests. The emergency department doctor who confirmed the fracture wants you to write a letter to the orthopod who is standing beside him. The orthopod, in turn, wants you to order a test because he couldn’t be arsed. The intern rings to know what tablets the patient is taking, even though they were prescribed by his team the week before and is the probable reason the poor crathur is in hospital at all.

It is easier than looking it up, so they make you look it up. The uneducated chancer of a politician thinks your letter could be stronger and wants you to do it again and the psychiatrist wants you to write to them about the person with schizophrenia his team have been treating for 20 years because an appointment got mixed up. Then the nursing home wants you to copy out medications for their records and berate you for your poor handwriting.

Is it for this, you ask, as you transcribe some more nonsense, that you spent the long evenings of your youth studying the Krebs cycle and the anatomy of the knee joint? Nobody can do what you can do, not the emergency department doctor, or the orthopod, or the intern. Yet they expect you to do what they should either be doing if they had the time or the inclination.

I try not to act like the contrary publican. But it can be difficult, when an SHO, lolling in the hospital office like the Emperor Nero on his couch, commands the GP to do a blood test that any of the med students, nurses, or phlebotomists who are waiting on his whim could do. The fact that it had already been done by the GP and is in the referral letter seems to be a mere detail.

If only you could get any of them on the phone – you could tell them what to do.