One of the problems with having elderly relatives living with you is that you tend to see rather more of the NHS than perhaps you might ordinarily wish for. Not that I am complaining, by and large we have enjoyed a very high quality service when required. Of course with a disabled wife and an elderly and increasingly infirm MiL we may have had more call on such services than the average household. That doesn’t make me an expert, more a frequent flyer.

There is one group however whom have provided us with jaw-dropping response times which the government could only dream of. I speak of course of the ambulance crews which we have regrettably needed on a number of occasions as gravity got the better of the MiL. To be honest with her degree of disability it has really become a matter of when, not if, she will need the emergency services again. At the moment however, she is being cared for by Southampton General Hospital as there was no room at Lymington.

So anyway, without exception the bright green clad ambulance crew and Rapid Response drivers and motorcyclists have been courteous, extremely helpful and an all round calming influence. Before you ask, no until they turned up I didn’t know there was such a thing as a rapid response paramedic. The things you learn through adversity eh?

I know it’s all the rage to put down our Health Service, especially if you are an American and seemingly only know about it from re-runs of Casualty 1907 on BBC Worldwide. But in modern parlance I would like to ‘Big Up’ the NHS. It may be lacking in certain areas, but as far as we are concerned they are doing all right by us. So there.

If only I could report the same with regards to the Hampshire County Council. Someone has been rationalising. And from that rationalising has been born the centralised contact facility Hantsdirect based in Fareham. I suppose they get brownie points for the centre being not only in the same country, but even in the right county. But it’s small comfort when you need to talk to someone in the Town Hall in Lymington and you have to call some pleasant but unyielding operator whose programmed response is to enquire as to whether you have ‘checked the website’ to see if your answer was there. Incidentally, why is anything including the word ‘Direct’ seldom anything of the sort?

Before you lable me as some grumpy old man (less of the old if you don’t mind), I will allow that such things are inevitable and so if you need to contact the council, try the Hantsdirect list of strangely similar numbers here. One thing we did find out recently, astonishingly local GP’s and school head teachers also have to go through the call centre. However if you have a magic SWIFT reference number, you don’t have to fill in the details each time you ring up, just quote the number.