Just another Saturday

Abstract

Elton John, that well known pugilist, once insisted that “Saturday night’s alright for fighting.” Now it may well be for bespectacled neds up for a ruck. But most doctor types prefer a quiet night at home enduring X Factor while wrestling with a barrel load of SurveyMonkeys. We crave a gentler life. But wait! Here’s another cuddly albeit cunningly cutting old fuddy duddy—John Betjeman—writing a poem he called “Five O’Clock Shadow.” Betjeman speaks for patients that this is the “time of the day when we feel betrayed” in the men’s ward—a time when “a doctors’ foursome out of the links is played.” Well that was back in the days when consultants could rely on the dogged Dr Finlay and his ilk doing the community cover, who worked all the hours that Tannochbrae or wherever gave them. Consultant physicians in particular back then could instruct troubled juniors down the phone. Faced with an intractable supraventricular tachycardia they might urge …