‘Autumn wins you best by this, its mute appeal to sympathy for its decay.’
Robert Browning (1812–1889)
The last weekend of October was my last weekend being on call in the old system. The colours were glorious, the leaves were falling, and I was busy. Busy and satisfied. Perhaps forbidden fruits tasted sweetest but many of the patients I happened to see and situations I happened to find myself in made me feel glad to be a GP and somewhat thoughtful about what we might be about to lose.
The first patient was, sadly, deceased: an overnight sudden death of a member of a visiting shooting party in a farm cottage. NHS 24 passed on the message from the police with the request to attend. Having waded my way through the new central police telephone system and ignored the taped invitation to dial 999, I acquired directions to the ‘locus’. Many misty miles later, I confirmed death and, as the rest of the shooting party had …