Opinion  

I had the company of a fellow examiner who had actually read one of my books, and could even quote bits of it at me, which filled me with such enormous pride that I didn't notice for two hours that the plane hadn't taken off.

Unfortunately, I snapped back into consciousness to hear the pilot saying, 'Well, folks, you see, a light has come on, on this here panel, and we don't really know what it does, but a bloke in a van is coming to give it a kick, if we can work out which pub he's in, and then if it goes out we'll take off and might manage to fly all the way to Gatwick without falling like a stone on to Accrington Stanley. That would be very unlikely.'

Now I'm sure he didn't say quite that, I imagine he talked very sensibly about valves which were stuck and engineers who were just going off shift, but that was nevertheless the gist that we got, sitting in the cabin like lambs in mint sauce awaiting our doom, and it was no surprise that some of us were a bit twitched.

It came back to me today in one of those cholesterol conversations, the ones where she says my cholesterol's too high doctor, and you say no it's fine for a woman who doesn't smoke, doesn't drink, and isn't built like the Coventry Odeon, and she says but the chemist says I should buy Lipitor and you say the man is a thief and a blaggart and ought to be sent to Devizes, and she says well why is my cholesterol up when I am genetically perfect and live like Kate Moss apart from snorting nothing but Beconase and you say you don't know and she says can you guarantee I won't have a heart attack ever and you say I wish I hadn't started this.

Then you try to hide the bit on your screen that says cardiovascular risk 6.7 per cent in 10 years because you know she won't like it, and she sees it, and you say we can't say for certain that you won't have a heart attack but on the balance of probability it's very unlikely.

Of course that's not really what you say, but that's what she hears and it ends badly.

Lambs in mint sauce.

Dr Selby is a GP from Suffolk. Email her at GPcolumnists@haymarket.com.