Opinion  

There are wooden leopards, painted leopards, leopards on cushions. There are leopard masks, key rings and necklaces, bowls and tablecloths.

There is no end to the resourcefulness of the locals when it comes to tapping the tourist market, and, when you go there six months after political upheaval has shaken most European holidaymakers into Choosing Somewhere Different, you find the full force of it is directed at you alone.

It can be difficult to resist, when every trick in the book is engaged to get you to look, bargain and buy. Wherever you go, people rush up to engage you in a conversation that always, always ends up in a request, the price for their effort.

Back at home, morning surgery feels just the same. As one professionally accustomed to giving the answer 'no', I usually cannot be changed to 'yes', not by descriptions of the greenness of the phlegm in the nostrils, the soreness of the recently pinkened throat or the certainty that I have in my gift a pill for curing general dissatisfaction with one's body shape.

Some patients will use every trick in the book to get their own way, like Miss No-Limp who threatened me with the GMC if I wouldn't sign her off for the rest of her living days, and Mrs Ill, who wants a new blood test at every consultation and has resorted to increasingly obscure internet print-outs to obtain them.

Most, though, take 'no' for an answer with what I feel is suspiciously good grace. They've come all the way to town, waited and put up with my cold stethoscope and endless inability to read the computer screen without my specs on, just to be told that they don't need an antibiotic and can't have a sick note, and that the chances of them having contracted bovine TB from their neighbours' uncle who visited a Turkish prostitute in wartime Malta are not great.

I don't really understand why they give up so easily, although the appearance of their names on another doctor's afternoon surgery suggests that, like the leopard, they are simply turning up in a different place but with the same spots.

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