SUPPOSE that we had never had direct out-of-hours access to our GPs. Suppose that calls had always been dealt with by a telephone answering centre, whose staff dispensed advice largely according to a check list.

Now suppose that the Government ordered that patients enjoyed access to their family doctors, or equally qualified stand-ins, at all times.

What should this new service, cutting out the intermediaries, be called? NHS Direct. Brilliant. In fact, as you know, NHS Direct means exactly the opposite.

Turning truth on its head in pure Orwellian fashion, it places someone else between you and the family doctor service. And now, Health Secretary Alan Milburn, who masterminded this backward step, is reportedly poised to extend the so far limited scheme nationwide.

Ever since NHS Direct was launched I have wondered how the NHS, with its well-chronicled chronic shortage of nurses, currently put at 17,000, was suddenly able to find the qualified medical staff to man phone lines. Would not these fully-trained nurses, as we are assured they are, be better employed in hospitals?

The Government insists that NHS Direct will improve service to patients. Well, back in 1980, my wife collapsed in a coma during the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas morning.

My emergency phone call was answered by her own doctor, who arrived within minutes. He immediately summoned an ambulance which rushed my wife to hospital, where I was later told that if she had arrived a few minutes later she would have been dead.

If NHS Direct had been in operation we would not have happily shared the last 20 years and now be looking forward to another Christmas with our family.

THOUGH I have no strong feelings about the possible removal from Trafalgar Square of the statue of Major General Sir Henry Havelock, I tend to agree in principle with London Mayor Ken Livingstone, who would like to replace Havelock with someone the public can better relate to, that there is no reason why a statue should remain in its original position forever.

And let's face it, despite Havelock's links with Darlington and Sunderland, he is a pretty fusty figure from the past. The person who, in my opinion, commands a place in Trafalgar Square above all others not so honoured, is Sir Joseph Bazalgette.

OK, so he is no more a household name than Havelock. But he is the late Victorian engineer who made London fit to live in - responding to the Great Stink and cholera epidemic of 1892 by building 1,200 miles of sewers, served by four pumping stations and two treatment works, which are still in operation.

To gain land for his sewers he built the Victoria, Chelsea and Albert embankments. He re-housed 40,000 Londoners from squalid tenements, which he demolished to create such famous streets as Shaftesbury Avenue and Charing Cross Road. He also built the Hammersmith, Putney and Battersea Bridges.

London has no finer benefactor, and the small bust of Bazalgette on the Embankment is an inadequate tribute. Besides, is it not time we paid more homage to civic heroes rather than men of war?

IN THE immediate wake of the very sad and untimely death of the Scottish Parliament's First Minister Donald Dewar, it would have been very inappropriate to raise the following minor point.

But now that his successor has been elected, it seems not out of order to ask whether he shouldn't be styled Premier Minister, rather than First Minister. After all, everyone knows that nowadays First means Second.