From The Editor's Chair
Peter Barron was born in Saltburn, and raised in Middlesbrough. He joined The Northern Echo as a reporter in 1984, rising to become the paper's editor in January 1999.
Taking the bad with the good
WHEN you work on a newspaper, there are
good days and there are bad days.
Days
when you feel it is all going right, and days
when it all seems to be going wrong.
Last Wednesday
was one of the good days.
We published the front page news that health officials
in North Yorkshire had performed a U-turn
to enable cancer sufferer Anne MacFarlane, of Bedale,
to be prescribed a new drug called Revlimid.
It means that Anne's life may be prolonged by
three precious years and others suffering from
multiple myeloma could be given fresh hope.
Anne's case is one of a number The Northern
Echo has featured over the past year as part of its
"End NHS Injustice" campaign, aimed at highlighting
the postcode lottery governing the availability
of cancer drugs in this country.
There have been other U-turns among the cases
we have featured and, hopefully, there will be
more, because the debate over newly-developed
cancer drugs goes to the core of what our society
expects from the National Health Service - that it
will be there, free at the point of use, when people
need help.
I believe the campaign, driven by the paper's excellent
Health Editor, Barry Nelson, is every bit
as important as our previously successful fight to
bring Britain's waiting times for heart bypass
surgery into line with the rest of Europe.
It surely cannot be right that cancer patients -
separated only by county borders in some cases -
can be treated so differently, with one given hope
while another is denied it.
And it cannot be right that the process of licensing
new cancer drugs is so much faster in
France and Germany than it is in Britain.
The front page smiles on the faces of Anne Mac-
Farlane and her husband, Andy, made Wednesday
a very good day indeed. I wish them well.
BUT there are bad days
When I referred in last Monday's column to concerns
over the standards of English, I knew I was
setting myself up for a fall. And so it proved.
On the same day the column appeared, the front
page headline contained an embarrassing
spelling error: "Child porn horde at North-East
bookshop."
"I may be mistaken, of course, but it seems a
very small shop to accommodate a horde," wrote
Susan Cummins, of Bishop Auckland.
She was one of several readers to point out that
a horde is a mob of people and a hoard is a stock
of objects and, of course, they had every right to
complain.
It was a dreadful mistake for which I take full
responsibility and apologise.
WHILE that sorry episode left me feeling utterly
depressed, the story which made me
laugh most last week came from
Germany.
It was about a farmer who married a woman he'd
met through the internet, only to discover on their
wedding night that he was really a man called Ralf.
It was what might be described as a bad Herr
day.
AND no matter what goes wrong, it's always
worth remembering that even the worst days can
turn into good ones within the blink of an eye.
There was another tale from Germany last
week which began as a particularly bad day for
27-year-old Jens Wilhelms when he fell down a
lift shaft in Frankfurt.
But his luck turned when he landed on a
woman who'd fallen down the shaft the day before
and was lying unconscious.
It meant he could climb out of the shaft and
raise the alarm about the woman.
Good day to you all.
11:41am Monday 21st April 2008
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