A TOP surgeon has been accused of racism and threatened with disciplinary proceedings after stopping an operation because the foreign nurses he was working with could not understand his requests.

To someone like me, facing the possibility of a caesarean section operation in just a few weeks' time, the attitude of bosses at Guys and St Thomas's hospital in London is not just baffling but terrifying.

As if we poor, nervous patients didn't have enough to worry about, what with all the normal risks associated with any operation, not to mention recent publicity about blocked oxygen tubes and the like, the last thing we need now is to wonder if the staff performing the operation are going to be able to communicate with each other.

While I appreciate, and am grateful to, the thousands of nurses from overseas who have recently stepped in to help prop up the ailing NHS, I don't think it's racist to expect them to be able to understand English.

In fact, isn't it more offensive and patronising to suggest that foreign workers shouldn't be expected to speak good English at all?

I MAY have to have a caesarean, not because I'm "too posh to push", but because scans have shown I have a low-lying placenta, something which, in extreme circumstances, can be life-threatening to mother and baby.

But unlike Posh Spice and other celebrity mums-to-be who book into plush private hospitals like the Portland for their caesareans, I am not the least bit concerned what the surroundings or food will be like.

My main consideration isn't whether there's peeling paint or threadbare curtains on the wards, but to have all the back-up and expertise that the NHS provides. And, of course, it would help if everyone could speak English too.

POLICE and the National Rivers Authority have criticised a proposed attempt by canoeist Shaun Baker to kayak down High Force in Country Durham, the country's highest waterfall. Yet I haven't heard any complaints about the advert for the Commonwealth Games that shows a swimmer leaping into the waters of what looks like the top of High Force and swimming against the current, as the commentary refers to remarkable feats by remarkable human beings. Isn't that just as irresponsible?

I WROTE the other week about competitive dads in school sports day races. Now a man who ran into a 6ft high brick wall, breaking both his arms, at the end of a fathers' day race that included Robbie Fowler, the Leeds and England footballer, is claiming damages against the school. In court, he denied having lost control because he was so desperate to finish ahead of Fowler. At our school sports day last week, the only parents' race involved mums or dads running, hand-in-hand, with their children. Where most mums ran along at the pace of the children, the competitive dads dragged their poor youngsters until arms were practically yanked out of sockets. These dads don't need someone like Robbie Fowler running alongside them to encourage them to take desperate measures. They're more than capable of doing that all by themselves.