The award-winning TV series The Office is set in Slough a few miles west of London and opens with this panorama of the town. Sir John Betjeman wrote a poem that put Slough on the map the way that George Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier put Wigan on the map. The poem from the Bard of Suburbia goes like this:

Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough!
It isn’t fit for humans now,
There isn’t grass to graze a cow.
Swarm over, Death!
Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air-conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.
Mess up the mess they call a town -
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.
And get that man with double chin
Who’ll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women’s tears:
And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.
But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It’s not their fault that they are mad,
They’ve tasted Hell.
It’s not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It’s not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead
And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren’t look up and see the stars
But belch instead.
In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.
Come friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

It is no surprise that the Church of England owns large tracts of land in cathedral cities such as Canterbury, Ely, Peterborough and York. But after the Church Commissioners debacle a few years ago the Church has begun investing in industrial estates in Swindon and Waltham Cross and shopping areas like the Cribbs Causeway Centre in Bristol. Its newly-acquired interests also spread to Europe with its stake in the ING Central Europe Property Fund.

Closer to home planning permission has now been granted for the Church to develop land on the Ashford Great Park estate while 15% of the Church’s commercial portfolio is in London’s West End…mainly with a holding in the Pollen estate. Connie’s old employers…Quin and Biddie Cole at Rye Pottery…have been at the sharp edge of these New Model Church Commissioners. One day out of the blue the Church…landlord of their Retail Outlet in Sloane Square…gave notice to Rye Pottery that their rent was trebled. They had little choice but to close up shop.

The Church of England also has parking space in the capital and nets twenty million pounds a year from selling 99-year leases on garage spaces. Nor is property in The North neglected where it holds a 10% interest and associated land in the MetroCentre in Gateshead…the largest shopping and leisure centre in Europe providing Shoppertainment with an indoor theme park, an 11-screen cinema and a bewildering array of shops open from 10am to 9pm six days a week and from 10am to 5pm on Sundays. What would Sir John Betjeman have to say about all this? Is it good form?

Shortly after 9/11 at the age of 42 the star of Basic Instinct Sharon Stone was at home when she suddenly felt she had been shot in the head. The pain was so intense she fell over. She had always feared having a stroke yet when it happened she didn’t take it seriously. She found herself with a splitting headache while none of the things she said made sense. After three days she finally went to hospital. They operated but the haemorrhage was missed. They thought she had a ruptured vessel that had bled itself out. Nine more days went by and her condition didn’t improve so they operated again. This time they found an artery that was pumping blood into the brain.

Sharon Stone was close to death at one point and saw the white light reported by those who have a Near Death Experience. She saw people she knew had died and felt they were as close and as real as any living being and that she only had to step over a very narrow line and to join them. Talking about it five years later Sharon’s conclusion is that it just wasn’t her time. ‘The whole experience got rid of any remaining fears I may have had about life after death. I still have much to do,’ she said, ‘but I don’t fear for the future.’ Sharon had this to say about her experience.

‘My near-death experience affected me profoundly. It made me prioritise and put a new perspective on my career. I love what I do, but more than ever I keep it in its place. I’m a different person now. I walk closer to God and have an overwhelming sense of wellbeing, of joy, and I don’t have the wants and desires I had before. I have more gratitude in my life for what I have than longing for what I don’t…and that’s a peaceful way to be.

Last Friday I had an oblique brush with the National Health Service when Registered Charity 1058944 descended upon my Local Doctor’s Practice on Ferry Road for the afternoon.

Not one to pass up something free at the point of delivery the moment the news arrived in the post I programmed my digital organiser to beep at me a day beforehand so I could schedule myself to be at PCHut…just two minutes walk away from the Surgery…at the appointed hour.

The day before, I reset the alarm for half-an-hour before the event. Then off I went to have my upper arm squeezed. Twenty minutes later I returned to work the proud owner of a little card telling me that on 15/9-2006 my blood pressure was satisfactory at 138/80. The card from the Blood Pressure Association tells me high blood pressure causes stroke and heart disease…the major causes of early death and disability. Pity there was no tea and biscuits.

Five years ago on 1st December 2001...a year before Connie died…I bought a gadget to measure blood pressure…the Mark of Fitness MF-74 Wrist-Type Digital Blood Pressure Monitor to give it its full title. I took readings on Connie and myself and noted them in my journal. I was fine at 139/78…with a pulse of 66.

A week later on 6/12-2001 I was 134/92 at 61 and 138/94 at 63 which was beginning to get a little border line. A week later on 8/1-2002 I was up at 140/88 at 61…on the border between High Normal and Mild Hypertension. So I signed up at Hilden Gym.

Two and a half years later on 19th August 2004…and a couple of stones lighter…I dug out my MF-74, treated it to some new batteries and tested myself again. Yo! 118/67…58 pulse. Not just Normal but Optimal.

Two months later on 19/10-2004 I recorded 132/82…repeating at 143/85…but with ‘6 pm + coffees’ in the margin. A year ago on 27/8-2005 my MF-74 recorded 125/66 at 3 pm and 125/67 at 8pm while at 8am on 15/9-2005 I was 142/85…pulse 65.

However in all this time I never took a proper look at the reading I had taken from Connie a year before she died. My heart skipped a beat when I found the numbers at the back of an old journal. On 1st December 2001 Connie’s blood pressure was 157/105 and her pulse 78. Much too high…in the Moderate Hypertension range. Connie died of an aneurysm at the age of 52 eleven months later. One more ‘if only…’ to feel guilty about.

A National Health Service free at the point of use is back in vogue. Apparently it is what the great british public wants and hence what every politician intends to give them…although they differ on the small print and the weasel words like complementary, supplementary and anything else…and insist that they are not saying ‘privatisation’.

Real discussion of Sane Medical Provision awaits new linguistic terminology like ‘Personal Care’…as opposed to contradictions in terms like ‘impersonal care’; ‘Local Provision’…complete with such criteria as ‘delivery within half and hour’s walk for easy access by visiting relatives and friends’; and ‘Health Products & Services Providers’…what difference does the legal structure of the deliverer make to the patient at the point of delivery…Tender Loving Care Ratios; Medical Delivery Miles; and 'Cosmetic, Nice-to-have or Vital’ being more pertinent criteria for the patient.

As the Health Care Sector becomes ever more insurance-driven…via the BUPAs and SAGAs…Medical Provision will shift from product-led to market-led…not by the idiocy of a VAT Approach where everybody sells the unsellable to everybody else…a recipe for a Hustlers Paradise…but by discriminating between End-User Markets…Old People Care and Road Accidents being two prime candidates for Independent Business status…with their own P&Ls and Balance Sheets. A good way for Cameron & Co to begin might be by reading Ivan Illich’s Medical Nemesis.

But I have no complaints about my NHS Dental Treatment. I was suffering for a couple of days after Tuesday’s session with its gum-slicing to get at the second root canal. But I am now in the final straight of my Once Every 30-Years Routine Maintenance with just two sessions to go. And I will make it to the chequered flag with nothing to pay unless vanity demands a tooth-coloured crown instead of the silver or gold option on offer to NHS Patients.

One rather quaint little quirk of my treatment is that it is affected by Ramadan. My dentist finds it difficult to do her job during Ramadan so this is the time of year when she takes her year’s vacation. No free time-spots before Ramadan in 2-weeks time so I must wait until the end of Ramadan in early November for my final two sessions. In 2036 I will start treatment earlier in the year so I am all done and dusted before fasting begins in the Moslem World.