Far more common I fear, are the criminals of character, the people whose definition of trust does little to engender it.

‘Real’ criminals are easy to point out. When we get to see the mug-shots of paedophiles and murderers in the Daily Mail, they all tend to look, well… murderous and paedophilic. Likewise, car clampers can be identified by the stench of evil, as well as the triangles of bright yellow metal they carry around.

But liars, cheats, people who go back on their word - they may be more difficult to detect. Granted, the crooks of credibility can have that shifty look about them, but I’ll warrant that just as often their innate deceitfulness means that they can be masters of disguise. They can hide behind the sober and honourable robes of judgement or the smart suit and Cheshire-cat grin of politics and they will be that much more difficult to identify than the nutter plotting to leave your body cold and lifeless in the woodlands.

No-one is truly safe from the machinations of the deceitful; their legacy reaches even as far as the NHS. It is, after all, fourteen years since Labour pledged to put an end to mixed-sex wards.

Being in hospital is never easy, and ward life itself can be enough to make you ill. In between the anticlimactic anticipation of lunch, the pondering of the purpose of life and the musing over the depth of your bed sores there may be the opportunity to relieve some of the tedium with some chit chat with your fellow patients, if you feel up to it. But the last thing you ever want, as you lie pondering, or indeed chatting, in your bed, is for your hospital gown to fail you in your hour of need.

And the last thing you ever want your fellow ward-mates catching, perhaps even less than an infectious superbug, is a glimpse of your nether-regions as you shuffle to the bathroom, IV stand in tow.

Privacy in the hospital ward may be in shorter supply than nurses are, but in the name of dignity and respect, any potential purveyor of your buttock should, if anything, be a member of your own sex. That the most vulnerable members of society are denied this entitlement is nothing short of scandalous.

If the coalition government can deliver on their promise that mixed-sex wards will be ‘virtually eliminated’ by the start of next year, it will be a major victory for patients, respect and common sense.

If they can deliver, in a matter of months, what the Labour government have failed to do in fourteen years of false assurances, it will be a major victory for truth and integrity.

Please, Mr Lansley, don’t let this opportunity pass. Don’t let this end up as just another case of brazen lies and broken promises. Keep to your pledge and we will know that for once our country is not being run by the moral equivalent of the common car clamper.

Frank Leigh

Admittedly I am probably not the paradigm of selfless altruism. I will on occasion give up my seat for the elderly, the disabled, the pregnant and the pretty, but on the other hand I studiously avoid Big Issue sellers and the man who stands outside my supermarket with a funny hat and a plastic bucket.

I have never adopted a tiger, a penguin, a meerkat or a child. My car guzzles petrol, and the only time I ever use my recycle bin is when I have inadvertently deleted something off my hard drive.

But lately I have been thinking about the error of my ways. For in truth what is man if he does not care?

I have looked for inspiration, for role models to emulate.  I hoped that they would help me kick-start my transformation into a charitable and socially-aware human being. I looked towards environmentalists, animal rights activists and oil-spill mopper-uppers. I looked towards whale savers, tree planters and flotilla-joiners. But in all of those groups I did not find my true calling.

It wasn’t so much the small matter of taking off work to sail the seas in protest of perceived injustice, nor the daunting prospect of the packing involved before flying off to Haiti or Peshawar. And it wasn’t even that my aversion to handling animals precludes me from coming in contact with any that are not pre-packaged and ready for eating.

The realisation came from a humble source. It came with the scrabbling hand of an elderly man, clawing at me as he tried to navigate the crooked London pavement. It was the realisation that there is plenty of humanitarian aid waiting to be distributed here in this country, in our own back yards and old age homes.

It made me think of all the unglamorous charity, the hard work that is done and is waiting to be done, the missing glut of volunteers at the hospice doors (myself included amongst them), the unheeded suffering of those afflicted by the more conventional types of pain and isolation.
 
True, there is no monopoly on suffering and perhaps one can be such a sensitive soul that there is space within one’s heart and schedule to tend for the needy in all parts of the world including one’s own.

But there is one thing that I will say with some certainty. It is how immensely glad I am that the nurses and doctors of the NHS do choose to dedicate considerable effort to such menial tasks as the excising of our cysts and the wiping of our incontinent bottoms.

Because they could just as easily have joined a flotilla.

Frank Leigh