Charity fun runs? They're still a little way off

Some came from old friends, and others from new friends whom I didn't even know that I had.

The good wishes worked.

Within two days I was doing circuits of the ward on my racing zimmer frame.

From that I graduated to crutches and then a stick.

The stick will be with me for a while, since even the miracles of modern surgery don't happen overnight.

I hope to be back in action this week. Just don't expect to see me participating in any charity fun runs.

As luck would have it, my arrival in hospital coincided to the hour with the first outbreak of real summer that we have had this year. But there were compensations. It renewed and revived my admiration for the National Health Service - all the greater because I spent 12 years of my life in America, where nothing of the kind exists, and all too often it is the rich who live and the poor who die.

The NHS, for all its problems, is an incomparable national treasure.

It is staffed by expert, committed and wonderful people.

(My surgeon spoke apologetically of moonlighting on what he called 'the street of shame' - by which he meant Harley Street and the private sector.)

We must insist that, with all the money now being pumped into the NHS, enough is set aside to relieve the chronic problem of the under-payment of its nurses.

Even angels have the right to a decent living wage.

GLIMPSING myself in the mirror the other day, hobbling downstairs on a stick, it occurred to me that I am coming to look dismayingly like a grandfather.

And guess what? I am going to be one.

I am authorised by my daughter Melissa and her husband Peter, now enjoying wedded bliss in Handforth, to announce that a baby is expected early in March.

I had assured the girl at her wedding that I was in no great rush to become a grandparent, but she went ahead anyway as she always does, and I am actually quite delighted.

All the existing grandparents I know - like all owners of a replacement hip - have nothing but good to say of it.

It gives them a new lease of life and improves the quality of it.

Appropriately for a grandfather-to-be, I must confess to having just passed one of life's milestones.

A certain birthday occurred last Monday.

It had an O at the end and something rather more than a 5 at the beginning.

I refuse to be more specific about it than that.

It was also the day on which, under the original scheme of things, I would have retired from the BBC, got out the carpet slippers I suppose, and invested in a rocking chair.

Fate decided otherwise and I am duly grateful to it - because my new environment is so much better than my old one.

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THE BBC gets odder all the time.

Before my trip to Burundi last month, on behalf of UNICEF, I had offered to write a piece of Radio Four's 'From our own Correspondent', the BBC's longest-running news programme.

Its editor, Tony Grant, readily accepted I had contributed to the programme for 30 years, and my broadcasts had appeared in some of its anthologies.

When I returned from the war zone he rang up full of apologies.

The idea had been vetoed by the BBC at 'very high level' because I was now an MP and therefore presumably not impartial.

This struck me as moderately absurd.

The tragedy of Burundi is hardly a party political issue, at least in this country.

And I am the same person as an MP that I was as a journalist, except perhaps with rather better access.

I would have dismissed the whole nonsense with a shrug of the shoulders, if the BBC had sent someone else to report this forgotten war.

But the correspondents in Nairobi, who cover Burundi, were grounded and forbidden to travel because their budget was over-spent.

Which is perhaps why the war was forgotten in the first place.

SOME people will be disappointed, and others relieved, by the Government's decision not to go ahead with the A556(M), the link road between the M6 and the M56, while the issues are studied further.

Passions have been running high on both sides, and I hope that we can use this period of grace to pay some respectful attention to each other's concerns.

Of course there are the strongest environmental arguments against the concreting over of yet more of our green belt, and I happen to believe that the link road shouldn't be built.

Yet the people of Mere, who generally support it, also have rights in the matter.

It is their lives which are at risk every day - I would even say, at increasing risk - on the existing A556.

The oddest proposition I heard since becoming an MP was that this didn't matter so much because they were all rich people and hadn't voted for me anyway.

This is nonsense.

All sorts of people live in Mere - rich people, poor people and in-between people.

How they voted makes no difference at all.

And it may be unfashionable to say so, but even rich people have the right to be listened to.

Now is the time, in my view, for a re-evaluation of Option 11 - the construction of a full motorway interchange at Lymm.

It would be a hard decision for those who live nearby - one couple in particular, whose house would have a slip road almost on top of it, would merit the most generous compensation.

But it is the only solution which would save the green belt and reduce the dangers at Mere.

One piece of good news in all this is that the new minister responsible for the roads programme is Dr John Reid.

He is both a good man and a clever one - qualities not always found together in the rough and tumble of politics.

In his former post, as Minister for the Armed Forces, I always found him well-briefed and approachable when I came to him with my cases of soldiers in trouble.

I know - because he told me so - that he was one minister who hoped that his phone would not ring at the time of the Government reshuffle.

He was happy where he was, doing the job he had prepared for.

But of course his phone did ring and overnight he found himself responsible for road schemes rather than soldiers.

I suspect that after coming to grips with the complexities of the A556(M), he will think nostalgically of his days of peace at the Ministry of Defence.

MARTIN BELL

Converted for the new archive on 13 March 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.