Ten years at the helm and not a single complaint about car parking. Until the Boy Burnham sticks his nose in, that is.

I accept that we are blessed by the 17 year delay to phase 3 of the site redevelopment and, in particular, by the fact that phase 2 involved the razing to the ground of a Victorian monstrosity with a footprint the size of a 600 strong car park. Which means that the staff and the patients are happy in a fit for purpose facility run by the two most fulfilled car park attendants this side of Timbuktu.

OK, so perhaps they shouldn’t be running their allotment shop from there on Thursdays. But hell, it looked good on our declaration on promoting public health - and the beetroot’s to die for.

But no longer. Everyone to park free, yells the Boy Burnham, as 150 ex-park and riders dance deliriously around a funeral pyre of bus passes and eye up the best spots for the quick sprint to the 7.56 to Bletchley. (I mean the 9.00 appointment in the eye clinic - honest!) Which makes the staff unhappy, the patients unhappy, and puts the kibosh fair and square on my betteraves à la crème au noix de saison.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Time to unleash the fifth horseman of the apocalypse; to let loose the hounds of hell; to go to the consultants committee. Strategy and policy on the agenda: tumbleweed junction and all the engagement of a Frenchman at a cricket match. Yet when it is car parking there is standing room only and a passion beaten only by the annual post mortem on the clinical excellence awards round.

How should I know that the chairman of the committee happens to be married to the editor of the Bugle? Or that the medical director’s husband is the prospective MP with a passionate interest in market gardening and encouraging the entrepreneurial spirit that made this county great?

Playing with car parking, Mr Burnham, makes reducing health inequalities look like a stroll in the park. Now, where did I put that recipe for borscht?