‘There is certainly a particular place for books that are there for all time on your shelves, ready to stimulate, challenge, in a way that no online work could ever achieve’

'I’m worried about my dog. Dyson is now 12 – nearly 13 - which isn’t a bad age for a Labrador. Over the past few months he has started to struggle. He loves his food, and he loves the idea of chasing a tennis ball and going for a walk. However, all too often he will come back from a walk struggling with a limp. And he does seem to get exhausted much quicker than he used to. Are we being cruel and selfish in keeping him going? Is it time for him to be put to sleep? Isn’t it fascinating how a question like that has become the norm? So what is the risk that this could become the norm for humans too? One day might my children and grandchildren have a discussion about whether it is cruel to keep me going, or if it is now time to have me "put to sleep"? I’m not being facetious. I’m not equating a human life with a dog’s life. What I am doing is noticing just how easily a concept like being "put to sleep" can become the unremarked norm. Is that what we really want?'

'Don’t you find docs on the box intensely irritating? I’m not talking about the real doctors who pop up on factual programmes putting minds at rest, nattering to presenters, giving an instant update on whatever medical condition has come to the fore overnight. It can’t be easy, getting a call asking you onto breakfast TV to discuss the ins and outs of Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, just because some minor celebrity has been diagnosed with it on holiday. In fact, it’s just about as straightforward as doing an average morning surgery when patients can descend and ask anything and everything and you don’t even get a moment’s notice...'

'These are really difficult times for general practice. Wherever you practise in the UK, or indeed the world, we face extraordinary challenges. It’s not just the ramifications of politics. There is the ageing population often with multiple comorbidities, not to mention increasing expectations, the impact of the internet and the explosion in widely available knowledge, funding pressures, regulation and revalidation, and workforce issues.'

Somewhere in the middle of my second preregistration post, the equivalent of a modern FY1, I finally made my mind up. General practice it was going to be. In those days, extraordinary as it may seem now, vocational training for general practice was not compulsory. If you wanted to be a GP, you could simply apply for a partnership straight after registration, something that quite a few people in my year at medical school seemed happy to do. Crazy! Like you, on the day that I qualified I felt pretty confident that I knew enough to be able to do the doctoring, and after about ten minutes in my first job I realised that the depths of my ignorance were almost unfathomable. And when it came to having to know the range of topics that would be involved in life as a GP, then panic really set in...

'I recently visited a friend's father in a nursing home. He is very aged and very frail but still has all his marbles. When we remarked that he was looking rather miserable, he replied: ‘The night-time staff are really mean to me.’ Every evening he got more and more agitated about the staff who were coming on duty. I offered to have a word with the manager. ‘Oh no,’ he exclaimed. ‘You mustn't say anything. That will only make it worse.’ How many old people suffer in silence because they fear the repercussions?...'

'My wife hates spiders. I learnt long ago that a shriek from another room didn’t mean that a maniac with an axe had broken in, but that a half-inch spider had just careered across the carpet. An ability to tackle spiders has given me a touch of hero status in her eyes, as if I had seen off a gang of feral hooligans single-handed. There is no logic to phobias....I bet there’s something illogical that petrifies you...' writes our regular columnist Professor David Haslam.

'They had been partners for 15 years but on the day his father was taken critically ill Tom first discovered just how supportive partners can turn out to be....'