'I STRONGLY recommend that you put the phone down and get someone to call an ambulance for you immediately," said the nurse at the end of the line. I'd only dialled the out-of-hours number for a little reassurance.

I'd hoped they'd say: "You're young(ish), fit, active, healthy. The sudden severe pain in your chest, crushing the air out of your lungs and grinding the life out of your body, is nothing to worry about."

Instead, the voice said: "I really would, sir."

And then, to brook no argument, put the phone down.

When you're in a busy restaurant and the food is lousy, you feel reluctant to complain. They're rushed off their feet, harassed to their wits' end, and you'll only make it worse for them. So you slink quietly out, anxious to avoid a fuss. Similarly with the NHS. We've all seen Casualty, with the medics rushed off their feet, harassed to their wits' end. There's no way you'd make it worse for them, or make a fuss, by calling an ambulance.

So I dallied at my desk for 30 minutes. It was Tuesday evening. I was trying to complete the editorial comment on the Government's folly of introducing genetically-modified maize. It's an argument blindingly obvious to all but a Cabinet minister, yet the pain obliterated its strands from my brain.

Eventually I prevailed upon a colleague for a lift, and staggered into casualty at Darlington Memorial - staggered because I was carrying a copy of every national paper. I've read the papers. I know the NHS is in crisis and getting worse. I know that if you turn up at A&E you'll need plenty of reading matter as you'll require a haircut before you get attended to.

The duty nurse lounged - yes, lounged - behind the desk. "I've got a severe pain in my chest," I gasped.

Lounging no more. A swish of curtains, a rumble of trolleys and a dash of nurses. Within two minutes, I was wired up to a heart monitor and an ECG-machine. Within five minutes, a one-eyed male nurse from Namibia - "I'm registered blind, y'know" - had painlessly found a vein and taken some blood. Within 20 minutes, I'd been seen by an exceedingly young doctor, and within 25 minutes a mobile X-ray machine had peered into my chest.

And within two hours I was back out in the cold of the Darlington night, dosed up on paracetamol but exposed - ever so politely - as a malingering hypochondriac bed-blocker. A touch of pleurisy, my GP said later, and so the NHS is, from my experience, in far better health than I am.

ALTHOUGH I have this week walked in death's dark vale, I have been comforted by a couple of silly stories. The one about the rare American robin - Latin name turdus migratorius (honestly) - has been worth a chuckle. It turned up in an industrial estate in Grimsby, but just as twitchers were setting up their paraphernalia to observe it, a sparrowhawk descended out of the sky and ate it before their very eyes.

Better still is one purportedly from the Pattaya Mail in Thailand which is so good that it doesn't matter if it isn't true. Apparently a circus dwarf named Od bounced off his trampoline. The next act on was a hippopotamus called Hilda. Hilda was bored, yawned, and - naturally - Od bounced into her gaping mouth. A "gag reflex" caused her to automatically swallow him.

"Unfortunately, the 1,000-plus spectators continued to applaud wildly until commonsense dictated there had been a tragic mistake," alleged the Pattaya Mail. Od was dead, an ex-dwarf, eaten by a hippo. Even my one-eyed Namibian nurse in Darlington wouldn't be able to find a cure for him on the NHS.