THE plumber was here for ten minutes and charged £30 for stopping the drip in the downstairs loo. The washing machine man wanted £35, the vacuum cleaner man £40, and the people who made my fax machine wanted £60 before they'd even look at it.

Dentists expect you to pay them for looking at your teeth, opticians for checking your eyes, while hairdressers can, and do, charge up to £500 for a cut.

So why should doctors be free?

Yes, I know we've already paid for them through our National Insurance. But we all know that's not enough.The NHS was never designed to give people new hearts, new kidneys, new lives. We expect miracles every day, in the routine way our grandparents expected cough mixture. It's a bit like paying for the AA's basic roadside assistance and then expecting a chauffeur-driven stretch limo to take you to your luxury hotel.

If we want the best, we have to pay for it. And paying to visit the doctor seems as good a place to start as any to get money into the system.

A new report by a member of the BMA's General Practitioners' Committee has suggested a payment scheme - perhaps £28 per visit, covered by insurance. Many GPs are for it. Others are violently against it. The Ggovernment is said to have rejected the idea outright.

But it has to be worth thinking about.

For, providing that the young, the old and the chronically sick were exempt, is it really so outrageous? We throw so much money at so many worthless things - think of all the expensive junk food our children will wolf down this summer - that paying for our health seems not that unreasonable. Might even make people value it more.

Might even - dare we say it - make people think twice about going to the doctor for every little ache and pain and help unclog the system a little.

There is, however, one very good reason for not introducing charges. Anyone who has had anything to do with NHS administration says that it is a black hole run on little logic, less common sense but vast sums of money.

If we had a scheme to pay for surgery visits, you can be sure that the extra administrators needed to run it would cost twice as much as the money it raised.

Back to the drawing board.

SINEAD O'Connor. Yes, she of the shaved head, strident voice, and abrasive personality, is now into domesticity. She's been a punk and a priest, but now says she wants to stay at home with her children, make cakes and look after the new man in her life.

"I've always had this fluffy and feminine side to me." she says.

Fluffy and feminine? Sinead O'Connor?

It must be April 1st.

DIDN'T watch the Brass Eye spoof on paedophilia, so can't comment - though that doesn't seem to have prevented a lot of experts putting in their two pennorth. Senior Son saw it and said it was an excellent joke at the expense of the prurient documentary that purports to be serious but is in fact just titillating.

But I am reminded of Dean Swift back in 1729. Horrified by the condition of starving children, he wrote a satirical pamphlet, "A Modest Proposal for Preventing the Children of Poor People from being a Burden to their Parents or their Country".

His satirical suggestion was that children should be reared in comfort until their first birthdays, by which time most of them had died anyway, when they would be killed and used for meat. "A young healthy child, well nursed is a delicious, nourishing, wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked or boiled."

Back in 1729, they didn't see the joke either.

THE parents of murdered eight-year-old Sarah Payne have described the £11,000 compensation they've been offered as a "sick joke".

In a world where a policeman can get £20,000 for hurt feelings and compensation of hundreds of thousands of pounds can be paid for the most trivial injury, then of course it seems heartless.

But what price would be right? Even millions would not be enough. And if you were to ever get that, could you enjoy profiting from your child's suffering?

In the week that Bradford police officers are trying to sue the force for injuries suffered in the recent riots, Percy Goring, the last British survivor of the ill-fated Gallipoli campaign, has died in Australia at the age of 106.

More than 34,000 soldiers were killed in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. Mr Goring was surrounded by dead comrades, nearly died himself of exposure and lost a leg to gangrene. He saw horrors that even Bradford policemen would find hard to imagine. But he knew he was lucky, and always considered himself remarkably fortunate to have survived.

And he never sued anybody.

Someone asks you for £3,000 for a get rich quick scheme, DON'T DO IT. Women Empowering Women is a pyramid scheme in which people at the bottom pay £3,000 and people at the top walk off with £24,000. You can see the appeal.

Trouble is, for every person who gets £24,000, eight people have to put in £3,000. Then each of those have to recruit eight and each of those have to recruit eight and so it goes on and on, until eventually an awful lot of people are scratching around to find eight more.

If they don't, then the whole pyramid crumbles, leaving an awful lot of women a lot poorer. To make it more appealing, it has all been wrapped up in a New Age supportive message - just look at the name of the scheme for a start.

Basic mathematics says the scheme will never work for long. But mathematics always was more of a boys' subject than a girls', which is no doubt why women have been targeted.

Do your sums, girls and hang on to your cash.

Did some washing, did some shopping, did some work, then got out the sun cream and the deckchair and went to make the most of the sun. And what happened?

Black clouds appeared.

Moral of this story - when the sun shines again, forget all the jobs you have to do, just get out there and make the most of it.

You know it won't be for long.

www.thisisthenortheast.co.uk/news/griffiths.htm