Birthday parties, club committee meetings, hog roasts, cricket matches, fetes: you name it, I have missed them in the name of work. Even a wedding once, although I regret that now. On-calls were the ultimate reason for stepping aside from difficult, awkward or just unwanted commitments. No-one could reasonably object without appearing as if they wanted to deny succour to the sick and needy. It played on the consciences of others that they were luxuriating in roles, such as public relations, which paid well and gave them lots of time off but had no moral content. Our claim to be forced to stay and grimly help the diseased when they were free to break off from their apparently responsible professions each weekend, pricked their sense that perhaps they weren't really contributing to society after all.

My father says always to judge the outcome not the expressed intent. To him a failure to appear counts as a failure to prioritise highly enough. So to him my failure to appear at family events due to on-call commitments pricked no conscience: I was simply failing to rank my family commitments highly enough. He has a point, but then sometimes his position appears a tad harsh: on-calls often have been unavoidable commitments in our lives. After all, there are only so many weekends available for normal life when living with the rhythm of a one in three rota. There was a stage in my life when I did an assistantship in a place where on-calls were measured in weeks: during those weeks I was clearly bound to the practice area.

But it wasn't all pain. It wasn't all getting up to go out on pointless errands on cold wet winter nights. It was coming back from Wooler on a summer morning, so early that the children have still not woken, and seeing the rising sun warming the width of the Till valley and all across to the slopes of the Cheviots beyond. Or maybe waiting in the pre-dawn half-light for a badger to lumber along an innominate lane and off through the hedgerow. It was seeing the glassy calm of the sea reflecting an immense cloudless sky on the way over to Holy Island. Then, later, the sympathy for breakfast, a cup of tea made for you. And later still, the quiet admiration of patients who know you were out and know still you will be consulting today.

Becoming only a daytime doctor loses some of these things. It takes away a reason for drying out each week and risks replacing our gentle contempt for alcoholics with empathy. It forces us to cope without perfect knowledge of what goes on in our community since some of it will be happening henceforth without any reference to us. Our excuses are rendered as simple and unemotional as anyone else's. It commits us to having to attend more of those uncomfortable social events, prevents us from hiding behind the needs of the sick and elderly. Moreover, we pay for the privilege of being able to attend all these fusty family events. Like a five-in-one jab, being relieved of the burden of on-calls is not without pain.

‘What are days for?’ asks Philip Larkin before providing his own oblique, romantic response:

¹

Picture the harassed but caring men muddying their black leather shoes in the perpetual pursuit of illness and suffering in need of relief. He might have asked, ‘What are nights for?’ and there has been an era in which the same answer might have applied. That era has ended.