A happy and healthy New Year!

Did you bin 2009 with relish or look back at a particularly happy year?

At the party where we all grouped according to our view of it, my sister-in-law and I immediately 'binned' the year as both of us had discovered we had medical conditions requiring rather urgent treatment. Afterwards, I felt guilty. Indeed, I thought in reality I should view it as a lucky year because when I needed them those amazing doctors were there, telling me to stay calm and just let them get on with sorting me out. Which they did.

This isn't just a way of thanking them - although I do very much want to thank them - but also to remind me and others of things we overlook in the UK. The unusual condition I had was only 'discovered' some 30 years ago - by experts in this country, who also developed and then improved the treatment. The hospital where most of this work was done still provides expert diagnostics and advice for consultants treating patients with it. Was I humbled? Yes. And, yes, it did also dawn on me that in many (most?) parts of the world this wouldn't have happened.

We are a very argumentative nation. One of the key points put to me years ago by a favourite history teacher is that we are constantly complaining - our politicians rarely get lionised, in fact we rarely have a good word to say fro them until they retire, or die. Her point was that this is actually a great strength - we don't often do uncritical acclaim and this helps maintain a free society. But we do also take it too far - there's a time to recognise that sometimes the services we recieve, the thought and managerial skill behind them, as well as our trained front-line staff, can be amazing. So just as the battlelines are drawn up for a very important election, and we prepare for a positive fest of complaining and whingeing about everything, I just want to put on the record - apolitically of course, this is a totally apolitical statement - that last year I was deeply grateful to all those people whose names I will never know but who together took decisions on research and treatment which meant that years later, when I popped up on the radar, a lot of other people knew just what to do. Underneath it all most of us do - at least occasionally! - realise what a fine country this is.

Quality not quantity

What will get our 'mother of Parliaments' back in a position of respect? Why did I read Cameron's rumoured plans to run Parliament through August next year - if his party is in power - with a sinking heart?

I just don't know that having our legislators sitting throughout next summer is quite what the doctor ordered if they are just going to continue to spout the kind of tedious politico-speak which has become the norm. It's quality not quantity that counts.

What we need is a return of the Awkward Squad, people who are proud to serve as constituency MPs and actually don't give a stuff, to use the technical term, about being promoted. They can be an absolute pest, they cause the Whips to foam at the mouth, but they're just the people who stand for something because they think it's right. The House needs a lot more of them - people who have lived other lives and aren't in awe of party leaderships.

And while we're at it, more of the late-night rows which I used to enjoy in the Palace bars when I was working there as a jouranlist would help to ge tthe place back to where it should be, full of life and argument and - occasionally - the kind of brilliance which commands national respect. Not the shrivelled husk I hate to think it (almost) now is.

Gordon Brown

I have quite a number of criticisms I could make of Gordon Brown, but lack of courage in dealing with the fact that he is blind in one eye is not one of them. I have long admired Mr Brown's stoical determination to do his job and make no public fuss about it. With a member of my own family affected by partial sight, I have some appreciation of the true cost of that determination.

Most people have little idea how much of a problem loss of vision can create - from the obvious issues around personal safety through to failing to recognise someone or being assumed to be lacking in alertness because they have not spotted signs or information at a distance. It can be upsetting and painful to be with someone who has such a problem when you realise what they do suffer, and so often uncomplainingly.

This week's row over the letter Mr Brown wrote to a mother who has lost her solider son is a case in point. Her suffering is of course unimaginable, and she is entitled to remonstrate personally with her Prime Minister about what she sees as his inappropriate letter and the more fundamental issues over equipment for the armed forces. But, in truth, I have been glad to see the tide turn around the letter. It was sincerely written to try to bring her some comfort. If his writing is poor and some letters not properly formed (all faults I have, without the excuse of poor vision) I think that is secondary to the effort he made in writing to her. No-one other than the lady he wrote to needed to say anything about his handwriting. I dislike our national tendency to jump on people for imagined failings. Mr Brown may not be popular, and indeed we may think he is very unlikely to be Prime Minister for longer than another few months, but attacking him for his handwriting and failing to acknowledge the extraordinary way he deals with his own disability struck me this week as shallow.

Bombing of The Grand

Twenty-five years ago I was a young political correspondent reporting on the Tory Party Conference. With a one year old son at home, I couldn't bear the separation and my husband arrived in Brighton for the last night with our gorgeous curly headed son in his arms. At the end of the evening we headed for The Grand Hotel - that's what you always do on the last night, and, Sam - ever cheerful in his pushchair - was no barrier. My husband was happy Sam was there as he attracted a crowd of BA stewardesses. We dropped any pretence of early bedtimes and stayed there enjoying ourselves till the early hours.

I think of that scene when I play back the events of that conference. Our cheerful departure to a nearby hotel. No we didn't hear the explosion. No mobiles then, I first got the news from early morning tv and ran back to The Grand to see the scene of utter devastation.

In the conference centre, we journalists milled around each other trying to piece together our thoughts before filing copy (I was an evening paper journalist). Someone said: "you know this was an attempt to assassinate the entire Cabinet". It was the first time any of us appreciated quite the scale of what had been attempted. I walked into the hall, and there on the platform was a dignified figure, sitting quietly and calmly. Mrs Thatcher. She had declined security advice to leave, and felt she must show by her presence that the IRA weren't going to defeat our democracy by bombs. On that awful morning I was so glad to see her there, expressing by her quiet dignity an overwhelming moral rejection of IRA violence.

Party conferences never have been quite the same since. Security fell like a heavy curtain. A certain innocence was lost. I remember sitting with Sam afterwards and trying to connect that happy evening to the picture of carnage I had seen myself but hours later and the shocking human consequences. They could have been even worse - the bar had closed earlier than usual (many journalists would otherwise have been there when the bomb went off). But above all it is Mrs Thatcher I remember.

On trains

What is it exactly that makes train operators determined that every rail journey is punctuated by constant announcements? I am sitting on a train writing this, and there have have just been three announcements in succession, reminding me which carriage I am in, not to leave my bag unsupervised, and that I am about to arrive at Oxted. No! I have in fact arrived and must now listen to yet another 'welcome' announcement.

My husband has become so fed up with this non-stop assault on our ears that he plugs in his Ipod to cut the world out, only pausing grimly to point out that if ever there is a real health and safety problem ("train on fire") he'll be the last to know. I am glad to hear a campaign is building. Already I have heard the defences, the health and safety/EU regulation blah blah. But I am hopeful that passenger revolt will make the operators see sense.

They have actually provided we long-suffering commuters the best trains ever - modern, comfortable - and even more amazingly they are more punctual than I ever recall in a lifetime of commuting. Now it's time to back off and leave our ears in peace. I was going to say more, but we're about to arrive in Lingfield and while gathering my bag, and listening to the extra announcement about being careful if I am crossing the line I lost my flow...

Bob Ainsworth

Ok, Bob Ainsworth may not be everyone’s cup of tea as Defence Secretary. If I were him I probably wouldn’t want to read my morning papers. Phrases like “not up to the job” have followed him everywhere since his surprise promotion from Armed Forces Minister to Cabinet rank as Defence Secretary in June.

One of the few MPs in the Commons to have a background in manual work – he was a sheet metal worker and fitter with Jaguar cars – you wonder what Bob “Bollocks” Ainsworth (a nickname he is said to regard as undeserved, denying that he uttered the words in the Commons) makes of the condescension that seems to flavour a good deal of the coverage he receives. I have a notion that many who actually listen to him think he comes across as sincere and down to earth.

He is under huge pressure at present regarding the court action to limit compensation payments to British servicemen, and, yes, I recognise it’s an incredibly sensitive and serious issue where many of us are offended by what the Government are doing. But when I read that he was, disgracefully, on holiday and should be forced to return – as indeed he did – I began to feel uneasy. Am I the only one to find this perennial campaign every summer to bring a minister back from his or her holiday to “face the music” deeply unsettling? And I say it because, unpopular though the sentiment is at the moment after a year of ugly revelations about MPs and their expenses, many of them work incredibly hard. And I do mean hard, long days that last late into the night, the pressures of many competing demands, and decisions that all of us would find extraordinarily difficult and challenging should we be making them. Yes, politicians are accountable to us and we have every right to demand explanations from them. But it’s one thing to be critical, it’s quite another to treat them all as idle buffoons spending most of their time on holiday sun loungers. It simply isn’t true, and by tyrannising them back home from their family holidays all we do is make it harder for any of them to get a proper rest or to make good decisions when they get back..

Never waste a good crisis

At a breakfast last week Sky’s Adam Boulton reminded us that Obama had made the phrase “never waste a good crisis” a guiding concept for his administration.

I was initially puzzled, until of course I realised what it means is that a crisis gives you an opportunity to say and do things you never could at any other time. You may be facing huge challenges, but if you’re a strong leader you can also appeal to people in such a situation to accept the inevitability of major change. Think of a family crisis, when all the old rules go out of the window, and you know what I mean.

And it is a tribute I have to say to the failure of most of our politicians that a “good crisis” – in truth one of the worst economic crises we have ever faced – is being squandered. An angry and very senior Tory aide spluttered to me last week “Talking to Gordon Brown is like standing on a weighing machine. You just get robotic comments, no dialogue.” And, taking the analogy a bit further, the wrong weight presumably. Because across Whitehall it is an open secret – blown open I see by the Sunday newspapers – that the mandarins are quietly working out all the true implications of our national budget deficit and drawing up plans to address them as soon as the politicians have stopped pretending that a lot of budgets can easily be protected. Our transformed economic situation and our huge national debt will be a part of all our lives until 2030 at least. Walking up to the problem, and deciding what we should be doing about it, is a NOW problem, not tomorrow. The Tories have launched an open challenge to Gordon Brown on this, and they are right – but they need to add their own reality too and explain what all of them know, which is that after 2011 virtually every government budget will be frozen or cut. The British people are very good at adapting to crises – heaven only knows we have had enough practice over the years - but they need to be told the truth.