John Light fondly remembers his cousin, Matron Light, at Stroud Maternity Hospital

National Health Service is one subject that touches all our lives. We may have differing views on its efficiency, but we all know it is stretched to breaking point and underfunded.

Thanks to speedy diagnosis, swift treatment and wonderful follow up work from our Cirencester surgery, Mrs Light and I are still alive to tell the tale.

Three operations for life-threatening conditions were all successful, and with subsequent clinic appointments at Cirencester and Stroud the aftercare was accessible and effective.

Others of you will have good reason to complain, having experienced long waiting lists, cancelled operations and difficult journeys to appointments.

What I am certain we are all agreed on is the need for better funding and the need to maintain our smaller hospitals. I have already mentioned two, but with Tetbury, Fairford and Stroud Maternity Hospital you can see how lucky we are to have so much... and how we must fight to keep us so sell served.

Thanks must be paid to the number of local people in such groups as the league of friends. The late Norman Whitehead did so much in Cirencester and the benefit of his work lives on.

My cousin Marion was a spirited matron at Stroud Maternity Hospital from the 1960s until the early 1980s. She was always ready to spring into action to defend the hospital she loved so much.

In the evening of her life she stressed to the younger members of the family there would always be the need to fight, and on many fronts.

There is one crucial thing that some of us must be prepared to do and that is pay. Unless the better-off tax-payers do so our essential service will struggle. Politicians must grasp the nettle and us middle and especially higher earners must accept any subsequent stings.

If one man has two buns and another 10 you do not take one from each. The better off must be prepared to pay and also not receive the winter heating allowance. That is a small way to start.

Honest thinking and common sense should take us the rest of the way, but that raises another point. Is the NHS too valuable to be left to politicians, many of whom use it as a political football? I know what my answer is.

Marvellous choice for high sheriff

WHAT a marvellous choice Charles Martell is as high sheriff of our county!

He has done so much to preserve our rural heritage and at the same time enhance our current gastronomic delights.

Each county needs an individual identity and we in Gloucestershire are fortunate. We have cheese rolling, shin kicking, and the Severn Bore.

The Tyndale monument at North Nibley proclaims faith, courage and scholarship. We are the county of Laurie Lee and J K Rowling and last week’s television awards show that our young people can do so much. Congratulations to Charlie and Daisy May Cooper and their programme This Country, which won three awards. All Cirencester is proud of them.

Some of you will just know Charles as a cheesemaker, being aware of Stinking Bishop of Wallace and Gromit fame. Add on Double Gloucester and his revival of Single Gloucester and have an impressive list.

Add on the products of his 17th century still, from which come spirits with exciting names and a smooth taste and you will now be starting to get a measure of the man.

Christmas present problems can be solved by purchase of a bottle of Naked Lady, Jack High, Vintage Pear of Apple or perhaps Poteau.

Then there are his publications Pears of Gloucestershire and Apples of Gloucestershire which keep alive our knowledge of species that are being swept away.

Traditional animal breeds such as Gloucestershire cattle are safe in this man’s hands.

The high spot of the ceremony and service at the cathedral was the reading of the poem The Fishermen of Newnham by Charles' daughter Emily.

Written by ill-fated Gloucestershire poet Ivor Gurney this shows that Charles has a true sense of this county of Forest, Vale and Wild Blue Hill.

How lucky we are to live in a county with individuals who maintain its identity. How awful it must be to live in Surrey or another anonymous county.