JOHN Thurston as befits a main prop in the local establishment has retired to his cottage in Herefordshire trailing clouds of glory in his wake. As a sharp business man he has favoured us in his letter to the press with thoughts on the vitalisation of Lydney. He suggests that people like himself should get together and develop Lydney. He mentions for instance a new hospital where he has unquestionably maintained the sterling work of Melville Watts. Nor should we forget the generosity of the land donated for the park, the hospital and other places by the family of Viscount Bledisloe. Perhaps our retiring County Sheriff was in philanthropic mode.

The brutal truth is that small cottage hospitals lack the staff and much of the equipment needed to provide other than simple and basic procedures. Among the illustrations of this I am thinking of a little girl who suffered a complicated double fracture of the leg while jumping on a bouncy castle at a local fête. She was taken to Lydney where, like the Dilke, there is no orthopaedic department. They had to summon an ambulance for Gloucester Royal. The girl was in terrible pain. The sister who was highly qualified and experienced knew what painkiller was appropriate but she was not allowed to administer it without a doctor's signature so they had to wait for the ambulance and the paramedic from Gloucester who was probably less well trained than her.

In another case a woman was summoned to assist her elderly and blind father. He had fallen and was bleeding badly from the scalp. The nurse on duty at Lydney did not have the right sized bandage and advised the woman to take him to his GP's surgery. They had a bandage but no nurse on duty, so his daughter bandaged him up herself.

Taking Lydney Hospital, its costly operation theatre is under used as surgeons are reluctant to come to deal with, say, two patients when they have normally ten or so at Gloucester. Lydney provides some permanent facilities like short-term physiotherapy and X-Rays etc and is better than nothing in a desperate emergency until the ambulance arrives. Its main value is as a place to come for patients approaching the end of terminal illness. In my view it should be extended to provide a full line residential hospice. It should also provide wards for sufferers of Alzheimer's and dementia. When I was a district councillor in sleepy hollow as I call it I recall telling the bureaucrat who was masterminding the closure of Collier's Court as lacking in humanity. He argued it did not matter where you put the mentally disabled because it was all the same to them. The fact that most had friends and family who still loved them and wanted to visit them regularly did not matter. They have to go near Cheltenham.

One of my constituents asked me to call in, he said he was bothered about the speed of the traffic outside his home. There is no good way of influencing County Highways so I asked what did he do for a living. He said "I am Chief Superintendent in the CID". He then came to the point. "How do you like living in a place that isn't policed?" "I trust in my Alsatian," I said. I managed to button hole an Assistant Chief Constable at a meeting "How many patrol cars do you deploy in West Gloucestershire at night? " It transpired that one is parked up off road somewhere and another on standby to relieve it. Every 24 hours hundreds of calls come into control, may ask for police assistance, and some of the most urgent are passed on.

Then I had a brainwave. Near the junction of Coleford Road and the main road in Lydney stands a public toilet. Unfortunately a fast sports car crashed into it belonging to Mr Thurston. After an extensive repair, the "To Let" sign was raised. Trouble is "The Old Public Toilet, No 1 Coleford Road " is not an address many people care to reveal. So why not turn it into a 24 hour police post. Perhaps the Sheriff of Gloucester County could be invited to open it as part of the campaign to modernise Lydney. What the Forest really needs is more jobs as so much of the local industry has gone abroad where labour is cheaper and trade unions discouraged.

– Roger Horsfield, Bream.