Moves are afoot to introduce a law to prevent family doctors from discriminating against older people by booting them off their lists when their treatment starts costing their practices too much money.

How sad that such a law should be needed - that some members of the medical profession have become so corrupted by their enforced role as managers of money that they've lost their sense of vocation.

How did we get to this situation reported by Age Concern, which is lobbying for support for legal measures to combat age discrimination in the health service? It cites the cases of people who have been sent letters by their GPs when they reached the age of 80, asking them to find another practice to register with.

And it isn't just family doctors, apparently. Age Concern quotes examples of people in their early 70s who have suffered heart attacks and whose relatives have had to plead with coronary units for them to be treated.

Even then, some of them have found that their age debars then from being accepted on the heart-attack rehabilitation programmes in some parts of the country.

It's a lousy sort of health service, isn't it, which rations treatment and care according to age. Surely the only reason for withholding life-saving treatment from anyone should be if their quality of life should they survive is certain to be desperately grim.

So good luck to Age concern in its campaign for new laws which will not only cover discrimination in health care but also in the financial world (insurance etc) and the jobs market.

It's hoping to persuade sympathetic MPs to push through its proposals by amending Government Bills. It's going to be an uphill struggle, if last week's bid to restore the tax refund received by 300,000 low-income pensioners on dividends from shares (usually building society windfalls) is any guide.

The rule change, from next April, could cost them an average of £75 a year. That's not a fortune in the broad scheme of things, but can make quite a difference to someone with very little income.

The Prime Minister, in the Commons the other day, turned down calls to look again at the decision. He said that the government's proposals for the reform of pensions provision, with its new minimum income guarantee for pensioners from next April, would benefit poorer pensioners.

Which it well might. But it rather misses the point. They'll still not have the £75 to which they're entitled.

I Don't Believe It!

A bloke called Harry rang up this week and left a really cross message with Mike Priestley for me. He was filled with very unseasonal wrath.

What had upset him, apparently, was the unusually high number of Christmas cards he'd been sent which wouldn't stand up properly. Not the ones that stand on their bottom edges, like a book, but the ones that stand on their fronts and backs (with the spine pointing upwards).

Harry was sick of them because, he told Mike to tell me, "the damn things keep doing the splits!"

I know what he means. You prop them up as best you can, using some of the other cards around them to hold them in place. But within minutes they sink down, spreading out and causing the other cards to fall over.

Like Harry, I hate these cards. In fact this year I got so fed up of them that I tried to patent a way of stopping them collapsing. I stuck a piece of sticky tape to either end of a short piece of cotton and then stuck the tape on to either side of the card, so it couldn't do the splits.

I thought it was a brilliant idea, but Mrs Mildew said I was a really sad person and should get a life. I don't know where she gets these modern expressions from. It can't be the Women's Institute, surely?

But enough of this Christmas humbug. I've got good news this week for fans of proper popular music who've been complaining that there's nowhere on the radio they can hear it.

"Of course there is!" chorused three readers. Colin Thornton rang from Queensbury to say "If you tune into Radio Leeds on Monday evenings, from 7-10pm, there's a programme called Stars on 78 - records from what I call the days before non-music started."

Jean Cooke wrote from Baildon on the same subject. She says that the programme, presented by Frank Wappit, can be found on 92.4FM (in Keighley on 103.9FM).

"However, sometimes sport, which has a bigger audience, is broadcast on this frequency, and Stars on 78 is moved to 774MW," she says. "The reception is not quite so good, but the programme is still good listening. Frank and colleagues give information about the golden oldies as well as playing some great music."

And Peter A RUshForth, writing from Cullingworth, passes on the same information and adds a complaint that football nowadays gets far too much radio and TV time.

"I don't think the sport is as popular as is made out," he say. "If it is, then there ought to be more people attending the football grounds. Out of a countrywide population of some 55 million, I doubt if it is anywhere near one per cent."

So there you are. Many thanks to Colin, Jean and Peter. To them, and to all of you, a very Happy Christmas from me and Mrs Mildew - and from Mike Priestley, who's stopped sulking now about my column getting a mention on Terry Wogan's show.

If you have a gripe about anything, drop a line to me, Hector Mildew, c/o Newsroom, T&A, Hall Ings, Bradford BD1 1JR, email me or leave any messages for me with Mike Priestley on (44) 0 1274 729511.

Yours Expectantly,

Hector Mildew

Enjoy Mike Priestley's Yorkshire Walks

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.