Now in the fall of my days I started to get serious knee pain for the first time a few years ago.
A former journalist and TV producer, I had spent a lot of my career out of the door, walking and sometimes running. Having stories regularly led to shameful and fast retreats!
Indeed I was fairly active from the boys. In these distant days, knees were things that felted when they came in contact with asphalt.
After having worked out that it was better to stay on my feet, I largely left my knees on their devices.
I remember that I had come along the highways and side by my native St Andrews, jumped up and out of a milk car or later furiously kicking my familiar bike, while I delivered groceries and Sunday newspapers.
My knees did not seem to object.
Holiday saw me running around the West, the two miles stretch later made famous in 'Charmots of Fire', or diving in the icy North Sea, while I discovered that legs and knees could also be useful to push me through the waves.
As a teenager I had a summer job as a beater on Korhenmoren in the Angus Glens, Prossen, Clova and Islay, who often chose knee -high Heather to twenty miles a day.
I cannot remember that I had ever experienced a stab, because my knees willingly accepted that they should deal with all kinds of stress, because I quickly grew to my final 6 ft 4 ins.
Patients have to wait years for knee operation at the NHS
You can cost up to £ 16,000 in a private life for knee operation
But that was before a rugby career that lasted far too long. Thirty years of scrumming on the soaked Scottish rugby fields seem to have played a major role in destroying the cartilage that knee mends kiss.
While I look around at that of my surviving playing contemporaries, all have undergone a form of knee operation. Some on both knees.
Two decades after hanging my jockstrap, the pain was like an ever -present toothache, bearable with industrial doses of paracetamol but interrupted by unbearable spasms if I turned too fast.
The pain has become more intense in recent years. Walking and cycling are now a test, a staircase on a marathon climbing.
Time to definitely consult the NHS on possible knee operation. Numerous X-rays Later my doctor confirmed that I should see an NHS FIFE consultant before I could be recommended for any form of surgery.
How long would that take? Everything up to six months – just to see the consultant! And how long thereafter could take place before the operation?
Everything up to two years. Two years? By that time I could be completely off my legs or on a scooter of a mobility.
Like all 4,400 Scots that are waiting for hip or knee operation, I know the difficulties that the NHS is going through. Every day we hear stories about patients who have to wait 49 hours in hospitals, of life -saving operations that have always been postponed, or delayed cancer treatments.
It is clear that people are much worse off than me, medical and financially. I really have all the sympathy for them.
But a waiting time of more than two years for one of the most common surgical procedures in which men and women are involved in their later years? How can this be like?
There is some sense in the new proposal from NHS Scotland that patients with the most serious pain have to jump in the queue for knee and hip operations.
How you actually assess the pain levels for individuals is a different matter and I see this lead to all kinds of disputes with the medical authorities.
So earlier this month I went to a private hospital where a consultant confirmed what my doctor had already told me: I need a new left knee.
The consultation costs £ 250. Only when the compensation from the consultant was paid did I qualify to go on the hospital waiting list for private knee operation: estimated costs £ 16,000.
More worried, as I discovered when I called the Privé Hospital to investigate the possibility of poking my £ 16,000 for an operation, how could they arrange a private consultation within a few days that NHS Fife lasts up to six months?
And how can the receptionist casually offer me a choice of consultants and surgery within a few weeks instead of two years on the NHS?
Are there really surgeons, happy to make the best part of £ 16 Grand A time, to perform procedures for which they have been trained, but still unable to limit their skills within the system that most of them Gifts expertise?
If this is the case, this is certainly a betrayal of everything our cradle for the serious NHS stands for.
Like most of us, I have contributed all my working life to the National Health Service.
My mathematical grandson tells me that in the almost half a century I was in paid work, my NHS contributions must have amounts to the best part of £ 300,000.
I was very lucky. At that time I was lucky not to have any day off.
But now that I have reached an era in which I would expect a small return of my health contributions, I think I should be a soldier in great pain, hopefully wait for a knee surgery within two years.
The only current alternative is setting up approximately £ 16,000 in hard -earned savings by going private.
I was only five years old when the NHS was born in 1947. But I can remember my grandfather, who was gassed the Somme in WW1, regularly visiting the doctor's operation for recipes without the need for an appointment long before the Health Service arose.
I can still remember his description of my grandmother's reaction when the doctor visited her home after she complained about chest pain. “It's just a bit of wind,” he told her. “Aye and it was just a bit of wind that Doon blown the Tay Brig.” She answered.
At the time, doctors and patients had a relationship and confidence that we can only be jealous in these times in which we have to book a telephone conversation with our GPs or predict exactly when we get sick to be admitted to their real presence.
Rightly so, the National Health Service, for free at the point of delivery, that Nye Bevan and others pioneered, was praised to the air, especially by those who are not as happy as my parents and grandparents in their access to excellent local medical attention.
But is an NHS where only the rich can get the rapid treatment that they need something in the vicinity of the type of health service Bevan in the Initiate?
And what about the thousands who live in pain who have no hope to increase the costs of private life? Just like me, they also have to feel that eighty years on the NHS that they have financially supported over the years is no more than an expensive con trick.
Russell Findlay, the Scottish conservative leader, says that NHS Scotland has been broken. John Swinney can only wring his hands in clear agreement. From where I am (the knee is too painful to get up), it is not only broken, but also in Smitteens.
Labor also seem to have no ideas about how to repair it. Regarding getting value for my £ 300,000 in health contributions, don't let me laugh!
Oh, and because the plans are prepared for a lucky one to jump into the queue, I already said that my right -wing knee is already having twing?
