Sometimes it is possible to feel that you are in a story. According to novelist and journalist Will Storr, this is a necessary condition of flourishing as a human.1

I was recently visiting the Story Museum in Oxford, and got chatting to Mini Grey, the author-illustrator of several children’s bestsellers such as Biscuit Bear and Traction Man is Here (nothing whatsoever to do with orthopaedics).2 Her book signing was for ‘National Bookshop Day’ — a day to celebrate the persistence and survival of bookshops against the onslaught of the internet! The conversation got on to general practice, and particularly whether there was a literary device that could solve the issue of several presenting complaints in a 10-minute appointment. We wondered whether, a little like Doctor Who’s TARDIS (Time And Relative Dimensions In Space machine), which is bigger on the inside than the outside, we could conceive of a device that holds back time — so that inside the consulting room you have unlimited time with patients, but appointments still somehow run on time. The downside would be the premature ageing of the general practice workforce …