AS a society, we may have passed the point where those in authority can just do as they please and expect us to put up with it.

Regardless of what you think about their results, the votes on Scottish independence and EU membership offered people real choice and real power.

And now they’ve realised that they quite like being listened to, I don’t think it’ll be easy to shut them up again.

There’s an understandable outcry over the weekday closure of Salisbury’s walk-in medical centre, and it was heartening to see city councillors out gathering signatures for a petition at the weekend.

I’ve used the centre a few times as an alternative to A&E, usually as a result of some gardening-related injury.

One of my favourite poems is Andrew Marvell’s The Garden, especially the bit about drifting off into a “green thought in a green shade”. It’s lush. It’s romantic. It’s wishful thinking.

Obviously, dear old Andrew never had to do his own weeding or pruning. Gardening’s a brutal pastime. Never mind smelling the roses, I spend more time picking their thorns out of my fingers. Or from under my nails. Or battling with brambles that leave me covered in scratches.

I’ll never forget slicing my thumb open whilst foolishly leaning on an upturned flower pot to reach a stem of bindweed that was trying to camouflage itself in the clematis.

My weight was more than pottery could bear, and a shard broke off, with extremely painful and bloody consequences. Now that time I did have to go to A&E.

Anyway, I digress. What I meant to say was that the service at Avon Approach has been excellent, rarely involving a wait of more than an hour.

It deals with the kind of minor, inconveniently-timed injuries and illnesses for which you can’t just march off to your oversubscribed GP’s surgery and demand instant attention, while you know that at A&E you’d (rightly) be very low down the priority list.

I can see the argument that if the clinic is open later in the evening, it will take some weight off A&E.

But I find it hard to imagine that GPs will wish to, or be able to see even more patients during the working day.

What about tourists? Or students and city centre workers who live elsewhere and aren’t registered with city doctors? Who will see them now?

The real problem, I suspect, is No Money.

If we can only afford to open the clinic for longer at night by closing it during office hours, are we solving one problem by creating another?

The paying public – and we do all pay for our NHS – are making it clear, in their thousands, that they don’t want this closure.

There is sufficient patient demand to justify keeping all of our medical facilities open.

What is required is the political will to make it happen.

anneriddle36@gmail.com