Opinion  

Since I am viewed as the only authority on the strange set of pedals and electric bellows (such a Heath Robinson instrument) that provides the music, most people are willing to go along with whatever I do. In truth I am no authority at all on anything, but it didn't stop them sending me inside the instrument to find the mouse nest last week when the B flat stuck open and the organ farted constantly throughout 'All Creatures of our God and King'. My emerging bruised, dusty and triumphant a moment later only added to my kudos.

Organ playing is for the independent, and you do have a certain power. If the vicar insists on talking whist I'm playing I always win, since however loudly he shouts I can just pull out another stop.

And I get to choose the tunes. This Sunday, for instance, the congregation had excerpts from Hunchback of Notre Dame, followed by a bit of Elton then the soundtrack to The Mission, the film that made me cry more than any other. The secret, of course, is to adapt so that it sounds churchy, then be convincing.

All organists do this stuff, vary the programme a little, hiding subtle puns at the right moment (nothing wrong with playing 'Yesterday' after a particularly heavy sermon on sin). Such gentle fun makes up for the hours alone in the cold practising, or playing to a silently waiting (but hopefully appreciative) fully loaded coffin, then feeling your way out in the pitch dark church afterwards because you've turned the lights out (they could have filmed The Blair Witch Project in our graveyard, but it might have had too much atmosphere). We organists suffer for our art.

As do GPs. We could learn a lot from the church organist. Lord Darzi and his plans to fill 24-hour a day clinics with medical students and thus offer the public all the antibiotics and X-rays they could possibly desire may make a good sermon, but we have both volume and a good tune our side, and if we only pull out the stops we can drown him out entirely. He may be promising them heaven, but he needs us for the delivery, and when there's a mouse nest in your pipes who is it that you actually want to see?

Dr Selby is a GP from Suffolk. Email her at GPcolumnists@haymarket.com