Interestingly, a piece of one of the plaques has broken off, and the ninth commandment is absent ...

yet with the possible exception of the vicar none of us could immediately work out which of God's laws was missing. This begs the question of how we've been managing without descending into a moral vacuum of Gomorrah-esque proportions.

Admittedly stealing, adultery, murder and keeping the sabbath are all up there on the board, and our favourite one about coveting our neighbour's ox, ass and maidservant. But number nine - well, we two churchwardens, a lay preacher and I had to look it up.

In fact the missing commandment nine reminds us not to bear false witness. Thou shalt not unjustly accuse thy PCT, for example, of failing to engage in proper adult-to-adult dialogue about prescribing budgets ...

but doing it justly is obviously ok, which is why I so frequently do.

But I think most of us had sussed this as being part of the moral code by which we should live without having it listed up there on the wall. Come to think of it, for the whole time the plaques have not been posted on the church wall our villagers seem not to have murdered anyone either. How did we manage it?

There's a parallel in our professional lives. Most of us have a broad idea of what constitutes proper general practice. It involves diagnosis, treatment and health promotion, trying to meet needs without bowing unneccesarily to demands, being professionally able, courteous and - well, the GMC has most of it pretty well listed. We don't need a list of commandments posted on the wall to tell us how to be proper doctors. And this being the case, chasing lists of targets devised by non-clinical individuals at our PCT, while the government pays them to monitor our success, really does seem a little pointless. Hopefully the coalition will think so too.