“We lived for three months in a rolled up newspaper in a septic tank. We used to have to get up every morning at six o’clock and clean the newspaper, go to work down the mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep with his belt.”1 ⇑ Every time doctors tell me about their working hours before the European working time directive came into force I think of Monty Python’s Four Yorkshiremen sketch, in which the surrealist troupe try to outdo each other …