In the end it turned out to be not so much a barbecue summer as a season of splints and yellow protuberances. For many politicians, this August was dominated by the NHS. And I was no exception. But rather than being engaged in theoretical discussion about the future of the service, I was getting experience at the sharp end.

The sharp end in question was unleashed at a particularly troubling moment when it was suggested that the answer to one family member’s condition was the piercing of an abscess at the back of the throat. The thought of it was enough to make one gag. Apart from Simon Cowell’s tongue, it was hard to conceive of anything worse being thrust into your mouth.

In the end the procedure wasn’t required, intravenous antibiotics and NHS TLC being enough to see the patient through. But what lent the whole process a faintly surreal air was that sophisticated drug cocktails and thermo-sterilised needles were deployed in the fight against something called a quinsy.

A quinsy sounds like some merrie Englandish pudding, or a complex crochet stitch, or a wildflower that grows only in western Lincolnshire. It is the sort of word you imagine would have sent Arthur Marshall into lyrical passages of whimsical invention on Call My Bluff in the Seventies. But there is precious little whimsy in a quinsy. It is Satan’s twist on tonsillitis, an infection that drains you of all energy, makes eating and drinking agony, inserts rusty razor blades into your ear every time you swallow and, untreated, can kill. One even finished off George Washington.

The quinsy, however, wasn’t the only condition that sounds delightful, but is in truth agony, that afflicted the Gove family. One of us also succumbed to a whitlow. Again, it sounds like a breed of Westmorland sheep, or a type of type of ox-bow lake found only in the Mendips, or a fruit cake baked every Wakes Week in the more rural parts of East Lancashire. But it is in fact an infection of the bit between your nail and your finger that, while it looks trivial, induces the sort of intense agony in your digits that Torquemada and all the officers of the Holy Inquisition managed, only lamely, to mimic with their thumbscrews and vices.

So as the summer went on, and, instead of crossing off all the places we’d visited in our Scottish National Trust handbook, we put a tick next to all the conditions we’d encountered in Webster’s Medical Dictionary, I began to wonder if I’d somehow offended the ghost of Frank Muir and was being cursed with a series of ailments culled from previous Call My Bluffs. What was next? Would the strain of driving through sheeting rain bring on Raedar’s syndrome by the banks of Loch Tay? Or is it a psychological condition first identified among those serving in the Kriegsmarine in the Second World War and restricted to sailors serving on capital ships with above average displacements in sub-tropical waters? Would we catch strine from the sheep on Colonsay? Or is it an airborne condition passed on by midgies?

In the end we got back home in one piece. But I couldn’t help reflecting on the quinsy/whitlow phenomenon whereby horrid things have such innocent names — maybe there should be a word for the idea that something nasty sounds so nice — perhaps we could call it Sunny Delightism.

Out of season

It has been, as the week when children go back to school always is, quite gloriously sunny over the past few days. But the chill of an evening reminds us that we are firmly in autumn.

Traditionally we’ve assumed that Keats’s season of mists and mellow fruitfulness begins in September, but my experience inclines me to reset the clock. August was, as it has been for years now, wet and stormy, monsoonish and generally inclement. And an evening chill was discernible from halfway through the month.

It’s clear that autumn now starts in what we used to call high summer. Basically, from August 12 on. And just as autumn starts early so does summer, with May and June boasting the best weather. If my hunch is right, and this pattern holds, perhaps we should recast all our sporting and holiday plans, starting the cricket season earlier, for example.

The English summer is still a glorious thing. But, like so many of us, it’s not quite where it used to be.

A life to savour

Sometimes the best holiday reads are those you stuff in the suitcase at the last moment, not quite knowing why, as though your hand were being guided by Providence. So it was for me this year. I have no idea why I packed a biography of the misanthropic Welsh poet-priest R.S. Thomas, but I gave silent thanks to the divinity that shapes our ends that I did. The Man Who Went into the West, by Byron Rogers, is a quite wonderful, hilarious and moving book. It confirms my belief that the best biographies are never the massive monuments to Great Men that thrust themselves to the front of Waterstone’s window but intimate lives of flawed creatures who went against the grain and generated something special. The story of how the grit got into the oyster is what makes a life worth reading.

Michael Gove is Conservative MP for Surrey Heath

Times Recommends

• Britain doesn’t need a dose of shock therapy
• Why the sea eagle has no right to land here
• Let older women have a voice at the BBC