Let me tell you about a brilliant old-school vet called Jimmy - Julian Norton

“I like talking to the people,” he told me, the first time we met; I immediately liked him.

Anne and Isabella, my colleagues at Thirsk, had worked with him before, at a previous practice. When he heard we were setting up the practice he was quick to offer his time; his pragmatic and hard-working approach and years of experience fitting in perfectly with the way we try to do things.

He comes to help us at Thirsk Vet Centre during the summer holidays and has been particularly helpful due to various staff crises over recent months.

He’s a joy to work with and seems to love travelling to Thirsk, staying in a local hotel and filling in our veterinary gaps.

We go out for a pizza and a few drinks when he’s here if we can, but I’d really like to spend more time working with him.

On these social occasions, the chat always turns to “the old days”; things seemed very different back then. The ways of a vet were much more relaxed.

I bumped into him today, carrying a dog to the prep room in his arms, for an examination and blood tests, away from the worried owners.

“Are you ok?” I asked. “Yep. I just need a hand with this dog. He’s a bit of a rascal,” Jimmy explained.

He is most comfortable in the consult room but also adept in theatre, happily deferring to modern nurses when new-fangled things are required, accepting that veterinary practice has changed but not necessarily bearing grudges against modern methods.

Only in private do I hear phrases like, “it wasn’t like this in my day.” I can only smile and agree most of the time.

During a quiet moment one afternoon during his recent spell of help he perused the shelves, amusing himself by identifying the medications he had not heard of or seen before. They were some niche drugs, for sure.

One was called Ondansetron, an off-license drug used for dogs with intractable and undiagnosed vomiting.

Another was called Fluoxetine. Anne explained that this one was more commonly known as Prozac. It is used in some dogs for anxiety, although it’s a drug I – like Jimmy – have never prescribed.

Apparently, there are quite a lot of psychologically unbalanced canines around these days.

This afternoon, his final patient before heading back home for a long weekend was a whirling dervish of a terrier, who I had seen many times over the last few years. He’s a lovely dog, but impossible to examine or treat in any way.

Goodness knows, we’ve tried every option over the years, all to no avail. I spotted Jimmy through the window, sitting outside the practice on the bench, chatting in depth with the terrier’s owners, in a calm and relaxed way, obviously trying to get to the bottom of the dog’s behavioural issues.

Jimmy was going the extra mile. Not with blood tests or CT, MRI or specialists of any kind. He was talking- and more importantly listening- to the owners.

Vets like Jimmy are hard to find these days. Maybe they are a dying breed. It’s a shame.

Eventually, he’s sure to retire for good but, at the moment we are privileged to have him working with us and will keep him plied with coffee and custard creams for as long as we can.

The profession needs more Jimmys.