Well good afternoon everybody.  Yes.  This is not a pre retirement do by the way, this is a real thing and I have been told I’ve got to keep my chimp in the back, whatever that means.  But you’ll be able to judge how successful I am as we go through all of this.  Well it’s great to be here, great to see you all, great to meet people round the confederation conference.

I have been reflecting when I normally make these speeches about the past year and heavens above what a year it has been hasn’t it in all sorts of ways, both for the NHS and I guess for me personally but I’ll come on to that in a while.

I feel I have got a lot to say, I have got a lot of things I want to do over the next period so I am certainly not in pre-retirement mode I am going to talk to you this afternoon about some of the things I think we all need to do over the next period, important things I think that we can get on with and that I can get on with in my organisation but just to say a little bit first of all about the decision I took to retire and indeed it was the timing of that which has been some speculation, I know, but the timing of it was absolutely driven by this conference.