Actually, I do mind if you join me!

Which question from a stranger is guaranteed to make your heart sink? There’s plenty of competition. For me, ‘Would you mind stepping out of the car, sir?’ ranks pretty high, and so does any question beginning with the words, ‘can i interest you in . . .?’ But the one i dread most is, ‘ Mind if we join you?’

Up to now, it has been a question confined to public spaces. in crowded cafes or canteens, strangers spot three or four empty chairs around a table and home in with the words, ‘Mind if we join you?’ it is one of those questions expecting the answer ‘no’.

At a party, drunken revellers, having bored everyone else in the room, including themselves, say, ‘Mind if we join you?’ and plump themselves down before their poor victim has a chance to protest that, actually, i’m terribly sorry, the empty chair is already taken by my old friend, Mr Nobody.

Slowly but surely, over the past few decades the world has grown more chummy. We have been led to believe that nothing is worth doing if it is not done in company. At work, offices are open-plan. in the home, walls have been knocked down to make larger, more friendly living spaces. isolation is the great taboo. in church, congregations are nudged out of solitary worship and encouraged to offer each other the sign of peace.

Matiness is all. Fewer and fewer clothes shops have individual changing-rooms. Sports clubs and ‘leisure centres’ no longer offer the timid and the paranoid a place to change by themselves, away from prying eyes. Even the act of reading has become a group activity, leading to a boom in book clubs and literary festivals.

Now it looks as though the GP’s consulting room, once so private and personal, is set to turn into a hive of group activity. Most of us dread a doctor in hospital saying, ‘Would you mind if we were joined by a student?’ But now there is news of people being asked to share their appointments with up to 14 other patients.

A GP who runs one of these group sessions, Dr Emily Symington, says: ‘if we are going to start to address the tide of lifestyle conditions and long-term conditions, we need to start thinking about how we do things differently. Group consultations have started to address that. it is putting people in control.’

Alison Manson, who leads the national training for group consultations, says: ‘it’s a different way of consulting with patients — a one-to- one clinical consultation delivered in a supportive peergroup setting.’

Unfortunately, their wellintentioned words of reassurance — ‘a supportive peer-group setting’, ‘putting people in control’, and so on — serve only to send shivers down the spine.

Personally, i’d much rather the doctor was in control than the people. Even Michael Gove, with his famous suspicion of experts, is unlikely to favour the opinion of a fellow patient above that of his own GP.

Likewise, the ‘supportive peergroup settings’ are meant to be a haven for those suffering from obesity or chilblains or erectile dysfunction, but the nervy patient will worry that they are more of a go-to event for the nosy-parker and the blabbermouth. ‘Mind if i join you?’ if an individual were to put his head around the door and ask this question as your GP was taking a closer look at, say, a pimple on your bottom, then most of us would feel a sense of intrusion.

ONThE other hand, if 14 people were to put their heads around the door, all at the same time, saying ‘Mind if i join you?’ then — abracadabra! — we are meant to believe that the scene would be magically transformed into ‘a onetoone clinical consultation delivered in a supportive peergroup setting’.

Will dentists follow suit? At the moment, privacy is one of the few consolations for pain. But what if, just as you were opening your mouth to say ‘Arrrr!’, you were to look left and right, only to spot a row of 13 other patients all opening their mouths and saying: ‘Arrrr!’?

And what about the poor dentist? Will she have to say, ‘ Doing anything nice this christmas?’ 14 times over, to each different patient, along with 14 separate injunctions to ‘Now wash your mouth out’ and 14 separate reminders to floss?

There is only one solution, though it may be hard for the British, who are brought up to be obliging. When we hear the question ‘Mind if we join you?’, we must learn to reply with another: ‘Mind if i say no?’