Like much else in life, it’s a trade off.

Decide you would rather wake to a view of Loch Long than the block of flats across the road, and you forego much of what makes city living convenient.

You can’t pop across the road to a large-scale food hall or round the corner to a clutch of bars and restaurants. You can’t walk to the theatre or the cinema. And, not at all incidentally, you aren’t within a mile or two of the nearest hospital.

But you take that on board as you calculate the myriad plusses and undoubted minuses of living in a country village instead of Scotland’s largest town. And what you might factor into the equation is the nearest hospital, with an out-of-hours GP service, being just half-an-hour distant.

The threat to that Vale of Leven service has brought hundreds of folks out to local meetings in the last fortnight. And that almost certainly doesn’t include people who are equally concerned but don’t live in the immediate vicinity of the meetings in question.

The problem with salami slicing facilities in any hospital is that there comes a point when it’s difficult to argue for the viability of its core functions.

Now it’s true that it’s difficult to persuade people centres of excellence, in various medical disciplines, make more sense in terms of patient outcomes, as well as using limited resources intelligently.

I get that. If you have a head injury, you want specialist care at the QEUH, rather than a local generalist. And in a country like Scotland it’s plainly unrealistic to have a hospital in every locality. as folks might ideally like.

But the out-of-hours GP service is different. It matters because of simple geography. It matters because in areas like my own neck of the woods the alternative to the Vale is an 80-mile round trip to Paisley provided you (a) have a car and (b) are well enough to drive it.

Few local GP centres offer out-of-hours services these days, and some medical centres, like Garelochhead, don’t even have regular hours GPs available right now.

So it’s a matter of having basic reasonably local access for emergencies, as all people will not get ill or have accidents in a neat time slot between 8am and 7pm.