The next six months will be busy as we run up to the General Election and I work on a super-busy rail portfolio alongside my local priorities. One of these has been to get more services back into Savernake Hospital where the operation was senselessly hollowed out under the last government.

I was therefore delighted that the plan to locate the Prospect Hospice outpatient centre at Savernake has finally come to fruition. The hospice’s community-based specialist nurse for Marlborough and the surrounding villages will also work from the new setting.

To fully develop these services will require £75,000 of additional fundraising and I am going to personally commit to raising money towards that total in the next 12 months.

Some more good news items were in my Parliamentary inbox this week and I thought it would be helpful to highlight some of the most interesting – like many pieces of good news, they often don’t get reported! First, a record number of children have found loving adoptive families in the last 12 months, with the total up 26 per cent on the previous year to 5,050.

It’s only a small number but one that is profoundly important as many local families who were previously caught up in the Kafkaesque world of adoption bureaucracy while the children they were desperate to adopt languished in the official system will appreciate.

By making some key common sense adjustments like no longer prioritising ethnicity in applications, working with adoptive parents in a supportive manner, and extending the pupil premium and school admissions priority to adopted children, we are seeing thousands more children getting the family love, stability and support they so desperately need.

Second, as well as making cooking lessons compulsory for children aged seven to 14 with the aim of ensuring that they can make up to 20 dishes before taking their GCSE exams, we are also reintroducing a rigorous cooking and nutrition GCSE.

My cookery O-level is still my most-used qualification and I still remember the techniques drummed into me by Mrs Hale of Nailsea School who ruled our test kitchens with a will of iron. Rough-puff pastry holds no fear for me and as I made plum jam from the garden windfalls last weekend she would be be pleased to know that I still remember how to do the crinkle test for a set.