I know I moan a lot. It's one of the 'Yellow Card' symptoms of working in the NHS - not enough resources, too much in the way of demand, daft governmental interference, management who apparently have no idea what they are doing...

But, like many of us, I don't look at the good things - the things that floated on down from the future and snuck up on us.

I'm not talking about robots, space travel or meals in a pill - I'm talking about the future that has, like the water that is slowly boiling the frog, crept up on us so that we don't think it's the future any more.

I'm sitting at my desk playing World of Warcraft - I can play with potentially 10 million people. The music on my home server is reminding me of the 80's where such a thing would be impossible to imagine.

I blue light a patient to the angioplasty lab - when I started nursing the treatment for heart attacks was minimal - now we can pretty much cure them as they happen.

The reasons behind heart attacks - let's take some pills to mitigate some of the bigger causes.

The internet.

THE INTERNET

Seriously, I can talk to people from across the globe, i can collaborate with them, I can play games with them. Surely it's a measurement of triviality that I can play games with someone on another continent in real time.

Cars are safer, I can buy a TV rather than rent it - and it doesn't need repairing every year.

I can fit a library in my pocket. Seriously - an entire library.

With 3G networks I can talk to people while I'm on the move - who here remembers the first mobile phones? They were a status symbol, now they are something that ten year olds have,

If I can think of a bit of music I can stream it, or download it. How about a movie?

I don't have to wait for the 6pm news to come on after Newsround - I have news 24 hours a day.

Sure, it's not perfect, people are still dying in silly wars predicated on religion or greed - but less people have died in wars this year than any previous year - and that number is falling every year.

We haven't died in a cold war exchange.

People die, people are discriminated against, people are killed in pointless wars, people die because they don't have clean water, or midwives, or accessible, affordable medicine.

But taking all that into account, it's not a bad future - it's certainly better than the one I expected when I was twelve years old.