Some disgruntled world leader could press a shiny red button at any point and wipe out half the world’s population. And the people twenty miles underground will be the brightest and the richest. That’s who will be left. And maybe they’ll emerge from the ground having learned from the mistakes of man. Maybe they’ll screw up what we have left.

What they care about is preserving the top. Skimming the foam off the consommé so all that is left is clear. Pure.

The other way is to kick out the dross. Begone with the time-wasters and complainers. The moaners and the outraged. The ones who sit on that sofa and say how hard things are. Who cry because their girlfriend left them for somebody with a full-time job and the only friend they feel they can rely on is a dog. When the hardest thing they have to come to terms with is filling out the returns label for a pair of shoes they bought that pinched.

Daddy doesn’t love me.

Daddy loves me too much.

I lost another patient.

And the thing you hear the most is that nobody would even care if I weren’t here.

Take a gun and bite down on that barrel. Take every pill in the house and wash it down with every millilitre of vodka you can find. Don’t take six paracetamol then stick your fingers down your throat. Because that goes against what you have told your therapist. Find the tallest building you can, don’t jump off your second-floor balcony.

If you want to die, you can die. There are so many ways.

If you don’t really want to die, head over to the ERMA offices. We can help.

We have ropes and rucksacks.

You can’t pull the trigger, we will squeeze it.

Big enough to handle, small enough to care.

The US President might be able to squash Cambodia at the turn of a key but this takes focus. To take a specific set of people and erase them from the Earth. One by one. Nine by nine. Twenty at a time. It’s a commitment.

Two hundred and fifty-five people is nothing compared to the population of South Korea but it’s more than Shipman. And there’s nobody around to talk about that nuclear holocaust because they’re all gone. There’s no legacy to that.

This will live on.

The People of Choice live on.

And this is what you tell them: ‘When you get to the edge of the bridge, you just have to ask yourself one thing – do I really want to die?’ If you do, if you have been sitting in that wooden room pontificating over the intricacies of your existence because you truly believe that you should step away from it, you will click into reality. You will walk away. You can be helped.