Normally I don’t watch the news. It’s either really boring, about things I don’t understand, like politics and interest rates and the Eurozone, or it’s full of horrible, scary stories about people getting bashed, beaten, brutalized, butchered or blown up.

I mean, frankly I don’t know why they put it on. They’re either mad or they think everyone else is mad. No one but a psychopath could enjoy it. And it’s not just once a week, like most programmes, but every single day. Several times a day in fact. The whole thing’s insane.

But what I’m leading up to is that on this particular day I did settle down on the sofa at six o’clock with a Coke and a slice of pizza and, just for a change, switched on the news. I knew no crimes would have been committed now that everyone was nice, so I was curious to see what they’d fill the programme with.

The newsreader, an Asian guy with a pink tie with purple swirls on it, was all happy and smiley. ‘Today’s extraordinary story, which is being confirmed from all around the world, is that, for the first time in human history, a day has passed on which nobody seems to have died, anywhere on the globe. Not one death has been recorded in the last twenty-four hours in any hospital in the United Kingdom. The story is the same throughout the European Union, and other countries are confirming the same remarkable phenomenon. Angela Crudgington reports.’

Cut to a woman with a mike, standing outside a big hospital with a stationary fleet of ambulances in the background. The wind whipped her blonde hair about her face. Another Asian guy in a white coat with a stethoscope around his neck was standing beside her. ‘I’m at Whipps Cross, the largest hospital in East London, with a patient population of some three thousand people and many times that number of outpatients, as well as a busy A&E department which sees around two hundred patients a day. In a normal twenty-four-hour period, doctors say the hospital would expect to lose two or three patients. But no one has died since yesterday. A freak statistic – or evidence of something far more mysterious?

‘I have with me the very charming, intelligent and handsome Dr Wickramasinghe – he really is a great guy, there’s no question about that.’ She pushed the mike under the doctor’s nose. ‘Dr Wickramasinghe – how do you account for this?’