… but unfortunately you only die once which is a shame because according to what I see in the newspapers I should be dying of something different every single day and I don’t even read the Daily Mail.  What a bitter blow it will be to science when I succumb to only one cause.

The brighter amongst you will have deduced that the target for this week’s wrath are scientists and to a lesser, but still meaningful extent,  the media that give them the oxygen of publicity.  Obviously all journalists are terminally idle or they would have proper jobs but even they shouldn’t stoop to filling their empty pages with alarmist nonsense gleaned from people in leather-patched jackets and ‘amusing’ kipper ties who should be put firmly back in the laboratory cupboard.  (Except on particularly slow days in, say,  August.  I’m not entirely without feelings.)

They are crying wolf and anyone who has read about the boy who did that knows that in fairly short order people will stop believing anything they say.  After all, and I am going to be a bit stern here, you test tube folk  have been wrong before.

Was it only weeks ago that we were told not to drink more than two glasses of alcohol a day?  Then we were told as a fact to drink as much red wine as we could force down,  (Hardly a challenge but one particular piece of advice that I did choose to follow.) followed practically the next day by a statement that every single glass of wine will shorten you life by months, possibly years.

Readers, this is nonsense.  Complete and utter piffle.  Fake news and, drum roll please, I can prove it.  Yesterday I had lunch with 14 lovely ladies all of whom had worked for many years for a well known news organisation and drunk like the proverbial fishes.  And were they dead?  No, members of the jury, they were not.  Not even one of them.  The oldest amongst us was approaching 80 and if, God forbid, she had dropped dead at the table it could hardly have been labelled a tragically premature passing.  If there was the smallest grain of truth in what Dr Doom was saying we would all have shuffled off at age 14.  Or something.  Maths, like so much else, is not my forte.

So in the interests of accuracy, another new line for me, I want you to take part in an experiment.  Everyone is to consume at least one alcoholic beverage a day for the next week, and let us just see how many have died by the end of it.  I venture the answer will be none.  Now where’s my Nobel prize?  And drink?