Clive James once wrote about how he agonised over getting metaphors right. His efforts certainly, to use a clichéd metaphor, bore fruit. One of Dr No’s favourites describes Demis Roussos. ‘His stage manner reflects the opulence of his domicile. There is an immense reserve of inner warmth, as in a compost heap.’ Then there is the near perfect description of Barbara Cartland. ‘Twin miracles of mascara, her eyes looked like the corpses of two small crows that had crashed into a chalk cliff.’ Neither are kindly, but it is not the TV critic’s job to be kindly, but to observe, and in the writing add something, and James’s writing is perfectly larded through and through with metaphors that add richness and flavour, like the marbling in a fine piece of beef.

Competent enough when reading out Google finance reports, Radio 4’s Simon Jack falls apart when loaded with a ministerial interview. Even with the bar set as low as it is these days on the Today programme, and the minister for jabs having all the appeal of a lump of blu tack stuck on the seat of your pants, Jack approached the interview like a teenager rugby tackling a brick wall, only to crumple through lack of preparation. Attempting to ask why individuals with learning disabilities weren’t being prioritised for vaccination, given their high covid mortality rate, it soon became apparent that the interview was to be as illuminating as mountain of Welsh coal slag. Click. The sound of silence filled Dr No’s kitchen.

Covid! The very word is like a bell, to toll me back from my sole self to thee! Dr No continues to wonder about covid entries on death certificates, and how and why these entries do or don’t end up in ONS’s weekly counts of covid deaths. Unlike the pin-ball wizardry of counting every single death within twenty eight days of a positive covid PCR test as a covid death — an indiscriminate and robotic definition — one hopes, rather forlornly, that a modicum of medical effort on the part of the doctor completing the medical certificate of cause of death, or MCCD, followed by sensible coding of underlying cause of death by ONS, might give confidence that when we sidestep Donne and send to know for whom the bell tolls, then at least the count of tolls for covid are reasonably accurate. But are they?

Dr No is surprised. Today’s ONS England and Wales weekly mortality report does not show the fall in deaths he confidently predicted in his last post. The rate of increase has certainly slowed, but there is no gainsaying the fact that the total number of deaths registered in England and Wales in week 2, 2021 has gone up compared to week 1, 2021. Wales did in fact show a slight fall of 28 deaths, but England’s 318 extra deaths meant an overall rise. This is against a backdrop of both Scotland and Northern Ireland reporting recent falls in the number of weekly deaths. Nonetheless, England and Wales, or rather England, deaths did rise, and a rise is not a fall. Is part or all of Dr No’s hat destined for the slow cooker?

Our government, and its PR machine, the mainstream media, have got the covid death caldron nicely on the boil. “Double, double toil and trouble; Fire, burn; and, caldron,  bubble… Eye of newt, and toe of frog, Wool of bat, and tongue of dog…Like a hell-broth boil and bubble.” At first glance, the recent daily covid death counts are alarming, but are the reported covid counts real? Is there a worrying excess in all deaths, or just a normal seasonal rise? The answers to these question are most readily found by looking at all cause mortality. Although all cause mortality is coarse grained — in truth it has no grain, it is just a single count of all deaths — it nonetheless has one cardinal virtue that comes about precisely because it doesn’t try to be too clever, it is robust. The diagnosis of death is rarely got wrong, and the UK has a reliable system of death registration. We know how many people have died overall, and when and where they died.