Hadiza Atunse, a 25-year-old PA, smashed her Toyota Auris into a Mini Cooper, spun out of control and flipped into a hedgerow in Wilmslow, near Manchester. When the coppers turned up, she declined to partake in a breathalyser and the police, mysteriously, did not give her a tongue swab to determine drug use. I say ‘mysteriously’ because the young lady was also found with a large bag of coke in her car.

 Later it was discovered that she was driving without insurance. Yet Ms Atunse copped only a £730 fine because the judge seems to have accepted the defence’s argument that she had been suffering from ‘excited delirium syndrome’, which, coincidentally, is what afflicts me in the moments before Bargain Hunt comes on the TV. I run backwards and forwards between the kitchen and the lounge, preparing my Bargain Hunt snack of a mug of tea and two Petit-Beurre biscuits and, wrapped in a pre-show exhilaration, wonder to myself, will one of the experts be the lovely Izzie Balmer, or will it be Danny Sebastian with his grating histrionics? Will the contestants win a Golden Gavel?

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It had never occurred to me that my excited delirium might be dignified by the suffix of ‘syndrome’ or that in the future I might be able to use it to mitigate – or perhaps entirely excuse – some appalling crime I might commit. This condition, medically, involves hyperthermia, excessive sweating, superhuman physical........

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