Great Uncle Fred? Mum and Dad and I were watching a documentary about the attacks of September 11th 2001 on America. We were all fascinated. I had a million questions I wanted to ask you. But Mum was going on and on about the relatives of the people who got killed and this meant that I could only think of one question. This is it: who was the saddest person in the world that Tuesday? (Jack, Autumn 2007)

As everyone knows, including you, when it comes to sadness, you can’t get sadder than sad. Sadness is not something that people get competitive about. However, of all the sadness that there was in the world by the end of Tuesday September 11th 2001, it is not surprising that the sadness felt by those who suffered in the attacks on the U.S.A. was getting the most attention. If you include the 19 desperate young men who perpetrated the terrible acts, 3,016 people died when those aeroplanes were made to crash, including eight children between the ages of two and eleven. This was one of the most significant events in recent history and the sadness of those bereaved would have been hard indeed to bear anyway but, with the whole world watching, what acute and unendurable pain the shocking news must have brought. But, and this is not to diminish that sadness by one speck, those 2,997 innocent lives lost, will have made hardly any difference to the size of the great wave of tears which washed over the world that day, which washes over the world every single day. A statistician of the future, with only the figures to look at, would hardly notice a blip. In the course of 2001, worldwide, over 56,000,000 people died, at the rate of more than 150,000 a day. Well, one says, `more than 150,000 a day`, to keep things neat and simple: the more accurate approximate figure would be 153,424, but when one is considering such an incomprehensible multitude, who minds a few thousand here or there? Of those millions, 10,600,000 were children, dying at the rate of some 29,000 a day, nearly all of them in poor countries and more than half of them from five preventable or treatable conditions (respiratory infections, measles, diarrhoea, malaria and HIV/AIDS). Obviously, at least some of those children, in Malawi or Bangladesh or Chad or Zimbabwe or Sudan, had mothers whose sadness that day could not, either, be surpassed. You can’t get sadder than sad.

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