At the Centre for Rare Diseases, the car park was full and lots of people were milling about.

I pulled into a private space I wasn’t meant to be in so that I could let my mother out of the car by the front door. I then sat in the car waiting, watching the rare people come and go.

On further inspection of the website, it turns out that a rare disease is not necessarily something that happens rarely. A rare disease is a condition affecting less than one in 2,000 people. However, ‘with more than 7,000 individual rare diseases, their collective prevalence is about one in 17 of the general population’. So not rare at all, in terms of how likely it is that you are going to get one. They really ought to put rare in inverted commas.

Some may condemn
conspiracy theory, but I call it conspiracy therapy

Nothing rare, or ‘rare’, has ever happened to anyone in my family before, so far as I know. But if rare things are getting more common, I should not be so surprised when they find a tumour in my mother’s neck called a hypoglossal schwannoma, a cranial base neoplasm arising from the so-called Schwann cells of the 12th cranial nerve.

When you look at the latest NHS figures, the column marked ‘neoplasms’ goes to the top of the chart in 2021-4. So if I look at it in that context, what she has is not rare at all.

Any particular neoplasm might be rare, but if neoplasms are growing in incidence, then I suppose it’s fair to assume that the likelihood you’ll get a rare one has increased.

Furthermore, if it’s getting to the point of illness being the average, then perhaps I should only be averagely upset about it. But I’m not. I’m one of those people imagining all sorts of lurid possibilities and becoming entirely paranoid.

Some may condemn conspiracy theory, but I call it conspiracy therapy. In the absence of mainstream debate, hypochondriacs like me are inevitably driven to niche websites. We’ve no one else to talk to.

On these sites, I can find like-minded individuals who feel the same sense of disorientation as world events become too much. Together, we wind each other up even more, I’m sure. What is undoubtedly the case is that once you start noticing anomalies, you notice more and more.

Added to which the way things are being presented to us is changing, so perhaps that is another reason which explains why compulsive worriers like me feel so disorientated. I wish they wouldn’t do this. If things are bad, let the facts come out plainly. When you try to manage them, it just makes fearful people go doolally.

Recently, the Office for National Statistics announced it had changed the way it calculates excess deaths, so whereas before it looked like there were quite a few more in recent years, now there are fewer, because they’re using a new page full of quadratic equations as the formula to work it out more accurately, they say. A rise became a fall. A change in methodology is what they call it. And it is meant to be comforting, I think.

Turns out all it took to make people less likely to die was to be a bit more astute with the calculus, which many will indeed find reassuring, but I don’t. It’s freaking me out.

And then you have these new NHS figures which show all the neoplasms shooting off the end of the charts and, despite the fact the data was given to MPs last week, only one is making a fuss about it, and he’s being denounced for some reason that seems inexplicable to me.

This MP has been raising the issues I’m most worried about, but instead of being congratulated, he’s been absolutely trashed all over the place. Right, I thought, it’s best I just have a break and forget about all this.

I went out for Sunday lunch with a neighbour and we were halfway down the road in her car when she pulled up to talk to another local, who was hobbling on a stick. ‘What’s the matter with you?’ this forthright Irish woman shouted out of her window. He didn’t speak but his son, walking with him, said: ‘He’s had a stroke.’

We drove on. At the restaurant we parked in a disabled space and my friend struggled out of the car on her crutches because she’s waiting for a hip replacement. A blind man in dark glasses walked in front of us and she teetered on one leg to let him pass. Inside, the walking wounded were hobbling up to the carvery. Every child seemed to be coughing and spluttering in my direction. It was meant to be a day out to take my mind off things. But it was a hypochondriac’s worse nightmare.