Increasingly, the narrator makes connections between the major news stories: Heather Mills McCartney appears on GMTV and compares herself to Kate McCann; Paul and Linda McCartney used to holiday in Praia de Luz, where Madeleine was snatched, and so on. These connections have the ring of paranoid conspiracy theory. But they go nowhere. And that’s the point — they are as unreal, as fictive, as the feeling that the summer is filled with a sense of loss. And the source of all this fiction is the news, bringing a new meaning to the old cliché: don’t believe everything you read in the papers.

But occasionally, and movingly, Burn stumbles upon reality. He finds Margaret Thatcher walking in Battersea Park, instinctively replacing the strap of a symbolic handbag that is no longer on her arm. And he visits Sedgefield, a community groping its way back to normality after the circus of the Blair years. These are people and places that the media is finished with. They may no longer be newsworthy, but in return they get to be real.

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