You must have noticed the change. You used to be able to get a good night’s sleep in a British city centre, but these days you are woken from your dreams every five minutes by the siren of a passing ambulance. And figures out last week show this is no illusion. In London, the number of calls received by the ambulance service has rocketed from 3,000 to 4,000 a day. And in the West Midlands it’s a similar picture, with 8,000 calls being received last weekend - a 30% increase on the same weekend last year.

So what’s going on? Obviously some people need an ambulance in these troubled times because they’ve been stabbed or shot or they’ve ingested a bit too much ketamine and are walking round the garden whinnying.

There are many reasons why the number of calls has jumped so dramatically and so quickly and I’m sure the NHS will be having many meetings, with biscuits, to try to work out what they might be and what might be done to bring the situation under control. Doubtless, the Daily Mail will have a few ideas as well, probably to do with immigrants and Princess Diana. Or people attempting suicide because they’ve just read a story suggesting that cornflakes give you breast cancer.

Happily, I have been giving the matter serious thought as well and I’ve come up with some ideas of my own. One of the reasons more people need the services of an ambulance driver is because of politically motivated weather forecasting.

The Met Office, which claims to know what the weather will be like in a hundred years but cannot tell what it will do tomorrow morning, now seems to be incapable of saying what it was like yesterday either.

It announced last week that thanks to patio heaters and Top Gear, the past decade has been the warmest on record even though temperatures have been falling since 1995 and Britain has been suffering from the coldest start to winter for 30 years.

And because the weathermen tell us it’s warm outside and will get warmer still until we all burn in hell, people get dressed in a T-shirt and shorts and then die of hypothermia while scraping 6ft of sheet ice from the windscreen of what the Met Office calls a polar bear-killing, Arctic-melting, carbon-emitting, greenhouse-creating star-destroyer but you and I know as a Ford Fiesta. That said, I don’t blame the Met Office for all of the ambulance service’s woes.

No. I suspect the main reason there has been such a dramatic leap is that Britain is now fuller than ever of people who are technically stupid. In the olden days (ie, before last week), it was a big story when someone dialled 999 in hysterics because they’d broken a fingernail. But now it happens so often, it’s no longer news.

Just last night in my local supermarket a woman became so hysterical about a hair she’d found on the outside of a packet of bacon that she called the police. Had I been armed, I’m fairly sure I’d have shot her in the back of the head. Certainly, I thought quite seriously about clubbing her to death with my shopping basket.

And this is just the tip of the iceberg. In the West Country a woman called for an ambulance because her television remote control was out of reach. Then there was the young man who reckoned he needed emergency care because he’d sniffed some deodorant by accident. And on the very day the ambulance service made its announcement, it had a call from a 22-year-old woman who’d squeezed a blackhead and it wouldn’t stop bleeding.

One pensioner told an ambulance crew she’d summoned to wait for 40 minutes because she was baking a cake. The crew gave her a stern warning about wasting their time and left, but the warning plainly wasn’t physical enough because exactly 40 minutes later the daft old bat told a second crew that her cake had risen nicely and she was ready to go to hospital.

The stories are endless. The people with shampoo in their eyes. The people who think they’ve caught a virus from their computer. The people whose brains are so tiny and so ineffectual that they cannot determine what is a nuisance and what is an amputation.

From an early age, I’ve told my children that they may come rushing into the house wailing only if they can actually see bone poking out of their skin but, plainly, other parents are not so wise. Even when their child has nothing but a minor flesh wound, they mollycoddle it so that they end up rearing a pathetic imbecile.

So, now that we have uncovered the problem, we must decide what to do. Many would call for better education but this is expensive, it won’t make an impact for 15 years at least and I can hardly see where it would fit in the curriculum now that children have to spend so much time learning how to have oral sex and why the Range Rover is boiling Johnny polar bear.

I have therefore decided that the carrot-and-stick approach is best. Only without the carrot. This works for dogs and so I see no reason why it should not work for life forms that have less intelligence, such as northerners.

In short, ambulance crews summoned to the assistance of someone whose head is still attached to the body and who does not have gangrene or Ebola should be allowed, if they see fit, to burn the person’s house down. Or, if they are kindly souls, to take an item that has roughly the same value as the call-out, so that it can be sold by the NHS on eBay.

In the meantime, perhaps the Met Office would be good enough to consult its supercomputer for the weather forecast instead of telling us what Jonathon Porritt thinks.

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