Relax. What you are doing now is perfectly safe, even if you have just woken up. This leading article will stimulate and even amuse in the normal way, but it will not require of the reader any driving, unicycling, co-ordinating of atmospheric re-entry, administering of drugs or stirring of delicate truffle sauces. If it did, it would, as part of a morning paper, constitute gross and possibly actionable irresponsibility.

For we now know that for ten minutes each morning we are a danger to ourselves and others. There may be nothing more really refreshing than a “good” night’s sleep, but, according to the leading sleepologists, exiting sleep brings on a lethal grogginess.

Apparently, even 24 hours’ raw sleep deprivation doesn’t produce the witlessness brought on by eight hours in Nod. Nor, in most subjects, does heavy drinking. The period of “sleep inertia”, that dreadful pyjama’d limbo when the spirit knows what the flesh still refuses formally to acknowledge, beats both conditions for its impact on the prefrontal cortex’s ability to perform basic arithmetic with randomly generated pairs of two-digit numbers.

The test may not seem that relevant. (Why weren’t subjects simply invited to perform a standard simultaneous toast-pop and tea gargle, or to comment for the Today programme on an old Iraq weapons dossier?) But the implications are still clear. An addendum to the respect agenda will have to be printed granting the right to be sullen and incompetent for ten minutes each morning. The law on shoplifting will have to be rewritten to pre-empt sleep inertia defences. And, to co-ordinate the joined-up Whitehall response, we’ll need a Ten-Minute Czar.