Lay out the entrails, read omens and auguries, study the heavens, shake your hoary locks like an ancient seer. Signs and portents bring us messages, and we should heed them ere civilisation crumbles.

Off Hope Cove, on the Devon coast, a crew of strong, experienced men has saved a girl's life with minutes to spare, only to find itself “disciplined” because the only boat available was classified as an “additional facility awaiting inspection”. Earlier and farther inland, see two more strong men standing helpless in their luminous Police Community Support uniforms, wittering into radios because they lacked the correct certificates to try to rescue a drowning boy.

Elsewhere, a coastguard resigned after saving a 13-year-old danging from a cliff. He failed to fetch and buckle on his own safety harness, and immediately found himself in trouble from bosses droning that they “don't want dead heroes”.

Meanwhile a thousand small habitual practices - from cake stalls to carpentry classes - find themselves under heavy reproof and restraint. And in a hospital ward somewhere a dying, frail old man repeatedly falls out of bed because nurses reckon that they can't put up his cot sides without a “risk assessment”, in case they breach his “human rights” and “unlawfully imprison” him.