Some days the news values feel all wrong. A man stows away in the wheel arch of a Kenya Airways plane, freezes to death during the flight from Nairobi and, when the wheels are retracted, falls 3,500ft into someone’s back garden in south-west London.

You’d have thought the story here was who exactly was the stowaway – he is as yet unnamed – and why was he so desperate to escape Kenya that he embarked on a journey he must have known there was a high probability he wouldn’t survive. And yet the way the story was reported by most newspapers in the UK, the main issue was the distress caused to the person into whose garden the man had fallen. For it wasn’t just any garden. It was the garden of a house worth more than £2m and its owner, who had so thoughtlessly had his sunbathing interrupted, was an Oxford graduate. And as we all know, Oxford graduates are much more sensitive than other mortals and find it much harder to cope with having their paving slabs broken by a desperate man frozen into a block of ice.

The message to all other stowaways is clear: if you’re going to be inconsiderate enough to die in transit, at least have the grace to fall out over the Thames where there’s a chance your body may never be found. But failing that, fall out somewhere where house prices are lower and you’re less likely to disturb Oxford graduates.

I don't know why where you live should make a difference to how distressing it was for the bloke who had a dead body crash right next to him in his garden. What was he supposed to do, mutter 'oh deary me' and pour himself a stiff drink?