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Seldom have I heard such a positive interview. "Delighted... The good news... wonderful news... we want to focus on the good... sing hallelujah... we need to look at the good here." All in barely five minutes' air time. Though the event which prompted it seems very different. Natasha Ednan-Laperouse should now be eighteen. Three years ago she begged, "Daddy, help me," as she struggled to breathe. "Tashi," her mother urged over the telephone. "I love you so much, darling. I'll be with you soon. I'll be with you." Instead, her father told his wife to say goodbye; urgently; anything; their daughter was already dying. An almost unimaginable adieu. Many of us live with some kind of allergy. Last Sunday, out in the garden, a bee got caught in my hair, my face swelled horribly and my chest constricted. An epipen and a lot of patience eventually reduced the symptoms, though the paramedics kept warning me it was still possible I could die. Natasha read the sandwich label carefully. But the crucial ingredient, sesame, wasn't listed. Now her parents have closed the legal loophole which killed her. So two million people - and many, many children, her father insisted - will be far safer than they were... before Natasha's tragic and unnecessary death. Her extraordinary parents turning personal loss to public gain. All my life my mother taught me to look for the bright side, the benefit, the blessing through any disaster. Everything, she often quoted, works together for good, for those who love God. I'm not nearly as clever as she was, perhaps the happiest person I've ever known, but her example lives on, always looking for the sliver lining to stormy clouds. Our daughter has a very severe illness: I passionately believe her suffering should one day help her to help others. Our son has Asperger syndrome: his personal challenges giving him incisive objectivity, an uncanny sympathy with computers and crucial insights which have enabled me to write two of my novels. My optimism has always faltered, though, at a child's death. What could possibly redeem such loss? And yet here are Mr and Mrs Ednan-Laperouse, announcing, quotes, "fantastic news". When we were first married we were lent, free, a smart Kensington flat by a generous friend of my brother's. Shortly after our first child was born, our benefactor lost his. I couldn't imagine surviving such pain. And yet he says God called him, through his own terrible grief, to serve others by serving the church... so that now he has become an extraordinarily godly and caring leader. The sovereign oversight of God turning tragedy into legacy: the indomitable human denying death the last word. We might not have inherited some of Shakespeare's work - Sonnet thirty-three, for instance; also, perhaps, his best known play - without the loss of his only son Hamnet. Nothing can make the death of a child good. But through it, much good can come... as even God Himself knew. Our mantra, Mr Ednan-Laperouse said, was to bring the light on what is in the dark. To bring light onto a dark spot. The truth is out there. The light is shining on it...