Remember when we all thought 2016 was bad?

Hardly a day goes by at the moment without something else happening to shock, dismay and bewilder most right-thinking people on the planet.

Every time that ‘breaking news’ strapline pops up on my Twitter feed or news homepage, my heart sinks as I think, what now?

Last year, we held our breath in fear that it heralded the death of yet another much-loved celebrity. This year, it’s much, much worse.

It’s hard to find the positives against a depressing backdrop of wall-building, rights-squashing behaviour. But buried in the avalanche of horrible stuff this week I have discovered two fairly amazing things.

Firstly, that there is such a thing as a Global Seed Vault.

And secondly, that Scottish tatties are going to be the first UK deposit in it.

This is one of those stories that makes you want to hug a scientist. I love the fact that Scotland’s James Hutton Institute, with support from the Scottish Government, is in charge of something called the Commonwealth Potato Collection, an invaluable repository of potato genetic material, would you believe.

From this collection, the Invergowrie-based institution is the first in the UK to contribute to the Global Seed Vault, a mysterious facility buried deep inside a sandstone mountain on an island, halfway between Norway and the North Pole. Seriously, could it get any more James Bond?

This thrilling place, located as far north as you can possibly fly on a scheduled flight, provides permafrost and thick rock to ensure that seed samples can remain frozen, even without power.

There are genebanks around the world, storing seed samples from world crops, but experts were worried about their vulnerability. So the Global Seed Vault was set up to store duplicates of millions of seeds, representing every important crop variety available in the world today.

It is, as its website announces ominously, the ultimate insurance policy for the world’s food supply. It’s the final, final back-up.

And this week, the Scottish potato is on its way there, with some help from Scotland’s Environment Secretary Roseanna Cunningham and the CPC.

The CPC was established in the 1930s by a bunch of forward-thinking British botanists and collectors who wanted to safeguard the humble potato for the future.

Potatoes? Under threat? Pandas, perhaps - but potatoes?

Apparently, though, despite being the world’s third-most consumed food, feeding more than a billion people every day, the potato is facing challenges from climate change, diseases such as potato blight, plus land-use changes and modern agricultural methods.

Many potato varieties have been lost in recent decades.

So that’s why the Scottish spud is on its way to Norway, to what describes itself as “a fail-safe seed storage facility built to stand the test of time and protect invaluable genetic resources from possible future catastrophic global events.”

In the current climate, that’s probably a very good idea.