OH, the aches of age. My intermittent twinges include my left elbow and my right foot. Oh, and that nasty rash I get whenever Saturday Live comes on BBC Radio 4.

I used to love that programme, especially under John Peel’s tenure all those years ago. But now it’s become a self-congratulatory racket. The Reverend Richard Cole (no relation) is all right up to a point, but that point was about two years ago. Now he’s everywhere, although presumably not much in the pulpit. Still, at least he isn’t Shaun Keaveny, who sometimes acts as a stand-in: he irritates me about as much as Aasmah Mir, who often brings her cackle into the studio with the media rev.

And, as they stay, don’t get me started on all those assorted millennial-slop columns and features in the newspapers. Their twittered silliness does make me feel old.

One thing about getting on a bit is that you are meant to become more right-wing in your politics. An article in Psychology Today from 2014 offered the following explanation: “A review of 92 scientific studies shows that intellectual curiosity tends to decline in old age, and that this decline explains age-related increases in conservatism.”

I won’t add “age-related conservatism” to my list of minor aches. My politics haven’t changed that much. Started out left-wing and stuck that way – that’s my stab at a personal manifesto.

I guess the political landscape has moved around me, reshaped by the shudder of events. Those dipped more deeply in the left-wing pool probably see me as a right-wing Blairite or some other Twitter-bandied insult.

Well, sticks and stones and tweets, and all that. Watching everything unfold, sometimes I feel like a red-eyed observer on the shuttle bus to oblivion.

Looking out of the windows, you see Labour busy in-fighting over whether it’s an antisemitic party or not, and whose fault that might be. And all the while a terrible government of warring Tories squabbles and slides towards the cliff-edge chaos of Brexit – unopposed by Labour, which is too busy arguing with itself.

To taste the bitter flow of modern Labour politics you only have run your eye over Twitter. At the time of writing/bashing out, tweets were addressing the news that Labour had dropped its investigation into MP Dame Margaret Hodge over a confrontation she had with Jeremy Corbyn after allegedly shouting at him over antisemitism.

Here are some typical charmers…

“Has Margaret Hodge called Boris Johnson a fucking racist yet? Or is she too busy posting passive/aggressive smug crap?”

“When you have got Tory sympathisers like Tom Watson, John Mann and Margaret Hodge and other MPs who curse the ground on which JC walks makes a mockery of the electorate who overwhelmingly voted for JC to be their leader. My advice ‘Vote wisely in the next GE’ Blairites must go!!!”

“Keep the faith Corbyn supporters. Had the vile @margarethodge been sacked, she’d have been seen as a martyr and got even more publicity. It’s hard, but let’s focus on the end game.”

And Labour’s deputy leader, Tom Watson, received bucketloads of abuse for saying that his party risked disappearing “into a vortex of eternal shame and embarrassment” in this deepening row over antisemitism.

Here is just one charmer…

“Fuck me, @tom_watson and a handful of his chums have spent every day since Jeremy Corbyn’s election trying to get him to resign, but as soon as ordinary people suggest #ResignWatson, he’s “being bullied”. Grow up and #ResignTomWatson”

It’s all enough to make you want to find something annoying on the radio to listen to. Is it time for Woman’s Hour yet?

IF the Windrush scandal made me embarrassed to be British, then the follow-up story about efforts to deport a nine-year-old chess prodigy adds another smear of shame.

Shreyas Royal is described as the “greatest chess talent in a generation”. He has lived in Britain since he was three years old but has been told he must return to India, as his father’s work visa is about to expire.

His parents, Jitendra and Anju Singh, moved to south-east London in 2012, and have been staying under a tier 2 long-term work permit. “The only way Shreyas’s father would be eligible to review his visa would be to earn more than £120,000 a year,” according to reports in the Guardian and elsewhere.

The couple foolishly thought that having a potential chess genius for a son might grant them some leeway. Oh, how little they appreciate the cold contours of British bureaucracy.

Writing on the couple’s behalf, Dominic Lawson, of the English Chess Federation, called for this exceptional lad to be allowed to stay. He received a mealy-mouthed reply from immigration minister Caroline Noakes MP. She said : “While… Shreyas does show immense promise in the field of competitive chess I am afraid that there is no route, within the rules, that will allow Mr Singh and his family to remain in the country.”

A Home Office spokesperson, after first checking that they had removed their heart, said: “Every visa case is assessed on its own merits in line with immigration rules.”

Blah-de-cruelly-blah and is it time for my coffee break yet…

In the shameful Windrush affair, West Indian citizens who’d spent most of their lives in Britain were suddenly told they had no right to remain here. That scandal was in part a legacy of Theresa May’s time in the Home Office. She cooked up the hostile environment policy designed to make staying in the UK so difficult that people would voluntarily eject themselves from the country.

The treatment of Shreyas Royal and his family is both heartless and foolish.

Here’s the account in the heartless register. This boy has lived here for six years, his family are settled, and his father’s employer wants him to stay in a job he appears to be doing well.

But this can’t happen under the rules (stupid sub-section whatever) because his father doesn’t earn £120,000. Who on earth earns £120,000? Just about no one.

In 2015, the average UK salary for full-time employees was put at £27,600. Google doesn’t offer a more recent figure, but never mind. That one will do nicely.

Thanks to salary taboos, most Brits don’t like to discuss what they earn. I’ll happily share that “not a lot” covers it in my case. As for £120,000, that is a bar too high and too inflexible.

Here’s the account in the foolish register. Shreyas Royal has the potential to become England’s first world chess champion. That’s a big claim to rest on shoulders so young. But people who know about chess believe he really does show that potential.

Wouldn’t that be a good and enriching outcome? Even those of us who don’t play can appreciate that having a chess champion would be better than not having one.

So that’s the heartless and foolish boxes ticked. And a few more besides.

A further disappointment lies in that salary requirement. Setting such a high bar suggests that Britain is only interested in money.

No doubt it’s the sort of sky-high salary Theresa May and her buddies take for granted in Tory clubland. But money isn’t everything, and people who don’t tip over-the-top amounts into their bank account can still offer much to our country. Such as bringing up a potential chess champion.

Compare the heartless and stupid registers, and you will see this: Britain gains nothing by sticking to Theresa May’s rules but loses great potential instead. And that sounds like checkmating yourself.

“All the mainstream media do is lie…”

Says who exactly? From supporters of Donald Trump to the more ardent followers of Jeremy Corbyn, the belief that the media tells lies is now widespread.

Those with far-right views often shout the loudest, although those on the left can also make the same complaint. Many Corbyn supporters, for example, dismiss any notion of Labour having an antisemitism problem as a put-up job by the media – or “the lying media”, to quote Trump.

“All the mainstream media do is lie…”

Almost anyone from the quarrelsome congregation of modern life could have said those words yesterday, but in this instance it was Stephen Yaxley Lennon. And if you don’t know who he is, that’s because this far-right political activist prefers to be known by the self-invented persona of Tommy Robinson.

Yesterday, Robinson was released on bail after winning an appeal against a contempt of court finding.

He was in prison for live-streaming and commenting on two court cases while they were in progress. After the second instance, a judge in Leeds immediately jailed Robinson for breaching an earlier order. His release underlines that the rule of law must be applied fairly, and the Appeal Court ruled that Robinson had been jailed too hastily, and that more time should have been given to consider his case.

Sadly, in jailing this anti-Muslim rabble-rouser and stirrer of hatred, that judge in Leeds helped to turn Robinson into a far-right martyr, feted and financially supported by the extreme right in the US.

Yesterday, his supporters here and abroad proclaimed his release on bail as a victory for free speech, and proof that their man was innocent. But Robinson will face a further trial. He hasn’t been exonerated for his behaviour but told that there was a legal flaw in his conviction.

The trouble is, such finer points are lost in the shouting – a noise cleverly orchestrated by Robinson. One of many horrible ironies about this case is seeing Robinson proclaimed as a defender of free speech. Hardly a fitting honour for a man with such a narrow and twisted view of modern British life.

Coming out of court yesterday, Robinson harangued reporters, saying: “All the British media do is lie. I have a lot to say but nothing to you. I want to thank the British public for all their support.”

This statement reminds us that Robinson is a clever manipulator of the truth – right down to that chummy fake persona. As Tommy Robinson is a self-invention, perhaps the media he so despises should start using his real name.

Yet reporting about someone like Stephen Yaxley Lennon/Tommy Robinson is almost impossibly difficult, as shown his words, “I want to thank the British public for their support.” He doesn’t have the support of the British public, but of a noisy minority; and anyway many of his supporters live abroad and only see him as a hero because they have been fed a blatantly partial version of events.

“All the mainstream media do is lie…”

This view has been relentlessly promoted by Donald Trump to belittle and weaken the media – and neutering the media in this way, he thinks, stops what he regards as intrusive reporting into his affairs.

This elevation to ghastly sainthood of Tommy Robinson is one of the places that constantly decrying the media gets you in the end. It is also one of the unforeseen consequences of the internet, where the truth is whatever you want it to be. Trying to steer a straight journalistic line through that febrile world is a difficult business, but an important one.

“What’s a pillock?” asks my squash partner, mid-rally.

This is the partner I occasionally beat, rather than the one whose trouncing of me is unending, although sometimes I manage something approaching a draw.

Anyway, squash partners one and two, and anyone else who has the misfortune to share a court with me, will have encountered the chuntered commentary of self-laceration.

For some reason the word ‘pillock’ is the one most muttered when the little black ball doesn’t go where the little black ball was meant to go.

“Pillock!” I will cry, along with other statements of despair to convey my own uselessness. “What a waste of space!”

A pillock is a stupid person, as in the saying “he’s a complete pillock”. So you see, Mike, a pillock is the sweaty bald man you play squash with once a week; a pillock is a man who plays a game for more than half his lifetime, without acquiring any noticeable skills. Or that’s how it seems some days on court.

I searched in Brewers Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, but my old edition let me down. The Oxford online dictionary reveals that the word dates to the mid-16^th century and is a variant of the archaic word pillicock, meaning penis, which is said to be the early sense of pillock in northern English.

Without knowing it, I have been calling myself a penis on court for all this time. Oh well, if the insult fits and all that.

It’s a good word to say when cross or wishing to convey amused disdain, perhaps. Words that end in ‘ck’ leave a satisfying dent in the air. That’s why another old word, ‘bollocks’, is good to say, too. Here’s the online Oxford dictionary again – “Mid-18th century: plural of bollock, variant of earlier ballock, of Germanic origin; related to ball.”

And easily shortened to ‘balls’, of course.

I’m not sure if I mutter than when try to hit one, but it wouldn’t surprise me.

Sometimes I wonder about squash, as it does make me cross, but then so too does a friendly game of badminton with good pals. Perhaps it’s just me then.

My problem with squash – a good game, let’s agree – is that in my head I’ve lost before the ball is hardly warm. I beat myself in a way. My head starts clear, then the clouds roll in. And that’s pretty much that.

Anyone know a good sports psychologist?

Oh, this one’s a classic from the stack of shiny black discs with free clicks and crackles.

Cooder has been and done many things, from introducing slide guitar to the Rolling Stones when he featured on Sister Morphine from the album Sticky Fingers, to acting as saviour to Cuban music – at some risk to himself. He also wrote one of the most noted film soundtracks, for the Wim Wenders film, Paris, Texas.

His music has stirred the dust for the best part of 50 years now.

Into The Purple Valley is a Cooder classic from 1971 on which he resurrects classic American songs. The album has a handsome fold-out cover featuring Cooder and his wife Susan sitting in a Buick convertible, with mocked-up rainfall. The back shot shows the couple and the car against a blue sky on a sunny day, while the centrefold has them standing next to the Buick on a film set.

“We didn’t have video back then,” Cooder has said. “You had to suggest an alternative environment on the cover of your album. I used to think about ways to do this, mainly to please myself, and this one turned out pretty well.”

Cooder is a modest sort of guitar hero, a musicologist who shuffles through the past in search of diamond tunes. Here, there are 11 such songs, starting with How Can You Keep On Moving, credited to Agnes ‘Sis’ Cunningham, known for folk and protest songs.

Billy The Kid is credited on the disc as ‘traditional arranged by Cooder’, although the song is actually by Woody Guthrie. The sleeve contains scant information, unless an inner sheet has been lost over the years.

The great old songs roll on – Money Honey, FDR In Trinidad, Teardrops Will Fall and Denomination Blues. Side two opens with On A Monday, followed by the Johnny Cash song Hey Porter. The remaining three old musical tales are Great Dreams From Heaven, Taxes on the Farmer Feeds Us All and Vigilante Man, another Guthrie song.

The playing is lively, respectful of the music’s roots, but mostly it’s great fun – Cooder always is, as a spirit of joyous discovery slides in with his notes.

Into The Purple Valley always lifts my mood, and Cooder has been doing that since I first discovered his music back in 1066 or something. He’s still playing, about to start his first major US tour in ten years, and has a new album out, The Prodigal Son; one to buy.

Mission:Impossible – Fallout is stupendously silly but quite good fun, with entertaining action sequences, a bonkers plot about nuclear destruction and trademark stiff-armed running and helmetless motorcycle riding from Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt.

As we came out of the cinema, a possible sequel popped into my mind: Mission:Impossible – Brexit Batshit Edition.

“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to untangle the poisonous coil of Brexit before next March. You will face many devious villains who are meant to be on your side but turn out to be double agents working for their own egos. Your real opponent sometimes seems to be helping you, but you are not sure what he is up to. No one is, to be honest.”

Ethan Hunt: “Do I get to ride motorbikes round the middle of Paris and then London – without wearing a helmet and while defying the laws of gravity?”

Mysterious Batshit Controller: “No, but you do have to put up with Boris Johnson and his gravity-defying ego. And you must constantly endure Jacob Rees Mogg whining away all the time – like a James Bond villain as written by PG Wodehouse on an off day.”

EH: “Right, but do I get to leap in the air and climb a rope dangling from a helicopter?”

MBC: “No, but you may end up sitting in an empty room in Brussels with only four pot plants to talk to – and at least one of those plants is better at holding a conversation than you are.”

EH: “But do I have a punch-up in the gents in Paris that ends up demolishing half the place?”

MBC: “Well, you might do if bump into Boris while you’re in there…”

EH: “But do I get to free-climb a vertical rockface in Kashmir and save the world at the very last second after a gravity-insulting helicopter chase?”

MBC: “Well, we’ll just see about that, shall we? Anyway, your mission is far trickier than that. For you must unite a bunch of squabbling right-wingers who haven’t stopped arguing about Europe since Jacob was in plus-four nappies. And you must negotiate with 27 other countries by March, having made zilch progress so far…”

EH: “27? That’s tough odds…”

MBC: “Well, yes – and all those other countries think Brexit is as mad as the plot in your latest film.”

EH: “There’s a countdown, you say? I like a countdown. But what happens if we don’t disarm the nuclear option in time?”

MBC: “That is very much open to debate. Jacob Rees Mogg said the other day on Channel 4 News that we wouldn’t see the benefits of Brexit for 50 years – and he’s supposed to be a lover of the whole stupid business.”

EH: (Makes sucking teeth sound but says nothing).

MBC: “So what do you think, Ethan?”

EH: “Gosh, those odds don’t sound too good…”

MBC: “This message will self-destruct in two seconds. One, two…”

Smoke fills the screen.

Unsurprising plot spoiler: Tom Cruise just manages to save he world in the latest Mission:Impossible film.

Unsurprising plot spoiler No 2: The Brexit clock is ticking. No one has a bloody clue what to do, including the woman in charge – who may well be a double agent as she didn’t want Brexit anyway, but has spent two years uttering that weary frog croak line that it’s ‘what the British people want’.” Well, nearly half of them didn’t want it at the time, and many would now like the whole thing to just disappear.

Where’s Tom Cruise when you need him?

In the shade yesterday, just around from where a busking juggler busked and juggled, I sat and ate a steak and ale pie from the sausage shop in York.

In that moment it was the most perfect food I had ever eaten; the pastry light and short, the filling tender from long cooking in an ale sauce. Best news of all, that pie was still warm.

This set me thinking about how the simplest of foods can sometimes be just perfect. But it also set me thinking that I don’t eat anything like enough steak and ale pies.

For two pounds it was pretty good value too – tastier and cheaper than a world full of street food, and I love street food, even if it is a middle-class swerve away from takeaways. Oh, no, we don’t eat takeaways, but we do love a bit of street food.

Perhaps that pie hit the spot because it’s not the sort of thing I usually buy. Normally you would be following me for a long time before you saw me sitting on a wall in York, eating a meat pie.

To be honest, perhaps 70% of what I eat is vegetarian, and some of that is vegan too, although more by accident than design. With a vegetarian for a wife, meat isn’t on the menu unless I put it there. My wife wasn’t a vegetarian when first we sat at the same table, although she has been for a long time now, so I should be used to the dietary dilemmas.

“That’s your decision,” she will say if I mention not having eaten meat in a while. By this she means that I could just go and cook myself something meaty, and sometimes I do, although mostly it just seems easier to eat whatever my wife is eating. And I like veggie food and will happily cook meat-free meals.

Much of the flesh I eat is fish, as in my cookbook you can rarely beat a piece of fish simply cooked, trout fillets quickly fried in butter and sprinkled with lemon juice, or fat salmon wedges topped with pesto and parmesan, and baked in the oven.

It’s good not to eat meat too often, especially processed meat, so bacon and sausages are rationed, although I love both, so long as the quality is good.

Sometimes I add fish to whatever veggie food we are eating; or crisp strips of streaky bacon (placed in a large frying pan that is cold and heated gently till the fat runs, flipped over, then dried on kitchen paper – a tip from watching MasterChef).

We ate lightly last night, scrambled eggs on sourdough toast, with a new salad leaves grown in plastic pots by the garage door. No meat at all, but then I had sinned already, and what a delightful act of straying that was.

Perhaps that is the answer: if you are married to a vegetarian, sometimes you just need to eat a steak and ale pie.

WITH a heavy heart, let’s peep through the door into the row about Labour and antisemitism.

Quoted in last Sunday’s Observer, the Labour MP Luciana Berger said something worthy of note: “It is unfathomable that we find ourselves in this situation.”

Berger is the chair of the Jewish Labour movement and she wants her party to recognise the full and internationally accepted definition of antisemitism, rather than what you might call its new ‘pick-and-mix’ version. She is supported by various fellow Labour MPs and peers, including the MPs Louise Ellman and Ruth Smeeth.

How do we fathom these inglorious depths; and how has a party with a long history of Jewish support and involvement fallen out so badly with Jews? Or at least, some Jews, as nothing about this story is clear-cut.

Some disaffected Jews blame Jeremy Corbyn. He has always been pro-Palestine and therefore anti-Israel – a stance that leaves room for negative assumptions to be made about his party’s attitudes towards Jews.

This long-running row erupted further last week when the veteran Labour MP Margaret Hodge confronted Corbyn in the House of Commons and accused him of being “an antisemitic racist”.

While that may seem an unlikely charge, this row has broken out under his leadership, so he must carry or at least share the blame. Never mind that the followers of Jeremy will point a jabbing finger at the Blairites or say it is all a plot by the mainstream media, that handy whipping boy for all sides.

Blaming Blairites or the newspapers doesn’t lead anywhere useful, because everything the party tries to do only makes matters worse. In the latest attempt to clean this suppurating wound, Labour wrote its own definition of antisemitism instead of drawing on the internationally accepted definitions.

The Labour MP Wes Streeting, also quoted in the Observer, said he believed the national executive committee (NEC) had taken this approach over defining antisemitism because “it is intended to make it easier to let more people off the hook”.

But a problem doesn’t go away if you redefine it, as shown by the stance adopted by three rival Jewish newspapers. Taking a leaf out of all the northern titles who came together recently to attack the government over failing railing services in their region, these papers today publish the same front page.

The Jewish Chronicle, Jewish Telegraph and Jewish News do this because they believe that a Corbyn-led government would pose “an existential threat to Jewish life in this country”.

Here’s how the papers further explain their joint effort: “We do so because the party that was, until recently, the natural home for our community has seen its values and integrity eroded by Corbynite contempt for Jews and Israel. The stain and shame of antisemitism has coursed through Her Majesty’s Opposition since Jeremy Corbyn became leader in 2015.”

These may be small newspapers, but the combined impact of their assault should surely worry the Labour party. And shouting down opponents or plastering “Jeremy Corbyn isn’t a racist” memes across the social media walls isn’t the answer. In fact, it only makes the situation worse, and discourages voters who tend to look to Labour – and you can include me in that presently wary congregation.

Trying to fathom the unfathomable is enough to give you the bends, but Labour needs to come up with a solution soon. Otherwise this unlikeliest of controversies risks doing great damage to a party that offers the only alternative hope for the Tory-weary tribe (yes, I’m in there somewhere, head down and mumbling).

THE other day the broadcaster Tom Sutcliffe tweeted that he was “utterly sick of opinions, including all of my own. I’d quite like a week of being as thoughtless as a cow”.

Perhaps Tom was tired of curating all the wordy talking heads on BBC Radio Four’s Saturday Review. Perhaps he was just tired of being required to have opinions all the damn time.

Whatever the case, his words had resonance. Yes, I thought, opinions form a quarrelsome queue around every aspect of life, and they form a quarrelsome queue in your own head, too.

Strongly put opinions are what gave us Brexit and Trump, so often lumped together by the liberal disillusioned as a terrible double act. With Brexit, the pro-opinions are much stronger than they have any logical right to be. Put simply, how can something of unknown outcome have been sold to us as being of unquestionable good.

It can’t, but it was.

Brexit was oversold to us, and the Remain case was undersold by a complacent crew headed by David Cameron (comfortable whereabouts now unknown).

The world is full of opinionated people, from grumblers writing blogs to that congregation of horribly self-assured egotistical men who mess up our lives (they’re not all men, but it does seem like it at times). There they always are, shouting at us. Farage and Johnson and Gove and the gang. All so sure of themselves, all so certain they are right.

So full of arrogant opinions they make us feel sick.

Anyway, this was my train of thought yesterday when another tweet popped up, this time from Helen Pidd, north of England editor of The Guardian.

Helen was passing on news that the T&A newspaper in Bradford had turned off the comments on its website. The paper said it was not against “robust debate on issues of public interest” but added that a vocal minority was intent on abusing the ability to comment.

“They lurk beneath even the most innocuous of stories to grind out personal grudges, rail against the council or the T&A or – worse – pollute the comments section with hate-filled, racist, anti-Semitic or Islamophobic tirades”.

Those comments do represent a difficulty for websites, as they allow cowards to hide behind their anonymity and spit abuse safe in the knowledge that they will remain unaccountable.

The Yorkshire Post editor, James Mitchinson, tweeted in reply the hope that readers’ letters will rise again.

This may be so and, as a sometime letters’ editor, I do like a letters page. Yet it still seems to be a shame to cut off all comments, as this goes against the idea of democratising opinion.

In the past, readers only found an outlet for their views if they wrote to the editor – and if they wrote in green ink, you knew to take a deep breath before reading. Quite why the ranting brigade favoured green ink is just one of those mysteries.

In shutting off comments, the T&A is silencing the sensible majority along with the malignant minority. I think that represents a loss.

Ideally, the comments section represents a chance for everyone to have a say, and this has now gone. Perhaps it is a staffing issue, as keeping an eye on those rolling comments, and weeding out the unsuitable ones, is a full-time job.

The T&A shares an editor with the Press here in York, and at the time of writing, the Press website still allows comments.

As for my own opinions, for sure sometimes I am sick of those, although having none would stymie blogging. Feel free to comment on any of this, should you wish.

THE parched savanna of our back garden isn’t worth mentioning in the same  breath as wildfires raging in Sweden and Greece, but you can’t help worrying that it’s all part of the same disturbing picture.

Sweden has called on international help to tackle more than 40 fires from Lapland in the far north to the island of Gotland in the south. Fires raging above the Arctic Circle seem to be saying something about our climate, even if the geographically illiterate thought – isn’t Sweden meant to be cold? ­­– is hardly helpful.

We all know that Greece is a hot country, a more likely tinderbox than Sweden. Yet the fires in Greece this year are shocking, with reports this morning suggesting that at least 50 people may have died in the Attica region around Athens.

These are said to be the worst wildfires in Greece in more than a decade, while Sweden hasn’t seen fires so fierce and difficult to put out in 12 years.

According to a report on the BBC website, 26 bodies were found in the yard of a villa in the seaside village of Mati, where the fires around Athens.

Much of Europe is sweltering and unendingly dry. Crops are frazzling in the fields. Is this just an unusually resilient heatwave or are we all, to call on the technical phrase, buggered?

Those who deny that climate change exists often use an unusually cold spell as an excuse to trumpet idiocies about global warming, along the lines of: “Thought you said this place was hotting up. Feels pretty damn cold to me…”

Chief among such disclaimers is Donald Trump, who during a cold spell in the US in December last year pined for some “good old global warming”.

This is the same turnip-head who previously dismissed global warming as a hoax got up by the Chinese to destroy American jobs.

You have to admit that whether his thoughts blow hot or cold, the world has become a more unsettling place since we were all admitted to the inside of Donald Trump’s head, as alarmingly transmitted by Twitter rants in capital letters and the occasional narcissistic hug of an interview with Piers Morgan.

Anyway, this weather.

Usually I love hot weather but now I’m not so sure. The heat is just too unrelenting. This morning it is cool for now, but the temperature will be going up later and all this week, with the Met Office issuing hot weather warnings that run at least until Friday.

Those cautions ignite a few headlines this morning of the kind that cash in on the alarm, while also having a ‘nanny state’ grumble. “HAZARD WARMING” is the Sun’s take on this, with a typographical footnote adding: “Brits warned to stay indoors” and “But ‘nanny state’ blasted”.

The Mail sticks, unsurprisingly, to the nanny state line, proclaiming: “TOURISM CHIEFS’ FURY AT SUMMER KILLJOYS”, while the Express has: “Stay out of the sun until Friday.”

That Mail headline reminds us, should we need reminding, just how much fury there is in that newspaper. Hot fury, cold fury and any sort of fury in between.

Perhaps we just never like the weather we’ve got. When it’s rainy and miserable, and everywhere looks green and pleasant, we pine for hot weather. And when the heat comes we want it cold and damp again, you know, proper English weather and none of this imported foreign stuff.

Despairing of the heat seems to me a betrayal of the tanned young man who used to lounge on beaches, turning ridiculously deep hues of brown. I used to love lying around in the sun. Now I just sit in the sun for 15 minutes or so, armed with the Factor 50, and then retreat to the shade. My face and arms still brown easily, as do the uncovered stretches of my head.

But the sad truth is that the young man who browned from top to toe now worries about what’s happening to the planet. But I do still like to sit in the sunshine for a (protected) while.

As for the words we use to describe all this, perhaps ‘Climate instability’ may be a more useful way of putting it.