• The first is, of course, that we’re going to have to get used to it. These events will happen more and more frequently and with even greater severity. It may well already be too late to do anything about the worst effects of climate change. Humans can only cope with a small number of threats at any time, that number usually being one.

“Coping with” something, however, involves being able to do something about it on a time-scale which newspaper editors and social-media adherents are prepared to accept as reasonable (say about three days). There was nothing to be done about this heatwave apart from endure it: to prevent future ones will require changes that might take decades. The cost-of-living crisis can, however, be solved by Whitehall writing out enormous cheques, as during the pandemic. At the moment, though, the government’s main concern is who its next leader will be. In a month or so, the heatwave will have been forgotten but the cost-of-living crisis will not. As Professor Chris Whitty memorably and cheerfully remarked last autumn with regard to Covid, “winter is coming.”

I don’t think we’ve ever been been faced with an existential crisis like this. If nature wanted to plan a campaign against humanity its current tactic could not be improved upon – an advance towards us at a speed so imperceptibly slow that it’s easy for us to be distracted by something else, punctuated with spectacular examples of what its power really means, much as a terrorist executes random hostages. We all know now that we should have started dealing with this thirty years ago.

• The second is the extent to which, for most of the last three or four days, my brain and body (and perhaps yours) almost completely stopped working. I’ll be honest, I thought I’d cope a bit better better than this.

• The third is that the recent average temperature of say 38º is about 5% more than the “normal” July average (whatever that is any more) of 22º. (Absolute zero is -273.15º so it doesn’t seem sensible to use any other base point.) The really scary thing is that, even on this maximum scale, a 5% increase is pretty big. If one were to take 0º as the base point than the increase is a terrifying 72%. A repeat in August can’t be ruled out.

• What can we do about this? The horrible reality is that most of us can do very little (although that’s not to say we should stop trying). Investment in the future – whether it’s buying Premium Bonds or investing in a more sustainable heating system for our house – depends on having cash that we don’t immediately need and so can afford to tie up in something that will produce long-term benefits. The vast majority of the eight billion or so people on the planet are, however, looking no more than a couple of days ahead. It’s hard to think of a time in human history where the need for long-term planning has been more at odds with the clamour for short-term solutions.

• It’s amazing the extent to which even the heatwave can be politicised and turned into ammunition for libertarian drivel. My son Michael spotted this last week and penned this article for us, As of 22 July, the worst of the savage heatwave seems to be behind us: the even more savage erosion of our freedoms to which he refers continues apace, however, as the Met Office has now started issuing warnings about thunderstorms…

• Moving on from this to more minor matters, the battle to decide the next PM of the world’s sixth richest country will no longer be decided by a mere 357 MPs but by an electorate about 500 times larger, though perhaps no more representative of the population: the 180,000-odd members of the Conservative Party. There’s little I’ve read that suggests that this group of people – about 0.5% of the adult population – is in any way representative of it. The party is coy about releasing details of its members, but research suggests that nearly two-thirds are male, 90% are white and about half live in southern England. Opinion differs as to their age, 57 to 72 being proposed as the likely range.

I don’t know how much time and money the various candidates will have spent on social media but I venture to suggest that, in terms of getting themselves elected, this was almost totally wasted. For the first rounds, all the electorate was personally known to them. For the last one, I suspect that, if one accepts the demographics quoted above, social media is pretty useless as many of members will either distrust it, not use it very much or be largely oblivious of it. All of these are perfectly sensible positions to adopt.

Personal appeals through whatever mailing lists the two candidates can obtain is one one way that the battle will be fought. The other is through the national press which, I suspect, a reasonable number of members of Conservatives (and perhaps other parties) still see as important. We might therefore all expect a barrage of pro and anti headlines and articles for the two candidates over the next couple of months even though these are aimed at only a tiny percentage of the people who even buy newspapers any more.

• As for the outgoing PM, BoJo’s last PMQs were conducted in a ghastly level of hypocrisy. At the end he appeared to suggest that it was not the end, “hasta la vista: mission largely accomplished – for now.” The first bit is reminiscent of Bush’s premature verdict on the Iraq fiasco in 2003: the “for now” suggests that he’s planning a comeback. The hypocrisy came when all his party stood up to applaud him as if he’d just scored a century at Lord’s, even though many of them had been plotting his downfall only a couple of weeks ago. There is nothing more unedifying about politics than watching it in action at moments like this.

• I don’t know why I read articles about things like the size of the universe or the number of atoms in it (about 10 to the power of 80, if you can imagine that) but my eye was seduced by the large number of articles about the James Webb telescope which is now sending back stunning images from a long way away or a long time ago, depending on which way you look at it. My mind, still suffering from internal heatstroke, was in no condition to absorb or understand some of the facts. Take this article in The Hindu (which it prefaced with the accurate warning that “this is going to hurt your brain”): when the telescope sees light from galaxies as they were 13.7 million years ago, these are “not 13.7 billion light-years away. The actual distance to those galaxies today would be about 46 billion light-years. This discrepancy is all thanks to the expanding universe.” This, the article concludes with masterful understatement, makes calculations on a large scale “tricky.” I think “tricky” is an awfully well chosen word here…

Across the area