Enjoy your feelgood summer – there may be trouble ahead

I’ve been on a mini-tour, full of echoes and warnings. First, to the Grange Festival in Hampshire, where we might still have been enjoying the summer of ’87: a moneyed audience in a Barings mansion laughing at funny foreigners in John Copley’s retro Seraglio (see Richard Bratby’s crit last week). Then to Oxford, to show an American friend the gardens of my alma mater, Worcester College, and recall the sweltering heat of ’76 that distracted us from revising for finals or noticing the Labour-driven economic crisis that would blight the start of our careers that autumn. Then to London, to make light of Trump with other American friends — and back home to Helmsley, of which more in a moment.

This is a season of feelgood — at least until thunder and flash floods strike. As we chat of Southgate’s waistcoat and Wimbledon and Love Island, we choose to ignore the harbingers of difficult times to come — and the market twitches that might, on past form, turn to turmoil as early as August.