It’s so hot that I’m even cross with the evacuees

Yo — Reader! How are ya doin’? Hot and bothered, I suspect; sticky and irritable. And no less so for having been addressed in such a manner, or for being reminded that this is how the leader of the free world addresses those who do his bidding, the lickspittle minions who bring him gifts of questionable knitwear at world summit meetings. (Apparently it was a Burberry jumper our Prime Minister gave to George W. Bush; so if he wore it, he’d be refused entry to quite a large number of public houses and bars in the Leicester area, where Burberry knitwear has become associated with monosyllabic, aggressive troublemakers. Yes, how apt, good old Leicester, etc.).

I don’t know how you reacted to that stolen snatch of conversation broadcast around the world this week. Under normal circumstances I’d have chuckled and maybe even warmed to the two men; Blair’s laconic irony, Bush’s tongue-in-cheek avuncular self-deprecation and their shared language and apparently complete verstehen.