OK it’s an obsession. The weather, that is – the solitary topic on which total strangers feel able to voice an opinion when their paths cross. Usually, in these parts, a pretty unfavourable one.

Yet the pictures of holidaymakers fleeing Greek islands – for years one of my favourite destinations – made me realise that whingeing about serial dreichness is wholly inappropriate when whole chunks of the globe are on fire whilst others are drowning in sludge courtesy of torrential downpours.

I spent last week in the English midlands where the sky was paying homage to the Argyll variety by trying on various shades of grey for size.

Yet the main pre-occupation down south seemed to be mostly whether or not play would be possible in The Ashes at Old Trafford, with a side order of what part the elements would play in The Open at Royal Liverpool.

Cricket being wiped out did not cause this viewer too much distress – and what Scottish golfer has not had the regular pleasure of trying to swing a driver in clobber designed to keep out horizontal wet stuff?

Having said which, sports fan though I am, these events seem altogether quite trivial set against what is happening to our planet.

None of which stops keyboard warriors taking to social media to suggest that heatwaves are nothing new and it’s time to stop catastophising on the back of the odd wild fire or two.

They waste valuable hours scouring the internet for anything which may “prove” that there’s no real need to get anxious.

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A wee while back the BBC got itself in a bit of a fankle when it appeared to think ‘balance’ was putting up a scientist whose views on this matter chimed with 99 per cent of his profession, against a “celebrity” climate change denier like the late Lord Lawson, one of many politicians content to fiddle whilst the world burned.

Hopefully, we are beyond that brand of nonsense now given the ravages all too clearly visible nightly on our TV screens. As it happens Lawson, that particular great “patriot”, made his home in France, where, my friends in the south west of that land tell me, the daily temperature averages around 40 degrees centigrade.

In addition to which, broadcasters have stopped describing as a “once in a hundred years event” those UK floods or gales which have become an all too regular occurrence.

The idea that these serial disasters are not the result of human folly and addiction to fossil fuels is strictly for the birds.

The birds in question being those energy behemoths making a more than tidy profit from drilling or mining. As indeed are their loyal shareholders.