SO that’s it, then. Ed Balls is out of Strictly..... I have to admit to a sneaking admiration for the way he has handled it. And Hollande is out; Nigel Farage has been replaced (at last) as leader of UKIP, and has been confirmed as the UK ambassador to Washington (not); and the last remnant of 1960s revolutionary icons, Fidel Castro, is dead. My father had some conversations with him once about religion and Marxism, and found him rather engaging....

Meanwhile the Labour Party is firmly in the hands of (Castro-loving) Jeremy Corbyn, Scotland is in thrall to the SNP (who may, however, be at their zenith); the UK has voted to leave the EU, chopped out David Cameron and George Osborne as a result, and replaced them with Theresa May, who seems to be doing a remarkably good job under the circumstances, alongside David Davis and Boris.

Donald Trump has been elected President, with huge if as yet unknown consequences for the entire world. Russia is exercising nuclear weapons within the borders of the European continent (Kaliningrad); Aleppo and Mosul are being flattened with huge humanitarian consequences – and Raqqa will follow soon.

Tens of millions of people are afoot across the Middle East and North Africa apparently determined to come up to north west Europe in pursuit of peace and prosperity; and President Erdogan of Turkey is threatening to throw open Europe’s gates to them.

You remember WB Yeats poem, ‘The Second Coming’:

“Turning and turning in the widening gyre/The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold/Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world….”

It feels a bit like that right now. The world is a strange and exciting place indeed.

It's at times like these that one needs the old certainties – our religious beliefs as we look towards Advent and then Christmas; the certainties of our good old institutions – the Monarchy, the Army, Parliament; the regularities of our ordinary lives – births marriages and deaths, the school run, Sunday lunch.

As Churchill used to scrawl on memos alongside his famous “Action this day”, “KBO” – code, of course, for “Keep Buggering On”. What better advice could we need at a time like this?