My mother-in-law, Peta Keeble, is a Yorkshire farmer’s wife with a courage, feistiness and directness which outshines even that formidable breed.

“My friends and I are all hiding under the bed”, she confided in me this weekend. “North Korea, ISIS, Brexit, Trump. What is there not to be frightened about?”

As Parliament reconvenes, albeit for a tokenistic two-week sitting before the Party Conference season (which, at a time like this, I would have thought we could easily manage without), that perception of looming catastrophe should be at the forefront of all of our minds.

Kim Jong-Un’s nuclear test on the very day that President Putin was visiting Chinese President Xi was a carefully planned piece of ritual humiliation. Kim knows that China will not cut off their energy supplies, which would create economic collapse, and turbulence and worse at China’s borders.

So they are children playing chicken with oncoming vehicles. But the very fact that they understand international diplomacy and strategic positioning in that way demonstrates that leaving aside Kim himself, they are not mad.

Their entire economy is one quarter of the amount of money Americans spend on pet food every year. One wrong move and they would be annihilated; and the US too is well aware of the catastrophic side consequences of any such action by them. It’s all about deterrence rather than action. It’s a complex game of three dimensional chess amongst America, North and South Korea, and especially China. Let’s hope it all ends in a stalemate.

Something of the same could be said about the Brexit negotiations. They are at a difficult stage with Barnier playing ‘tough cop’ and David Davis a sort of Clint Eastwood figure staring him down. They must both remember that old maxim that all good business deals end with both parties being a little unhappy about it. So of course we will pay out some kind of divorce payment. I would like it to be nil, Barnier £100 billion.

If it ends up somewhere between the two, people like me will be a bit unhappy, and so will the EU. After all at the moment our net contribution is £13 billion pa, so even £30 or 40 billion would represent only three years or so payments.

ISIS remains an existential worry, perhaps especially as we come close to a military victory over them in the Middle East.

Unless we deal with their ideology and their funding they will become a multi-headed hydra under the sand, and will emerge with vicious consequences across North Africa, and of course here in the West. So we must not rest on our laurels, but use every sophisticated weapon we have to de-radicalise their people, and stop their use of, for example, the London money markets, at which they are great experts.

Human beings are intelligent. We, by and large, know what is good for us and what is not. We may take belligerent stances, test the other side to the limits, argue hard, fight hard; but after it all we find a way through the forest, and we know what is best for our people.

So I would just say to Peta Keeble: “It’s worrying – of course it is. But there is a solution, and good people and true will find it.”

In the meantime, let’s get out from under the bed.