The damsons here are almost ready: the jam they make is my favourite, although to be honest, I don’t eat much jam and so most of it winds up being given away. Why they’ve ripened so early I’ve no idea, as the winds have been from the north-east for more than a week now, so temperatures have plummeted from 28 to 20.

The heavy almost tired sagging of other soft fruit tree branches tells even the least observant visitor that it’s going to be a very good year for prunes, greengages, mirabelles and sloes. Quite when I’m going to have the time to boil up and jar this little lot is another matter entirely. I sometimes think there is a case for me employing seasonal labour, and then flogging both fruit and jam at the local markets (it is after all completely organic) but that’s a conundrum that will have to wait until 2015; there’s too much going on at the moment on five separate fronts.

Meanwhile – beyond the confines of south west France – things go from silly to surreal. European banking union ploughs ahead, but the participating banks are so secure, the ECB has announced that the upcoming stress-test may be far too stressful a nuisance for them to contemplate. So it will be a general rather than detailed health-check. The rest of the world thinks we need rather more detail not less, but that’s neither here nor there: Chairman Mario has spoken, and that’s it.

And on the strange island of Paedophilia, as fast as documents relating to Geoff Dickens and Elm House disappear, new evidence comes to light as to the population of Paedophilia. Former social services official David Tombs, who ran Hereford and Worcester social services, says his war nings about the threat of a Westminster-based paedophile network thirty years ago were ignored because “there were too many of them over there”. Unfortunately for all those who think Paedophilia Island is a myth, none other than Tim Yeo has – alongside the equally likeable David Mellor – leapt to their side by saying he was “not aware of a culture of child sex abuse” during his time as a health minister, and “I think it’s incredible, the idea that any remotely credible evidence had been shown to a civil servant at the Department of Health would have been ignored and received the comment that it apparently was. The whole thing is extraordinary.”

Er, no more extraordinary than taxi emissions being turned upside down and inside out in order to, um, sell taxis I would’ve thought.

Tim must be a very, very tall man because you can see him coming a mile off.

Across the sea in the land of my birth, the ever nonsense-free Archie Norman notes that ‘the recovery is still under-pinned by consumption which accounts for two-thirds of GDP. But growth in real disposable income is still very low. So what is driving consumption is people borrowing more and saving less as they too bathe in the wave of optimism.’

Quite so. And this observation can be applied in turn to the entire planet: the only route to growth from here on (under this daft model of capitalism) is more and more of the kind of mad borrowing that landed us in this mess in the first place.

When you have fiat currencies tied to nothing more than the speed of printing machines ,one can make anything look like growth, any rise in house prices look real, and any consumption figure look good. But ultimately, it’s an illusion, a mirage: Archie Norman may not be the nicest man in the world, but I thank God that people like him can still discern sh*t from putty.