When I was in my twenties, exactly 50 Edinburgh Festivals ago, Frank Dunlop directed the first professional production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat which Andrew Lloyd Webber and I had written for a primary school concert in 1968. In the first four years of the work’s existence, it began to burrow its way into educational musical syllabi at a modest pace. This we appreciated, but in 1970 we stumbled into overnight success with our double album of Jesus Christ Superstar, and we did not thereafter give our earlier piece the attention it perhaps deserved.

We are all supposed to remember where we were when we heard that Mrs Thatcher had resigned (my mother rang me while I was having a late breakfast). But I will always have a much more vivid memory of where I was when I heard Boris Johnson had called it a day. I was at a mountain refuge in Andorra when a Dutch hiker told me: ‘I’ve just spoken to my wife and she tells me your Boris Johnson has resigned.’ It turned out to be four days after the actual event.

This time it was surely all over. As inflation started to rise towards a 40-year high, as central banks started raising interest rates for the first time in more than a decade, and as the monetary printing presses finally stopped running, the crypto-currencies crashed. What a crash it was. Bitcoin, the best-known crypto, fell all the way from $61,000 last November to less than $19,000 in June, a spectacular drop of more than two thirds.