What a lucky coincidence. At the start of a week that could see the ignominious collapse of Boris Johnson’s premiership, an opportunity to go fully Churchillian has appeared out of the blue. In an unprecedentedly detailed and direct memorandum, the British Foreign Office announced that it had exposed Russian plans to mount a coup in Kiev. Johnson was quick to back the alarming news with a grave warning to Vladimir Putin.

I’m perched on the bed reading an old Mothering Sunday card. It’s just one item in a box of miscellanea that I must sort and prune and I really can’t afford the time to linger. That box contains a fraction of what I have to deal with before I move house and I need to crack on. But I am sweating the small stuff. I’m sure I’m not alone in this. One of the legacies of lockdown has been a longing for more space. Across the UK, families with children are falling over themselves to find bigger places.

Wellington Jacinda Ardern recently told an American television host that she finds it ‘slightly offensive’ when outsiders assume every other New Zealander starred in Lord of the Rings. Quite so. New Zealand has only one real film star in 2022, and that’s the Prime Minister herself. But the way things are heading, she might best suit an adaptation of Lord of the Flies. The place has gone mad. Many countries, even nearby Australia, have responded to the arrival of the Omicron variant by drastically easing many of their formerly draconian measures in response to Covid, in particular the widespread use of lockdowns, or what some might prefer to describe as mass house arrests.

The two leading candidates for South Korea’s presidential election in March, Lee Jae-myung of the incumbent Democratic party and Yoon Suk-yeol of the conservative People Power party, have both made men’s rights central to their campaigns. They hope to appeal to the growing constituency of outraged men’s groups who vent their frustration at feminist overreach on internet message boards and sometimes even protest on the streets.