Andrew Griffiths

It was two days after the storm, or ‘extreme weather event’ as we call them now. I was trying to get into the Derbyshire town of Whaley Bridge, which sits below a reservoir with a crack in its dam wall. The reservoir had topped over during the night and the build-up of pressure meant the wall was beginning to crumble. Fifteen hundred people in the town have been evacuated since the storm, with hardly even the time to pick up their keys. They have sought shelter in schoolhalls and with friends and acquaintances in nearby towns and villages. The world’s media quickly descended on the town and before journalists could even scribble down ‘closely-knit communities', the newly-installed Prime Minister Boris Johnson was parachuted in.

You can’t watch the video promoting the new Amazon drone delivery service without checking the date for signs of 1 April. While superficially absurd, there is something distinctly unsettling about this short film. It’s as though someone has made a satirical treatment of our consumer age, a reshaping of Chaplin’s Modern Times. The Charlie in this video is Jeremy Clarkson. He describes the process of the drone delivery service, as a parcel is prepared in an Amazon warehouse located at their research base ‘somewhere outside Cambridge’. 'A miracle of modern technology is despatched,' he tells us, as the warehouse roof opens like the top of a volcano in a Bond film.