Neil Clark

Here we go again. Another blistering heatwave. Just a few days after the last one. Like many, and probably like a lot of Spectator readers, I was a moderate climate change sceptic a few years ago. The whole ‘climate emergency’ thing came across as hysterical and alarmist. There seemed to be a clear agenda to get us to do things which would adversely affect the enjoyment of our lives. So the natural reaction was to go the other way and dismiss it as a load of hot air about hot air. But after yet another scorchingly hot summer – and we’re barely in mid-July yet – I think such positions are no longer credible. We still get hardcore sceptics tweeting that ‘it’s called summer’, and not really that hot, but come on, who are you kidding?

Oxford City vs Rochdale at Court Place Farm doesn’t have quite the same ring as Chelsea vs Liverpool at Stamford Bridge, but last Saturday’s match was important all the same. At this level, you feel part of the match, which never happens in an executive box at the Emirates ‘The Hoops’, Oxford’s oldest football club, founded in 1882 when Gladstone was prime minister and Old Etonians won the FA Cup, were playing their first ever home game in the fifth tier of English football. Rochdale, whose 102-year membership of the Football League ended in May, were playing their first away game in the Vanarama National League.

Romania gets a bad rap here, associated as it often is with organised crime. In recent years around half a million Romanians have settled in the UK, making them the fourth largest group of foreign-born residents. But the irony is that as Romanians head to Britain in search of a higher standard of living, we Brits should really be booking our flights to Romania to remind us of how our country once was. Romania has everything: fascinating medieval towns, unspoilt countryside, vibrant major cities and a 150-mile coastline. There are even still horses and carts on the roads. But the appeal is more than that: it’s the spirit of the place. If you want to go back to 1988 or even 1978 then a Wizz Air flight east is like a time-machine.

If you think your life is stressful it’s good to reflect on what poor René Artois went through each week in ’Allo ’Allo!, the 1980s BBC sitcom set during the German occupation of France. RAF pilots hidden in his mother-in-law’s cupboard upstairs, German officers in the café downstairs, Herr Otto Flick of the Gestapo likely to limp in at any moment – and all the time trying to serve drinks and juggle a sex life that would have exhausted even Errol Flynn. ‘I have to be nice to the Germans, they are my customers, they are winning the war, so if I am not nice to them they will shoot me,’ René would say. ‘I have to be nice to the Resistance, otherwise they will shoot me for being nice to the Germans.

‘The word “Terror” is so generally and universally used in connection with everyday trivial matters that it is apt to fail to convey, when intended to do so, its real meaning.’ Thus begins the third chapter of The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag (1947), part of the Man-Eater series by the great Anglo-Indian hunter and naturalist Jim Corbett. I was reminded of Corbett and his wonderful books when reading last week that human-assaulting tigers are once again on the prowl in Nepal, with 104 attacks and 62 people killed in the past three years. Conservation efforts have seen tiger numbers rise three-fold since 2010, but with that good news comes the bad news of increased danger to humans.

It’s around 8.10 on a lovely warm summer’s evening on the Isle of Man and the sidecar practice session in the 2022 TT – Tourist Trophy – is about to begin. The announcer at the grandstand asks the sidecar riders to get ready to race in ten minutes. There is the sound of engines revving up, great excitement and then… nothing. There has been an incident in the TT Supersport qualifying session at Ballagarey, it turns out, and other races are suspended. It’s not until around 11 p.m. that we learn the terrible news. A 29-year-old Welshman called Mark Purslow has been killed following a crash on his 600 Yamaha. He had just recorded his fastest ever TT lap, reaching an average speed of 120.

Amid all the Covid-19 coverage, it’s hardly surprising that the collapse of a coach-tour operator last week didn’t make too many headlines. But the end of Shearings, the largest such operator in Europe, could mean the end of coach holidays in the UK, and if that happens, something very special will have been lost. Coach holidays are unique. They engender a sense of camaraderie which is so hard to find nowadays in our very atomised world. You begin the week as strangers, waiting for the departure bay number of your coach to be called out, and end it exchanging addresses.

Václav Klaus has made a habit of saying things others shy away from saying, but it doesn’t seem to have done him much harm in the popularity stakes. Quite the opposite: the 73-year-old ardently Eurosceptic free-marketeer has legitimate claims to be regarded as the most successful ‘true blue’ conservative politician in Europe over the past 25 years. He was, after all, prime minister of the Czech Republic from 1992 to 1998 and then his country’s president for a further ten years, from 2003 to 2013. So when we meet after a typically hearty Serbian lunch — at the International Science and Public Conference in Belgrade — I am keen to ask if he has any advice for David Cameron and the British Conservative party.