When did everyone get so angry?

I love Suffolk, not just for its beauty but for the stories to be found all around me. Every day I swim with my two-year-old labrador in the river Alde with views of the strange pagodas built on Orford Ness, a long strip of shingle. Amazingly, components of the nuclear bomb were tested here during the second world war. Just up the coast is the wonderfully named Cobra Mist, a radar station active during the Cold War. If you’re lucky enough to go inside, you’ll find computers and surveillance equipment abandoned in the 1970s with lights still blinking and spools turning like something out of The Avengers. The US stealth bomber was apparently tested here. In 1980, UFOs were spotted above Orford on their way to Rendlesham forest. What a location for an author! Inspiration is everywhere I look.

And yet I have to work hard to keep the whispers of doom from my mind. Earlier this year I read Hothouse Earth by Bill McGuire, emeritus professor of geophysical and climate hazards at University College London, and it won’t leave me alone. If this short, cogently argued book has one fault, it’s that it leads to the inescapable conclusion that whichever way we look, it’s too late. We’re all doomed (and it was written before temperatures reached 40.3°C in the UK). It makes me wonder: am I sunbathing or becoming extinct? And how bad will it have to get – with wildfires, floods, melting icecaps, etc – before the switch is thrown and someone decides to… I don’t know… do something?

I mustn’t be hypocritical. I still fly, if considerably less than I used to, as Zoom – brilliant in some ways but still horrid and dehumanising – seems to have permanently replaced international literary festivals.