These past couple of weeks I have been exercised by the issue of energy once more. It has been the time when the issue of fracking moved south.

An esteemed former colleague of mine sent me the well-travelled story of God and the Northerners – where God was explaining that in creating the Earth He put balance everywhere. Heat is balanced by the freezing cold; poverty with riches; conflict with harmony. And then there was the North of England, where He put the wisest, kindest, most talented people. And the balance? You guessed it – the "tossers" He put down South to govern us.

As if to bear out that epigram, Lord Howell – George Osborne’s father-in-law – wedged his foot even further in his mouth by claiming not to know east from west. His idea of an apology was to infer that he really meant North West when he said North East. That’s all right then, isn’t it?

The upset to the weather continues to be a major topic of conversation. After returning to the UK in the middle of an – albeit shortlived – heatwave a couple of weeks ago, I had the spectacular sight today of a lightning strike in the valley just a few hundred metres from where I am sitting. The storm is also dumping a few millimetres of rain onto the garden that has only just dried out.

That was shortly before I logged onto Twitter to see what’s going on and was informed of a “yellow warning” for rain in London and the South East. Nice to know the Met Office is on the ball.

And my Christmas cactus – that I rescued from certain death at a local supermarket five-and-a-half years ago – has decided to flower!

Discerning readers will have noticed a prolonged pause between the last post and this one. I have been sojourning on the Ionian island of Corfu, where a pleasant 38⁰ has been the norm while Britain has been sweltering in the high 20s and low 30s. Although the most northerly and westerly of all the Greek islands, Corfu does still have the common problem of water being a precious commodity. It also finds renewable energy a ready source. What was puzzling, though, is how the solar-heated water contrived to be hotter in the evening than during the day.

The fruit crop this year suffered from an early heatwave in April, while we were clearing snow, which meant the blossom came before there were sufficient bees around to pollinate it. A second crop is very late so will probably never come to anything. It’s another side to the freakish weather that some people still don’t acknowledge as climate change.

I have come home to find my shorts and sandals are still in demand and the spring trickling from the hillside onto my lawn via a land drain has finally dried up. Ironically, it means the wetland plants I scrounged from a neighbour with a similar problem to soak up the resulting ‘water feature’ now need watering!

The billboard for my local newspaper has been shouting the news that the council is planning to save £1m next year by – among other things – closing down local recycling points. That follows just a year on from an act of vandalism by the county council when it closed the so-called ‘neighbourhood recycling centre’ (or tip, as it used to be called) in my town. It was an issue the victorious Labour candidate in my county council ward fought his campaign on. Now the newly-elected Labour borough council is to take the axe to more recycling facilities.

Still, at least Ed Davey has taken up the cudgels against climate change sceptics. After all, he is the Energy and Climate change Secretary. 

At the launch of the Met Office’s new Climate Service UK, he said: “Some sections of the press are giving out uncritical campaigning platforms to individuals and lobby groups who reject outright the fact that climate change is the result of human activity.

“This is not the serious science of challenging, checking, and probing; this is destructive and loudly clamouring scepticism born of vested interest, nimbyism, public-seeking controversialism, or sheer blinkered, dogmatic, political bloody-mindedness.”