BELGRADE, THURSDAY

“POISSON FROID!”

Luc Avantgarde is a man who shoots from the hip. Mostly because he is in a wheelchair following a near-death encounter with a grizzly bear in northern Canada.

The French climate scientist, who predicted that the combination of hot July weather and overcrowded tourism might cause fires in southern Europe this year, says that the reason the British find any temperature above 20 degrees Celsius difficult to cope with is that they are an inherently cold people, a feature which has been exacerbated by hundreds of years of frozen indifference to their own poor and the victims of their colonial conquests.

“Also, the single-sex schools and the football terraces, they have added to the problem. Les Anglais have settled into a temperature range consistent with watching sport in Scunthorpe, and standing under cold showers for overly-long periods. Over the centuries, this cold exterior has sunk deep and become a thermostat for the whole population. The cold Englishman – almost a cliche – has now become a major problem for them in these times of climate change. They just cannot cope. The cold fish cannot stand the warm water, as we say in Paris. So they whinge and whine and bellyache. And the rest of us drink absinthe and put plugs in our ears. I suppose if it drives them from the beaches of the Mediterranean, then perhaps climate change might not be all that bad.”