It’s a beautiful day outside; clear blue sky, scarcely the whisper of a breeze, temperature hovering around a gently cossetting 20C, greenfinch wheezing away nearby. This is good news for me because as soon as I finish this article I intend to spend the rest of the day under the horse chestnut tree with a pitcher of neat alcohol. But it is also good news for Britain and the rest of the world.

Last Thursday we were all frightened out of our wits by a new report from the Met Office about what life in Britain would be like in 2080: scorching African sun, all the crops dying, plagues of locusts and mosquitos. Cows collapsing in the fields because they had not worn enough Factor 30; half of Yorkshire and Norfolk washed away by the sea, middle England flooded by swollen rivers, Essex a lifeless arid desert (no change there, then); impeccably well-mannered middle-class people on their knees sucking the last molecules of moisture from dusty, exhausted standpipes in Notting Hill; famine, pestilence and death flapping its wings over our heads like a big black bat, cackling to itself.

This was the UK Climate Projections 2009, as envisaged by the Met Office and presented by a dutifully grave Hilary Benn, who insisted that we all had a responsibility to do something, anything, to stave off this apocalypse. So I did. I checked out the Met Office forecast for my village for the next 48 hours. Cloudy, it said. Bit of rain. Temperature of 17C, wind gusting at a remarkably precise 31mph, it said.

Short of predicting 6ft snowdrifts, ball lightning and gallons of newts falling from the sky, how much more wrong could it be?

And if it is that wrong over a forecast for the next 48 hours, how much faith should we have when it tells us, with a sort of smug and overweening confidence, what’s going to happen in 70 years’ time? How about none whatsoever?

Something terrible has happened to our weathermen since that evening in October 1987 when Michael Fish, with a patronising smirk, assured us we need not worry our silly heads about any of this hurricane nonsense – about five hours before Britain was flattened.

I think it is a case of Met Office overcompensation. These days they have hair-trigger reactions and are given to biblical pronouncements. Last weekend, for example, we were assured that by Monday we would all be drowned, with vast swathes of the country submerged by floods. It did not happen, anywhere. Thank the Lord the Met Office wasn’t around in Noah’s day with its comprehensive five-day forecast for the Ararat region or that dove would never have been released.

On our last bank holiday it warned people that we were in for a weekend of misery – but the weather was lovely, provoking Bournemouth to complain that it had been deprived of vast amounts of tourist money by this baleful forecast. When eventually they become convinced that the weather really is going to be nice and warm, they start up with those miserable don’t-go-outside-you’ll-die-of-cancer warnings.

It is not allowable to dispute the 2009 UK Climate Projections because if you do you will be what the eco-monkeys and the journalists, especially BBC journalists, call a “climate-change denier”, which is almost as bad as being a Holocaust denier, except without the Jewish angle.

In other words, “climate-change deniers” are not people who query some of the science and indeed the hysteria of the eco-lobby, but a form of human filth who dispute proven, historical fact. The description “climate-change denier” is used more and more frequently and spat out with almost the same venom as are the descriptions “racist” and “Israeli”.

So let’s just be thankful that we aren’t going to be around in 2080, not us nor our children’s children. My mother-in-law is a born again end-time Christian who has been told by Jesus Christ that the world is going to end in the late autumn of 2017. She is a bit sketchy on the evidence for this, but she knew it was going to be sunny today.

+ Do you ever get a little worried about our social services departments, suspicious that they might sometimes employ people who are a little odd and maybe not entirely suitable for the task of providing pastoral care to the needy?

Such as caseworker Lynda Barnes, from Nailsea, to whose care the troubled children of Bath and north east Somerset have been entrusted. She was convicted of having tried to hire a hitman for £10,000 to knock off her former husband. Her employers knew all about this, but thought no more about it than if it had been a parking ticket.

I suppose it’s entirely possible that in today’s social services such a conviction actually counts in favour of the applicant and is seen as an act of feminine empowerment, or something, and that all female social workers should at some point attempt to kill their husbands, if they are stupid enough to have one.

Barnes’s conviction was spotted when she lied through her teeth on a witness stand in another case and a sharp-eyed judge consequently rummaged through her personal history. Perhaps she should be moved away from the kiddies, though, to domestic violence.

Don’t flip your wig, Lembit

As a taxpayer I would be more than happy to pay the cost of Lembit Opik’s wigs, which he claimed on expenses, if it made the chap a little happier. I imagine him perpetually hunkered down behind a sofa, terrified of the rapidly approaching comet which is about to annihilate us all, a Romanian bimbo caterwauling in the background. If donning “the mother of all wigs” (£19.99) or the “film star wig” (£9.99) was able to induce a little calm in the man, then it is money well spent. But Lembit claims that the wigs were bought for a charitable event, and this is more of a worry. He has the modern, corporate view of charity: it’s compulsory and should incur no cost to the individual – ie, the very opposite of charity as we understand it.

Eye of newt, CD of Abba . . .

The Roman Catholic Church is not what it once was. It has lost a little rigour. A bunch of witches in Stockport requested that they be allowed to hold their October witches’ ball, with Abba tribute band, in the local church hall. Instead of burning these dangerously mad hags alive or drowning them in the nearby River Tame, the Catholic diocese merely sent back a short letter explaining they thought the idea “inappropriate”.

Of course, the witches have objected. Led by a woman called Sandra Davis – who, since the change of life presumably, now wishes to be called Amethyst Selmeseline – they are whining that it isn’t fair. What is the world coming to? Can you imagine Torquemada using the word “inappropriate”? And since when did witches listen to Abba?

+ Haven’t you heard enough about that gallant nurse from the Crimean war, Mary Seacole? Granted she deserves our respect. But now they are building a big statue of the lady in London. Her place in the school curriculum outweighs the amount of time devoted to Disraeli, Bismarck, Abraham Lincoln, Karl Marx, Jules Michelet, Tennyson, Charles Dickens, Gladstone, Clive of India, Queen Victoria andFlorence Nightingale combined.

Your children, if they are educated at a state school, will be able to tell you everything about Ms Seacole, nothing about the rest. I wonder if there was some other mysterious quality she possessed which makes her so compelling? And if I’m right, if it isn’t all a little patronising.

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