You think things are bad? Pretty soon, these will be the good old days

Traditionally, August was always “silly season”: a month in which newspapers would fill their pages with frivolous, offbeat and utterly inconsequential stories – simply because there was no proper news to report. So we would read that, for example, cows moo with regional accents (August 2006), the Milky Way boasts a constellation shaped like the face of Victor Meldrew (August 2005), and that the greatest number of people you can fit inside a phone box is 14 (August 2003). On August 4, 2009, meanwhile, The Times announced the death of “Benson, Britain’s best-loved carp”. A photo of the late, lamented fish dominated the front page.

At the time, such trivial non-stories may have seemed a waste of good ink. But how we miss them now. Because today, like Benson the carp, silly season is no more. This August, all the news is deadly serious, as we find ourselves engulfed by a dozen major crises at once. The near-collapse of the NHS, soaring inflation, terrifying energy bills, seas full of sewage, train strikes, postal strikes, barrister strikes, airport chaos, heatwave, drought… And then of course there’s the small matter of Russia’s war on Ukraine, and the  threat of nuclear annihilation.

What a blessed relief it would be to read of a parrot that can sing The Archers theme tune, or a potato in the shape of Chris Tarrant. No such luck. But the worst of it is, at Christmas we’ll all look back on this August with heartfelt longing. Because by then, things will be far worse. As is now clear, Britain has entered an age of “permacrisis”: an ever-swelling deluge of simultaneous national emergencies. Still, I suppose it’s possible that this nightmare may have at least one very small upside.

It’ll finally teach us to appreciate how lucky we are. Or at least, how lucky we used to be.

As we get older, of course, we all come to view our own youth as a golden age. I have an uneasy feeling, however, that in my case it isn’t mere nostalgia. It’s actually true. As evidence, I would cite one period in particular. My time at university: 1998 to 2001.

I’m not wistful about this period because I loved being a student. In fact, I hated being a student. But, from today’s vantage point, I would posit that 1998-2001 – after Diana, but before 9/11 – was the single happiest period in British history. I say this not because anything especially good happened. I say it because, by historical standards, relatively little bad happened. By and large, life in Britain was dull – and therefore happy.

For proof, look back at the newspapers. Britain seemed to be living through a three-year silly season. Front-page crises of the time included Man Utd withdrawing temporarily from the FA Cup, Anthea Turner eating a chocolate bar at her wedding, and fans of Coronation Street protesting against a storyline about Deirdre Barlow going to jail. Here’s how uneventful life was: Tony Blair, the actual prime minister, publicly urged the soap’s writers to free Deirdre, because “anyone with eyes in their head” could see she was innocent.

This same period saw the rise of celebrity culture and reality TV. Serious commentators railed against this trend, declaring it the sign of a sick society. In retrospect, though, the opposite was true. It was the sign of a society in rude good health. After all, why were the front pages filled with stories about celebrities and reality TV? Simple: there was so little else to fill them with. Britain was politically stable, and enjoying robust economic growth. Other than Peter Mandelson resigning every two weeks, it’s hard to recall much from Westminster. From today’s perspective, Private Eye annuals of the time seem startlingly flat. There was so little of substance to mock, they were reduced to endless tame gags about Chris Evans’s drinking or Nigella Lawson’s recipes.

Halcyon days – if only we’d realised at the time. But, as the eminent political scientist Joni Mitchell once so wisely observed, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. All we can do now is pray that, one day, in the distant future, life in Britain will be blissfully boring once again.