Even if it is about to rain, the damage has been done — with Britain’s arable harvest set to fall to a record low. No wonder the country’s most famous farmer, Jeremy Clarkson, has changed his mind on climate change. Wildfires offer a visceral intensity that other expressions of extreme weather do not. A hosepipe ban might be frustrating, but it isn’t potentially fatal (except for your much-loved begonias). In the South, an ongoing blaze in the New Forest has hammered local businesses, killed a great many ground-nesting birds, and is set to shut down the A31 for a fortnight. That’d kill businesses across the south if it extended to the bank holiday. 

And while that fire was largely unnoticed by the rest of the country, what really grabbed people’s attention was the blaze that engulfed whole streets in Stourbridge, razing almost 40 homes. Well, that and the national emergency alert sent to millions of phones warning of a “very high risk of wildfires nationally”. A major fire, which could kill many people, looked entirely plausible. Contributing to that heightened sense of panic was the fact that that two separate trains — both in the south of England — were derailed, with 20 people injured in one. While neither incident is yet to be attributed to the weather, high temperatures seem the most likely explanation. 

Water shortages, fires, critical infrastructure starting to buckle: it’s like a checklist for the early stages of climate-induced breakdown. Gradually, and then all at once, it has become clear we aren’t prepared for the world now coming into view. Least of all our politicians.

The politics of climate, for obvious reasons, dovetails with that of energy. In spite of their loathing for one another, deep greens and climate-skeptic capitalists agree on one thing: energy abundance cannot exist in a world without fossil fuels. In the short term, we can’t have both decarbonization while using more energy than ever. Thus, at the same time that Burnham is expected to respond to unprecedented heat and drought, others are saying he must grant licenses to the Jackdaw and Rosebank sites in the North Sea. The electorate wants competing things too: to respond to climate change — a recent YouGov poll showed 74% of the public care about the issue — but for that response to have a minimal impact on daily life.

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In the long term, energy abundance and decarbonization could go hand-in-hand — certainly if you include nuclear energy and hydrogen — but even an optimist such as myself will acknowledge a rapid transition will inevitably include delays, gaffes and mistakes.

Burnham has to navigate all this, not least because here — perhaps uniquely — Reform and the Greens believe they can snatch votes away from him. Until recently, both Zack Polanski and Nigel Farage have been playing national politics on easy mode, given that with Keir Starmer, they were up against the very archetype of a machine politician. But Burnham is a far more able opponent: a specialist in parasocial relations and political guerrilla warfare. Nonetheless, on climate issues, when it come to the Greens, and on energy and the cost of living with Reform, Labour still appears unsteady. The Prime Minister’s tactics-first approach won’t suffice. 

And the stakes are high. A key pillar of Burnham’s political project is to remove the Greens as a threat and make his party the electoral default for progressives once more. Should he fail, Reform would have a decent chance of winning a Westminster majority — a prospect that, owing to an embarrassing summer for Farage and his party, is currently underpriced. We should not forget that the reason Labour put forward Burnham for the Makerfield seat, where he won his fateful byelection, is that the Greens’ Hannah Spencer had won the Gorton and Denton by-election in February — from which Burnham had been barred from standing. A huge part of our now PM’s pitch was his ability to win back Green voters — a task that became existential for Labour after May’s local elections. 

And yet, however canny Burnham might be — and no matter how far his approval ratings diverge from Polanski’s — further climate-related disruption could see the Greens bounce back. It’s even possible that the party could scale new heights if the issue were to continue to grow in salience: something which does not seem unlikely as another heatwave is predicted for September. While Polanski has successfully expanded his party’s political offer beyond the environment and social justice, championing Gaza and the cost of living crisis, climate remains its bread and butter. At the start of August, after all, Polanski declared that climate change is the biggest threat to the UK since the Second World War. Naturally, his critics responded with rolled eyes and snorts, but even if you don’t think such rhetoric matches the reality, there are people who do. And it’s those people — some of whom voted Labour in 2024 — that Polanski wants to reach. 

Perhaps next time, borrowing from the social media-friendly tactics of the PM, Polanski will make a similar assertion, only in front of a smoldering woodland, or a fire-ravaged Dunwich Heath. And when the floods inevitably come in the winter, perhaps he’ll make like Farage and don a Barbour and Hunter wellies. Climate change — and the attendant increasingly chaotic weather patterns — means the Greens will remain a national political force. That undermines a central plank of Burnhamism: that Labour can re-hegemonize the Left vote. 

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The intensity of this summer’s weather also presents problems for Farage. Certainly, he’ll find it increasingly difficult to present “environmental issues” as a fringe obsession when Britain is literally burning. “This is just the weather now,” is how an electrician I recently spoke to put it, fresh from installing his own air-con. Farage’s outriders know there’s little upside in demonizing such people, even if the puritanical Greens may equally struggle to win over a public increasingly enthusiastic for the joys of air conditioning. 

And as the weather changes, views on climate change will do too. Right now, Farage disputes the science, and Badenoch rejects Net Zero, but there could soon come a time when both feel they have no choice but to explore other emission-reduction policies, from electric cars to nuclear power stations. In any case, don’t be surprised if figures from both Reform and the Tories start to lean into conservation issues: a kind of Countryfile centrism where Reform wax lyrical about painted lady butterflies, and domestic food supply chains, as a stand-in for fossil-fuel emissions. Equally, expect the conversation around North Sea drilling to focus on granting a license to the Jackdaw site, rather than Rosebank, which is larger. Calls to open fracking sites, or re-open coal mines, could also abate. 

Meanwhile, if things keep getting hotter, the next general election could be preceded by a catastrophic weather event. Imagine having to fight for votes with parts of the country beset by flame and drought. 

Burnham is likable, and is perhaps the most normal prime minister in living memory, something discernible from his encyclopedic knowledge of Bristol City football club. His t-shirted, everyman bonhomie makes people feel good about themselves, an invaluable commodity for a politician. But can he also deliver strategic thinking on energy security and climate change? In a moment of great disruption, football-coach charm won’t be sufficient. In the long Nineties, politicians could get by on charisma and effective media management. But that moment has gone, and isn’t coming back. 

Every day is the same: clear blue, suffocatingly hot, uncannily still. No one can remember what rain feels like. The parks are brown, and gardens turning to dust. Stressed trees are suddenly dropping huge boughs. At night, you see foxes all over the place, thirstily hunting water.

It used to be fun to indulge in pathetic fallacy, and project hyperbolic human sentiments onto harmless old British weather systems: brooding skies, raging storms, and so forth. But right now, in some places, the implacable heat is in charge, in a very-much-not-metaphorical sense. The feelings it produces in bodies are pretty basic: sweatiness, exhaustion, a mind as vacant as the eerily cloudless sky overhead. But assuming we can find the mental energy, it is worth asking: how do we feel about the new kind of summer, rather than simply because of it? Enthused and leaning into the piña coladas? Scared? Sad?

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The twilight of the ladyboss

By Kathleen Stock

I feel discombobulated — though that could be because of the screaming sirens that have accompanied the writing of this piece, as dozens of fire engines and ambulances rushed to a derailed train nearby. Four carriages went over; two passengers were seriously injured. Though not confirmed, observers say it looks like the rails buckled in the heat. In other news, the brambles around here are out far too early. The pond at the end of my road is silting up, and I worry about the fish and the ducks.

Inevitably, the usuals are using the fifth heatwave of the English summer to hammer home their preferred theories about the origins of about climate change. But I can’t be bothered to attend, and it isn’t just because of the brain fog. I find it impossible to navigate such large-scale intellectual terrain, where the very nature of the problem is radically contested, let alone the solutions.

Whether apocalyptic or deflationary, every point in this area seems to be delivered with identical confidence, in equally technical language. So who do you trust? A popular way to negotiate the thicket seems to be to pick the political side you hate most, then lampoon everything its representatives say on the matter, and conclude the opposite must be right. Unfortunately, though, I dislike Right and Left equally for different reasons, so that doesn’t much help.

Apparently unconcerned about the extra energy pull on data centers, this week the ever prolix Will Self took on Jordan Peterson about climate catastrophism. Peterson, himself no stranger to verbosity, had published a piece in the Telegraph, also full of contemptuous mockery for the other side. Peterson thinks that, when measuring trends, we should include the Medieval Warm Period. Self thinks this is daft, since nobody could measure warmth reliably in the medieval period and it wasn’t a global effect anyway. Peterson says that rising carbon dioxide produces increased greening and agricultural yields, not desertification; Self says this is true, but ignores the fact that biodiversity is still being reduced. You might assume that tapping the biodiversity sign would nail the argument; then again, others argue it is measured too heterogeneously to be a useful concept at all. Back and forth, the argument rages through each heatwave, a mix of uncertain predictions, categories at cross-purposes, and differently ranked values. It is not surprising that even some Green party members seem to be zoning out.

Something went wrong with the high-level discourse a while ago. Attempting to use words as behavioral prompts rather than accurate descriptions, ecologically-minded types made their desire to frighten or guilt-trip the masses a little too obvious, and neutral listeners started to switch off. Meanwhile some on the Right offered lots of stubborn skepticism, but not much else: little acknowledgment of local social and environmental losses, whatever their cause; no nuanced plan of action, except to keep buggering on as before. These days, the discussion about renewables in this country is absurdly polarized, with one side talking mainly of benefits, and the other talking mainly of harms.

I suggest, then, that we detach consideration of the local situation from the bigger picture, at least for a bit. First, whatever the causes and consequences of global warming, a small country like ours can’t do anything about it alone. Second, clashing over the wider context seems to be hampering useful consensus-building across party lines about how to manage regional problems — the atrocious working conditions, sweltering hospital wards, failing water supplies, buckling railway lines, and so on — and that’s all pretty urgent. Banning disposable barbecues is not going to be enough.

Relatedly, ignoring the global discourse might allow us to better notice what we, in particular, are losing. Our landscapes, industries, and living conditions are changing before our eyes. The least we can do is pay it attention, mourn what is vanishing, and help mitigate the impacts; not change the subject to dramatic losses elsewhere (Left) or deny reality altogether (Right). Jordan Peterson lives in Arizona. Maybe he’s right that the planet is getting greener overall, but yesterday it was 38 degrees in Kew Gardens. The Corsican Pine probably liked it; the ancient yews and oaks definitely did not.

And it is okay to be sad and unsettled by this new normal, in ways it is impossible to rationally explain or defend. Just as grief for people or pets doesn’t require a defense, nor should this. It is indeed strange and distressing that parts of the New Forest are now blackened and ruined, and others still on fire; that the cider apple harvest is failing, and the harebell disappearing; that there are hardly any wasps. I think with anxiety about the elderly people round about me wilting in their oven-like flats; about the two fires reported in surrounding fields only today; about local farmers agonizing about stunted wheat and barley yields. It is obviously possible to worry about such problems, and for politicians to form plans to address them, without espousing any grand theory about the role of carbon dioxide.

I anticipate defensive reactions. How can I claim to feel alarm over such small-scale problems when I’m unwilling to look the man-made source squarely in the face, to translate such feelings into action at a global level? But as I say, I don’t see how any action of mine — or even that of the British government — could really help. What we have is a near-impossible coordination problem for major world leaders, who would first have to agree on the nature of the issue and its solutions, then get huge numbers of companies and citizens to toe the line, or else impose authoritarian constraints. Self himself says that to deal effectively with climate change, among other things we would have to “control markets, impose rationing and civic obligation, [and] enact… particular forms of restraint for which the established political vocabulary has no adequate name”. He thinks humanity can and should do this. I think he sounds mad.

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The sun gods are punishing Britain

By Martin Shaw

Admittedly, if you take my line, you have to lose the comforting illusion that there is some global fix available, if only we could find it. That may be a reality too far for some. Yet there are people firmly within the environmental movement who argue for some form of localism on similar grounds; and it seems to me that even the most contrarian conservative skeptics should do the same. Indeed, I don’t see how they can properly call themselves conservatives if they do not. It’s not good enough to sit around poking holes in the Left’s preferred climate theories and saying nothing else, as if you were an obstreperous audience member at a conference. Whatever the explanation, our bit of the world is still heating up, and flooding more often; there are valuable things here to be treasured and saved, suffering to be alleviated.

It is now 30 degrees in my room. I scroll idly for a minute or two, and learn that part of Stratford-upon-Avon is on fire. Now is the summer of our discontent, and it seems unlikely to be the last. Once the heat breaks, there’s a lot of work to be done.

When thunder does hit — as it did spectacularly this week — it’s seen in mythology as being the gods complaining. From a Greek point of view, all this storming and lightning is what happens when Zeus protests to Helios, god of the sun. Even Olympus gets rattled sometimes.

I’m currently picking my way from London to the hills of Italy, where I’ll be following St Francis, a rather more reasonable fellow. But under the terrible glare of the sun, I’m rattled too. I peer up, thinking about our mythic relationship with that coppery beast hovering above our heads.

The sun is pretty much the first thing we started to tell stories about. On the summer solstice, well-meaning folk gather at Stonehenge and chant, dance and praise the sunrise. It’s easy to sneer at such archaic behavior, but I think it’s more instinctual than we may like to admit. It’s a sensual experience rather than a conceptual one: there’s no knotty theological issue to bend your head around. A First Nations friend of mine was once mocked by an evangelical for praising the sun in ceremony. “At least we can actually see it,” he grinned, as the pink-faced fellow jabbed his finger and ranted. My friend had a point. We are warm-blooded creatures and we love to look at beautiful things.

In Christianity, though, there’s an awareness of the difference between worshipping the creator and worshipping the created. Still, there’s a sense of a divine current that moves through this world. Whether beholding a heron lifting from the Dart river, or watching the dawn rise after an all-night rave in Shepherds Bush, it’s something to be alive to. And where I live, on Dartmoor, the old name for the sun is Belus. If you forget to praise Belus with a song or story once in a while your sheep may turn to stone.

In Jez Butterworth’s Jerusalem, we find an England still teeming with giants, sprites, luminous moons and rugged suns. Part of his play’s mesmeric hold is that it speaks to something we still bashfully recognize. It’s all still around if we pay attention: an earth that seeks our admiration. It’s a William Blake way of seeing, something quietly present beneath the hubbub of the World Cup and geopolitics. I walk the boundaries of my village most nights to sink into that sumptuous reality. I watch the sun come up and go down, then a pint in the Bay Horse. It’s almost too much.

Within myth, the sun in full beam is symbolic of fortune. Only last week I was in Dublin in a newsagent. I had a little time, so I let a lad in the queue before me. He looked as if he might not even have had a bank account. He promptly bought a scratch card and won half a million euros. As they say, “the sun comes out for him”. The whole shop shimmered at that moment.

That’s often the role of the sun in mythology: a life-giver. Think of characters like Helios, Greek god of the sun, who brings light to humans and gods by leathering his golden chariot across the sky. We have the Egyptian Ra, associated with the sun at noon, when heat is reaching its absolute fullness. Ra is out there encouraging things to grow, coaxing warmth from chill, sailing around the heavens in a celestial barge before heading down into the darkness to tackle serpents and demons after nightfall. The kind of thing we like our gods doing.

But that’s only one side of the picture. The Aztec deity Huitzilopochtli required nothing less than human sacrifice to keep distributing his rays. If he wasn’t charging about the heavens then he was down in the gunk and blood of battle, possessing Aztec warriors. His worshippers would take live captives so that they could sacrifice them afterwards.

It might not have been Huitzilopochtli’s doing, but a few weeks ago, Arthur’s Seat, the hill overlooking Edinburgh, caught fire. It was an apocalyptic sight. Were Arthur and his men about to erupt out of the turf and bring our squabbling nation to some kind of equilibrium? In truth, characters associated with the sun are rarely known for sagacity. They are usually hotheads.

Take Samson, whose name means Son of the Sun. He’s a judge — think a chief rather than a fellow with wig and gavel — of Israel at a moment when they have almost entirely lost touch with the best of themselves. In many ways, he represents the profundity of their lostness. He’s best known for his huge bursts of strength and his huge erotic appetite. He has a little of the Trickster about him, sometimes dispensing odd riddles before his next massacre, or making the odd quip as he holds aloft the donkey jawbone with which he slew 1,000 Philistines.

As a sun-associated figure, Samson doesn’t have a lot of obvious nuance. You probably remember Delilah, the woman who coaxed from him the secret of his strength: his long hair. Long hair has been perceived the world over as connected to both strength and the sun. The seven locks that are cut from Samson in the encounter with Delilah are often read as the seven rays of the sun.

The sun at midday, particularly today, reminds me of Samson: unrelenting. It’s a kind of strength that can incinerate but is also of tremendous power. Samson seems to arise from the lineage of the Sumerian wild man Gilgamesh, and there was a burst of comparative mythological work on him as a kind of solar deity in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The village Beth Shemesh, which is referred to frequently in Samson’s story, owes its name to a “temple of the sun”. Like Heracles, Samson slew a lion with his bare hands, tore down the gates of a city, and was betrayed by a woman. It’s been argued that Delilah is Hebrew wordplay on “Layla”, which means night. With his capture, and his subsequent blinding, she functions as night.

In Christian thought there’s a distinction given between gifts from the Spirit and fruit of the Spirit. The gift is Samson’s tremendous strength, the fruit is what he does with it. Sun characters often have great charisma in stories, but there’s a lack of charity in what may grow from such talent.

As so often in myth, this apparent excess is part of a wider balance. In fairy tales, for example, there’s attention to three colors, red, black, and white. Think of the black of Snow White’s hair, the red of her lips, the white of her cheek. In the past decades both anthropologists and mythologists have made comparisons to the colors representing life stages.

The Red is the oomph of youth, individuation, getting ahead, being visible. It brings heat. It’s about success and causing the appropriate stir to get there. It’s dashing, heated and all about display. At its best, it’s inspirational, and at its worst it is crude and rather ruthless.

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The Black is associated with midlife, with decline rather than endless success. The Black is about knowledge of roads not traveled. It means the insight of failure and the educative power of limitation. In mythology, real cultures are defined not by endless growth but a capacity to make a covenant with limit when needed. And the White is eldership. It’s the largesse that enables you to make decisions that benefit your wider community, not just your own ends. It doesn’t abandon the drive of Red and the sobriety of Black, but instead integrates them into something approaching wise choices.

When there’s too much sun, we tend to make overheated decisions. It’s worth looking at our own leaders this week and getting a sense of what color they are speaking from. Do they need more black, or the expansiveness of the white? Maybe the drive of the red is what’s needed. But too much red leads to burnout, rashness and general chaos. Too much red is endlessly bragging, all hat and no cattle, all sizzle and no steak.

In the old stories, when things start to heat up excessively, you need to get the cool of the black into the mix, or the even-handedness of the white. Heat like this works on the irrational side of our nature, gets us muttering into our beer about the end times. As it happens, “apocalypse”, a Greek word, literally means “to uncover”, a revealing of some sort. And today, as our fractious country smolders, it feels like the curtains are being ripped down. As a mythologist I’ll be keeping a close eye on the simmering of Arthur’s Seat as well as the hills of St Francis. I’ll hope for the saint’s patient sense of wonder rather than Samson’s jagged flare-ups. When things get hot, cleave to the cool.

Then, as if acting as warm-up man for the coming entreaclement of Luton Airport’s runway, the UK’s former energy and climate change minister, Sir John Hayes, went on Radio 4 to argue that all this fuss over a heatwave showed that “we’ve lost our sense of what’s normal”. (“I can remember the summer of 1975,” he declared, puzzling anyone who could remember the summer of 1976.) Three days later, his home county sent a four-wheeled gritter named Spreaddie Mercury to discharge itself over Lincolnshire roads liquefying at a record-breaking 56.3°C.

Then, just as I was about to finish this piece, Esquire magazine revealed that Chris Evans — the Knives Out one not the TFI Friday one — had been detected trying to “normalise” something. When you hear about things being normalised, it’s usually in reference to lying or racism or toxic masculinity, but thankfully Evans had just decided to go to the premiere of The Gray Man wearing a white vest under his suit jacket. “The normalisation of sexy, sexy menswear,” the mag confirmed, “has been coming for some time.”

At our moment in history, is the word “normal” exhausted beyond use? Is it time to retire it? We expect it to do so much. The normality of Sally Rooney’s Normal People, for example, resides in its characters’ struggles with mental illness; the novel argues for the ordinariness and ubiquity of experiences that fiction might once have treated as exceptional. It’s not the same normal as Planet Normal, the Daily Telegraph podcast that offers views on Covid policy that are not broadly shared by either the public or the scientific community. So what, if anything, does it now mean?

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Could you spot a conspiracy theorist?

By Matthew Sweet

These are questions for Sarah Chaney, research fellow at the Queen Mary Centre for the History of the Emotions, which in recent years has produced exciting work on British weeping, shame in early modern Spain, and Busman’s stomach (a psychosomatic disorder that troubled double-decker drivers around the time of the 1937 Coronation). Chaney’s new book, Am I Normal? takes a single term and, like a long, chatty entry from Raymond Williams’s classic Keywords (1976), traces its sources and explores the different uses to which it has been put.

Her first lesson about “normal” as we understand it today is that its history is short. In essence, her book is an account of an escape. In 1800, “normal” was a mathematical term designating a straight line perpendicular to the tangent. But in 1840, along came Adolphe Quetelet, a Belgian astronomer and statistician who loosed the term into the space of a new discipline he called “social physics”. (Auguste Comte had thought of it first, but coined another word — “sociology” — to ensure nobody confused their work.) Taking data on the chest measurements of 5,738 Scottish soldiers from a two-decades-old copy of the Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal, Quetelet plotted these numbers on a graph to produce an average chest size, rather as astronomers used multiple readings to establish the length of a planetary orbit. As revolution brought chaos and disruption to Belgium, Quetelet found that on paper, all measurable human qualities — from height and weight to propensity for suicide — fell into the quiet and simple order of the bell curve. We still call this “normal distribution”.

Quetelet knew that his calculations were not offering a simple description of reality. The average soldier who emerged from his numbers did not exist. Not all who followed in his footsteps were so clear-sighted. As Todd Rose relates in The End of Average, the spectral figure of the average man led US Air Force designers to produce a generation of jet planes with cockpits that fitted nobody. (It’s also why nuclear families are easier to find in adverts than censuses.)

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There’s another story here that’s just as big. Chaney spells out the problem with the data itself: it shows an enormous bias towards white middle-class individuals, who comprise less than 12% of the world’s population, but make up 80% of subjects in medical studies and 96% of subjects in psychological ones. The normal isn’t just a phantom; it’s one raised from the experience of a minority. Yet it is used to create standards for a world in which everyone must live.

Quetelet’s work generated a universe of good and ghastly work based on averages — the Body Mass Index, typologies of criminals, Florence Nightingale’s hospital reforms, John Snow’s discovery of the waterborne nature of cholera, the IQ test, the Kinsey Report into the sex habits of Americans, eugenic projects from Francis Galton to the Nazis.

Amazingly, Am I Normal? suggests that the data didn’t even have to be real in order to have an impact. For instance, statistics about the poor physical state of British recruits to the Anglo-Boer War are often credited for starting the process that gave us the 1904 Committee on Physical Deterioration, free school milk and — eventually — the National Health Service. The numbers are scary. 8,000 of the 11,000 men who volunteered in Manchester, it was said, were unfit to serve. Chaney uses a 2008 paper by the medical historian Vanessa Heggie to show that this figure has no source but the rambling polemics of Arnold White, a failed Liberal parliamentary candidate with a thing for antisemitic conspiracy theories. (“When we survey other nations,” he wrote in Efficiency and Empire (1901), we “perceive how weakness, self-indulgence, want of foresight, self-respect, culture and industry are enabling astute, industrious, or unscrupulous Jews to destroy the power of whole classes.”) A culture convinced of its own declining state did not ask for White’s receipts. It had a picture of itself that matched its prejudices.

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But Chaney’s work also yields a warning about making the same kind of mistake about the past. In one of her chapters, she uses the brutal practice of the clitoridectomy to illustrate how 19th-century medicine attempted to regulate female sexuality. The operation, she argues, was “a cure for sexual desire” that “acquired a dubious reputation after the discrediting of its main advocate, gynaecologist Isaac Baker Brown, in 1867”. She is not the first to use Brown to tell a story about normality imposed by a surgical blade — but I’m not sure whether the facts really serve her thesis.

Scandal erupted around Brown when it was revealed that he had been operating on patients without consent. The subsequent inquiry also allowed his peers to pass judgement on the procedure itself. They used words such as “barbarous”, “quackery” and “terrorism”. I can find only one example of an English doctor other than Baker who ever carried out it out. It was the opposite of normal. It was shockingly extreme.

Moreover, the case that brought Brown down was not the one that we might naturally imagine – a Victorian wife punished for her desires. The central figure in the affair, Mary Hancock, suffered from severe bouts of mental illness. She saved pus from her blisters in a gallipot, believed that she was turning into a crystal, imagined that she was Princess Charlotte of Wales, who had died in childbirth in 1817. Her doctors were concerned about what they perceived as a manic sexual energy, but marriage, not mutilation, seems to have been their preferred cure.

All this became a matter for the courts only when her husband, Robert Peaty, fought, unsuccessfully, to save her from the machinations of her family, who wanted to annul the marriage for financial gain. As the astonished press coverage indicates, there was nothing normal about any of this (except, perhaps, the punishment meted out to the doctor who cut Mary Hancock with steel scissors of his own design). A misplaced scholarly tradition of seeing the clitoridectomy as an exemplar of Victorian cruelty may be the only reason that Chaney implies otherwise.

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Ironically, Am I Normal? is just the sort of book that might save a researcher from error. Its pages are full of implied warnings against the unquestioning use of data, particularly when it fits preconceived ideas too neatly. But as Raymond Williams reminds us, this is hazardous work. Many of the entries in Keywords begin by saying that the term under discussion is “one of the most difficult words in the language”. “Normal” is not on his list. But, as Chaney demonstrates, it merits the same careful handling. It’s a word that imposes a false picture of the world and may sometimes cause us much pain. But it’s one for which we’re grateful when we’re trying to work out how many Paracetamol to take, or how to read a red hot weather forecast.

A few weeks ago, a clip of the scruffy CBBC personality Hacker T. Dog went viral. It was a short moment from a 2016 TV show in which he made a strange emphatic statement to his co-presenter, Lauren Layfield. “We’re normal men!” he declared. “We’re just innocent men.” Layfield, her face close to his snout, dissolved into incapable laughter.

Hacker is a little glove puppet with button eyes, but this was probably a more intelligent and sensible deployment of the word “normal” than the examples at the beginning of this piece. It demonstrated its meaninglessness and its power. It showed how a young and promiscuous concept has exerted such a powerful influence on our lives — despite being fragile to the point of absurdity.