As I sit down to write, enormous events are happening outside my hideaway here in Cambridge. In Manchester and London, one terrorist attack follows another, as if each group of madmen were jealous of the attention gained by the previous one. At the time of writing, the general election has not yet occurred. No doubt, by the time you read this, everybody will be able to look back and see that the result was inevitable.

But, right now, anything could happen. Not even the furiously tweeting Donald Trump can be sure of what comes next. As his fingers blur frantically on the keyboard of his device, I must face the fact that there is a maelstrom out there, while I am in here with nothing to contemplate except my own solitude.

I am thinking of arranging a visit from my granddaughter’s dog, which has few opinions about anything occurring in the outside world. He and I are in the midst of a long, intermittent conversation about the role of small dogs in the Roman empire under Tiberius. But it might be better to postpone that degree of forensic excitement and just settle for contemplation of the fact that my wife left yesterday for a week’s holiday in Greece, as part of her plan to visit all the warmer bits of Europe before the whole shebang disintegrates for ever.

I am jealous of her mobility, but determined to profit from being left alone with my books. Here, I know peace. My time is my own, and I can live at my chosen pace for as long as life lasts. For entertainment, I have been watching the later seasons of the American version of House Of Cards and wondering how they could have done such a precise job of predicting the degree of unsettlement that would occur if a great nation should elect a man who was at least half nuts.

But I myself am not unsettled. Indeed, I am about to listen to Bach. It’s quiet here in my kitchen, but soon it will be ringing like a baroque chapel. What I’ve got here is a kind of mental temperature control. My idea of a big, vital decision is whether I will add a few new lines to an epic poem that I plan to call All Is Not Lost. From the viewpoint of western civilisation, all may very well be lost, but it doesn’t seem like that yet out there on my balcony, only a short shuffle away. There, when the sunlight is warm enough, I sit writing a bit more of my epic. As epics go, it’s kind of short so far, but there is nobody to blame me, except the kind of small dog that can read Latin without a dictionary.