Last Sunday, diners from the Salisbury Zizzi were belatedly advised to burn all their clothes as a precautionary measure; as was anyone who had ever visited a Jamie’s Italian, but for different reasons. Enemies of Putin expire and nuclear threats are proliferating across the Earth. Perhaps the trademark robust diplomacy of the foreign secretary Boris Johnson, deployed via scatological limericks in his chickenfeed Telegraph column, might defuse the tension?

Needless to say, shameless remoaners are already exploiting the Salisbury poisoning to sabotage Brexit. Is there no pig trough low enough into which they will not now stoop themselves? Even given Russia’s nuclear threats, we must not be so weak as to go dunce’s cap in hand to the Brussels fat-cats who gerrymandered us into building wheelchair access ramps in libraries and planting wild flower meadows. Brexit means Brexit.

Did anyone toxicity test Stephen Hawking's telescope or Ken Dodd's tickling stick? Thought not

Unfortunately for diehard traitors, when Mrs May described “an indiscriminate and reckless act against the UK, putting innocent civilians at risk”, she was talking of the Salisbury poisoning, not hard Brexit.

Brexiters must remember that Britain’s real enemy is not our anti-EU ally Russia and her toxic novichok. Britain’s real enemies are Michel Barnier, Donald Tusk, Jean-Claude Juncker, Peter Stringfellow, Lily Allen, Marcus Brigstocke, all high court judges, and endless bloody red tape! Better to live free for a day in a Britain full of rogue killers roaming Italian restaurants with nerve agents, than to live a thousand years as the straight banana slaves of Brussels.

We have all seen the famous film of an untrousered Putin riding wild boar piglets bareback in the snow. Is it time to be talking of freezing our Front National-funding Russian allies’ assets, especially when Putin’s own assets seem resistant to cold?

Christ, I can’t keep this forced nonsensical tone going any more, even to provoke the usual online Kremlin gremlin comments. I’m on tour and it’s Tuesday in a Dundee hotel. I have to file this tomorrow from Perth by close of business, and the story unravels as quickly as I can rewrite it. Since I started scribbling, Rex Tillerson’s disappeared, the Sun says a Russian’s been strangled in New Malden, and even Stephen Hawking’s and Ken Dodd’s deaths look like Putin might have had a hand in them. Did anyone toxicity test the telescope and the tattyfilarious tickling stick? Thought not.

The Brexit British are a joke nation now. Putin knows no one will stick their neck out for those wankers. I don’t know anything about Russia anyway. Someone online in Russia has a tattoo based on one of my standup routines. And I have a Russian relative who is nice.

My only other Russian experience was a fever dream, frozen in the few winter weeks between the death of my mother and the birth of my daughter. In the dying days of December 2010, I was on a train through the falling snow from London to Worcester with my three-year-old son. I had to visit my bereaved stepfather, my wife at home in the painful throes of a problematic pregnancy.

Coincidentally, my friend the poet John Hegley was in the same carriage, I remember, and we said goodbye and good luck at Oxford, where the train surrendered to rapidly worsening weather, and the railway company bundled us into optimistic black cabs towards our respective onward destinations.

My son and I found ourselves sharing our ride through the suddenly Siberian Cotswolds with a groomed Russian businessman and his younger English companion, a glamorous, cut-glass woman who said she worked “in fashion”. They were on their way to a party at a country house in Worcestershire, swaddled in designer coats that mocked our cagoules, their eyes darkly ringed, their demeanours distracted. The pair seemed to have nothing in common with one another and no shared frame of reference. They were not delighted by the sudden beautiful world beyond the window. They did not hold each other’s cold hands in hot wonder.

I tried to make small talk. The fashion woman could not elaborate on her fashion job criteria, and they both looked away from us, out of the windows in different directions, as the snow fell hard and thick upon the darkening wolds. It came out that I was a comedian but they did not find this especially interesting; nor were they engaged by my eloquent and delightful infant, whose cherubic curls and indefatigable innocence created an angelic counterpoint to the black mood of the taxi’s interior.

I asked the Russian what he thought of gay rights at home, and of Putin, whom I found newly comical, as he had recently been photographed wrestling a bear naked while shooting an assault rifle. Or something. The Russian explained forcefully that I needed to understand that there was a vodka-fuelled crisis of manhood in Russia, and that Putin was selflessly providing a role model to inspire the men of the nation. The discussion was closed.

To me the pair seemed shrouded in shame, as if they had committed a crime, the presence of a chirruping child magnifying their corruption. I think the kid saved me from going under that evening – a psychic lifebuoy. They were my own devils, come for me, I think. That black cab was my blues crossroads.

At Worcester Shrub Hill, the taxi’s elastic limit, our farewells were not fond. I left the silent couple awaiting collection, halogen-lit in the falling flakes, and my little boy and I struggled onward through the drifts into the shadow of the Malvern Hills.

I will never forget our odd quartet’s awkward three-hour black cab journey in that snow-shrouded English twilight, an iconic British brand traversing the worsening terrain, a global darkness drawing in behind it. But the Russian was just passing through. The land and its people were a playground for him.

And I often think of the quiet woman, Komarovsky’s Lara reimagined. I hope that fashion thing worked out for her.

Stewart Lee’s Content Provider continues to tour until April, when it is abandoned over three nights at the Royal Festival Hall in London