With four enchanting arms, four enchanting legs and two of the most enchanting faces since Gable met Lombard, the merest glimpse of the hybrid creature known as Hiddleswift can be an inspiration if you happen to be immobile, which I more or less am. With my systems of locomotion packing up one after the other, I can just about move if it isn’t hot, but lately it has been hot. Hiddleswift, by contrast, can sometimes walk almost 100 yards before being brought to a halt by the spectacle of a couple of dozen photographers hanging upside down from trees.

This column threatens to be a bit fragmentary this week, because so am I. Not long ago, I missed my usual appointment at Addenbrooke’s to have my immunoglobulin enhanced. The very word sounds as if it is enhanced already, but the important thing the patient has to do is actually get there. A few days ago I did. I got linked into the system, opened my little Oxford Classics collection of George Herbert’s poems and, despite all vows to apply myself, conked out instantly. When I woke up, the TV hanging from the ceiling was saying, but not showing, that John Kerry, arriving at No 10 Downing Street, mistimed his relationship with the front door and got hit in the head.

Eventually, Kerry and Boris were up there on screen with a lectern each, and the contrast was as startling as ever. Kerry, despite the fact that he had just been slugged in the head by a massive door, looked as smooth as Sean Connery with a better hairpiece. Boris, despite several hours of training for his new role, gave an immediate impression of total dishevelment. On closer inspection, this impression proved false: he was as well-groomed as he is ever going to get. It’s not his clothes and coiffure, but his personality that makes him look as if he has been rolled on by a horse and then seduced by it. My own guess is that the suavely cool Theresa and the barking head-case Boris will be the greatest political double act since Ferdinand and Isabella, for at least five minutes.

I hope it’s just the heat that has been scrambling my brains, but it might be that they’re scrambling themselves. Perhaps it’s time to quit writing. If it is, I still have plans: there are several thousand hours of music that I’d like to listen to again. Trouble is, if I did that, I would write remarks. Recently, I have been writing a poem about the most fabulous of Beethoven’s late quartets, Opus 131 in C sharp minor. That amazing thing doesn’t need my poem, but my poem still needs it, the way every poem still needs all the world.