Peter Rhodes on taking offence, dreading winter and the return of dragons

Another great headline from the silly season of 2022: “Seal breaks into New Zealand home, traumatises cat and hangs out on couch” (Guardian).

Terms for our time. Clearing: the process by which children who thought their university education would consist of watching a screen in a bedsit in Exeter discover it will actually consist of watching a screen in a bedsit in Norwich.

The comedian Jenny Eclair has joined the online row about the “misogynistic” Crown Paint TV advert, which allegedly suggests a female character sleeps around. Ms Eclair has let it be known that she is “massively offended”. It makes me wonder what sort of TV add would render her slightly offended, marginally miffed or just a tad put out. Why is it that Twitter wars are always fought at full volume?

Anyway, paint ads and runaway seals are the least of our worries. As you may have noticed, thanks to inflation, starvation and energy-cap hell, the end is nigh. Newspapers, telly and online news sites are using the sort of massively oversized headlines we once kept in a locked cabinet in case the Martians landed. I can't think of a time when the end has been nigher. By December we will be smearing ourselves in goose fat to keep the cold at bay and struggling into A&E over the piles of corpses left over from the heatwave (whatever happened to those?).

Meanwhile, how strange it is that while scientists and activists have rightly been warning us of the horrors of super-hot summers, I haven't heard one of them suggesting that global warming might deliver a warmish winter, so we might not need to use much energy and the end might not be that nigh, after all. I write this with much trepidation. Before long they may be stoning optimists in the street.

I never watched a single episode of the TV legend Game of Thrones. But with the prequel, House of the Dragon (Sky Atlantic and Now), launching this week, I thought it was time to see what all the fuss was about, and bought the first two seasons, made in 2011. What a difference 11 years makes. The sex scenes judged essential to the early episodes look tacky today. I think it's safe to predict the new prequel will have many more dragons and far fewer bottoms.