It all started with a sunset –here in the hills it’s the one thing we miss but there it was — harbinger of more weirdness to come.

And the media was full of it — southerly winds scooping up all the industrial and vehicular effluent from France and Spain (didn’t think they had much) and funneling it over Eastern England to dump it there with a load of sand from the Sahara and produce the worst air pollution for aeons.

Thank goodness it wasn’t going to affect Wales — so where is the hill?

It was there yesterday!

Now you see it

Now you don’t

And there is a slight metropolitan smell — yes, definitely diesel fumes.

If it’s this bad in the West it must be cataclysmic in London.

Panic phone call to daughter in central London where the weather-man’s air quality map is scarlet, we are green.  ‘Pollution?’

‘Yes, pollution — the worst for years — a real pea-souper!’

‘What are you on about,Mum.  No, really Mum, I walked home to Wandsworth and it was a bit misty by the river — that’s all.’  Her husband had been in Canary Wharf — up a skyscraper — hadn’t noticed a thing.

‘Not even the people collapsing with asthma and heart disease?’

‘No Mum.’

That’s odd.