I have been canvassing lately, for Labour. Nobody has been rude to us, and everyone plans to vote for us, except for one woman who wouldn’t say. Which isn’t surprising, because this is Jeremy Corbyn’s constituency. I have always supported him. I go on my dog walks plastered with Labour stickers. The dog has one on his collar. The sun has been shining, the sky is blue and I’m feeling a weeny bit optimistic.

But, increasingly over the past few decades, the trouble has been that if you bang on about wanting a fairer world, with less mendacity and greed, and no bombs, people tend to think you rather naive and silly. “That’s not how the world works,” they say, sneering. “The military-industrial complex rules, and it always will …” What a dreary, hopeless point of view.

I’m old now, so really I’m more or less all right Jack. The world still hasn’t been blown to hell, there are still some rainforests left, and bits of ocean that aren’t completely clogged with plastic. Sixty years ago, when I started panicking about the world, we hadn’t even heard of global warming. Just Harold Macmillan, bombs and potential Armageddon. So we have had the best of it, but although we have marched about, protesting and canvassing, voting and begging for improvements ever since then, it doesn’t seem to have done much good.

“I have been going a bit mad over the past six months,” says Fielding. “I don’t understand why people don’t agree with me. It’s not an intellectual leap to see that the world isn’t fair and needs to change. You don’t have to read Kant, Plato or Marx.”

Exactly. Just look around, or listen to the odd song. Everybody knows the boat is sinking. And the far-right “identitarian” activists really are trying to let boats full of refugees sink in the Mediterranean, while emboldened neo-Nazis march and swank about Whitesville in Kentucky in black T-shirts. So in this election, I’m hoping, as I always have done, that we’ll see the light and turn the world to the left, away from such horrors, while we have still got a world to turn anywhere.