A few months ago, I made a small but significant tweak to my daily routine. Instead of having Radio 4’s Today programme on the radio at breakfast, I put on to my favourite music station, 6Music. I still listen to the headlines just before I get up and I religiously read a newspaper every day, but by substituting some brilliant uplifting music in for a chunk of largely depressing news, I’ve really changed my morning mood for the better. I start work with a tune in my head, a skip to my step and positivity flowing through my veins.

It is very easy to get into a mindset of ‘modern life is rubbish’ and fretting, understandably, over, say, the war in Ukraine and the situation in the Middle East. As a Gen X-er, I nostalgically yearn for the 1990s when me and the Prof were Dinkies with plenty of spending money, loads of time to do fun stuff and very little responsibility. But I have to keep reminding myself that those years were backdropped by horrific atrocities in the Balkans and Rwanda/Burundi and I was often grinding my teeth in frustration about my job at the time. My parent’s generation remember even rosier times when you didn’t have to lock your door etc, neatly forgetting those post war years gave us the horrors of Peter Sutcliffe, Denis Nilsen, Fred West and Harold Shipman. The generation before them gave us the Holocaust. It’s amazing how distorting hindsight can be – there’s always been darkness and light in the world and always will be.

What I’m getting at here is that it is really easy to get caught up in those reality distortions and usually negative ones. Is Donald Trump bad for the environment? Obviously he’s not good, but as John Friedman and I discuss on the pod, despite all the showy rhetoric (remember Trump in the miner’s helmet, miming digging coal?), ESG investments surged during the first Trump presidency and coal use plummeted. And a bulwark argument of the ‘do ‘nothing’ crowd, China’s reliance on coal, is starting to crumble as clean energy in the country surges. Not that you will hear this in the mainstream press as a. it is a good news story, and b. it conflicts with many editorial lines.

So we’ve got to keep positive. Positive internally and positive externally. Realistic of course, but performative doomsterism only plays into the hands of the denialists and agents of the status quo. Positivity is infectious. Get some music in your life, either metaphorically or literally. We are winning, not fast enough, but we are winning. Let’s raise our game.