I DON’T watch television, but I do consume copious amounts of radio. Radio 4 in the morning and evening; Radio 2 when I’m fortunate enough to be working from home; Sounds of the Sixties of Saturday morning (reminding me of a distant childhood); Guy Garvey on Sunday afternoon (stretching my musical repertoire); Classic FM, when I’m feeling mellow and Spire FM when my son finds the remote.

I rarely listen to the radio, you understand, it’s there in the background; but every so often something will break into my consciousness – a song, a news item, snatches of a comedy programme, a snippet of a documentary, distracting me from my article, work emails, cooking the supper or the ironing, bringing an end to domesticity and transporting me momentarily into another world.

This morning I found myself listening to an interview with Jay McInerney, an American writer whose novels are set in fashionable New York society at the time of the Clinton presidency. The interviewer invited him to speculate on what his characters would make of New York today and its most famous resident now installed in the White House.

He suggested that they would have been surprised by Trump’s success, and noted that, when Trump was based in New York, he kept himself to himself, rarely left Trump Tower (except to play golf) and didn’t engage with New York society or anyone outside his family or close coterie of business advisers. He then said that the circle he wrote about spent more time worrying about how they could book a table at the latest fashionable restaurant or whether they would be able to get their children into the best schools. They might be shocked or surprised at Trump’s latest tweet – but their lives had their own momentum.

It was, I thought, a very astute observation. I listen avidly to the daily news; the debate about whether the Brexit negotiations are a catastrophe in the making or the last opportunity for Europe to wreak its vengeance on Britain for daring to go it alone; the escalation of events on the Korean peninsula; the lamentable state of social housing; the crises affecting our health service. I am duly appalled, shocked and concerned.

And then I go back to the ironing, the washing up, my emails or making sure that I’ve got everything ready for my son’s return to school. The world recedes; work and domesticity take over. There’s something quite bizarre about worrying about trainers or the contents of a pencil case when the world is on the brink of a nuclear war or our health service is facing the greatest crisis in its existence. But comforting too; perhaps if I busy myself sufficiently with the things I am responsible for, the world crises that I have invited into my home will go away.