This will be a memorable summer for all the right reasons, except for the politicians stuck inside in a Brexit hell of their own making

This weekend London celebrated Pride, and Soho was awash with rainbows and any chants of 'football’s coming home' mixed happily with chants of 'I’m coming out'

Leaving the house has never been easier: who needs to think about a brolly? These days I don’t even bother putting a cardi in my bag – a quick squirt of factor 30 and I’m off (EPA)

Can you feel it? I’ve been feeling it for weeks, this country is having “a moment” – the sun is shining, the roses are the best they’ve ever been and it turns out that we can play football.

This is our summer and we are, as the kids would say, “owning it”.

Locally, downtown East Dulwich looks like Ibiza crossed with a summer wedding. Everyone is wearing their fancy summer holiday clothes, it’s all straw trilbies and Hawaiian prints, pom-pom fringing and polka dot playsuits.

Of course, for those of us who would get arrested in a playsuit, there’s a great deal of baggy linen going on.

Leaving the house has never been easier: who needs to think about a brolly? These days I don’t even bother putting a cardi in my bag – a quick squirt of factor 30 and I’m off.

I’m loving this. I applaud the girls with great legs in denim shorts; I love the fields of floral sundresses; I like seeing men in cargo shorts, shirts and shades; I adore seeing children with ice pop juice soaking the fronts of their T-shirts.

No wonder foreign holiday travel has hit rock bottom. Who needs to be treated like cattle by the airlines when it’s hot enough to play Love Island in your own back garden?

OK, so I know we’re on the brink of a hosepipe ban and any moment now there’s going to be a stampede to the supermarket to panic-buy bottled water, but until then, just for the moment, please can we just enjoy it for what it is? A wonderful blue skied summer, complete with an unlikely new hero in the shape of Gareth Southgate, a man who has shown the nation how to behave with grace and dignity in the face of winning for a change.

Whatever happens next in the World Cup, Southgate seems to have given football a new twist, as This Country’s Charlie Cooper pointed out on Twitter the other day, wearing the ubiquitous England football shirt to show your fanship is starting to look a bit “sad” now that Southgate (thanks to Marks and Spencer), has adopted the new “rascal look” with his natty shirt and waistcoat combo.

I hope the rascal look takes off big this autumn – I love a bit of street urchin. In fact I saw a small boy the other day who I thought had gone full Southgate rascal, but when I complimented him on his natty dress his mother pointed out that actually he was dressed as a Victorian street child for a school project. D’oh.

But this summer isn’t just about football (poor old Lewis Hamilton’s Grand Prix achievements have almost been ignored in comparison to the efforts of the boys out in Russia). For those of us who aren’t massive footie followers, the match on Saturday made driving in town an absolute doddle. The old man and I parked right up the Albert Hall’s backside, ambled up to the Serpentine to see Christo’s Mastaba, a huge pyramid of barrels floating brilliantly incongruously on the lake and watched hundreds of kids of every nationality splash about in the Princess Diana memorial fountain.

I stopped for a second to sniff one of Hyde Park’s deep scarlet roses. It smelled of lipstick on a martini glass and conjured up a young Elizabeth Taylor. I promise I almost swooned with the glory of it all, and then I realised it was 30 degrees and I should have been wearing a hat.

Meanwhile, a couple of miles away London celebrated Pride, its annual LGBT+ parade and Soho was awash with rainbows and chants of “football’s coming home”, mixed happily with chants of “I’m coming out” and in this mix is where London is at its best.

The only people who do not seem to be part of this fabulous British summer are the politicians who seem destined to spend the sunshine hours locked in a permanent Brexit battle.

Tough titty, this is their punishment, like naughty children sent indoors when everyone else is out playing in the garden, they seem to be existing in some kind of parallel universe, separated from the rest of us, trapped in air conditioned rooms over a negotiating table, drinking coffee out of those awful catering flasks.

Ha, not for them, the Breton stripes and flip-flops, the stripping off and finding a bit of grass to stretch out on.

While the rest of us are breathing in barbecue fumes and taking our work outside, they are stuck in a Brexit hell of their own making. Well good. It serves them right.

This summer of 2018 will go down in history. It will forever be the summer that Meghan married Harry, Jack met Dani, the tarmac melted and England won (or nearly won) a World Cup and, to top it all off, if those incredible divers from all over the world can get all those kids out of that Thai cave alive, then I reckon it will be one of the best summers of our lives.