I’m on my annual trip to Annecy this week, a town nestled at the foot of the French Alps, where Europe’s biggest animation festival takes place every summer. It’s an annual pilgrimage where the cartoon industry gathers around a pristine lake to do deals, eat cheese and, if the forecast is correct, quietly melt.

It’s a tough gig but someone has to do it. There’s a heat dome sitting over the continent this week, and large swathes of France and Spain are basically being slow-cooked in their own juices. And I am one of the ingredients - an Irish man not genetically predisposed to the conditions. It’ll be like USA ‘94 all over again.

The whole thing reminds me of the Simpsons Movie, where the government drops a giant glass dome over Springfield to seal everyone in and they slowly lose their minds.

In this version, the dome is meteorological but no less freakish and seems to be part of the new normal now, a thing to factor into any summer trip to the continent. It’s the first time I’ve been jealous of everyone at home getting to enjoy the Irish summer, where the temperatures are much more manageable.

And I say that in a week we could hit thirty degrees in Ireland. It’s thirty seven degrees as I write this, at eight o’clock in the evening. Pray for me.

Political pass the parcel

Things are also hotting up in the UK this week, where they are continuing the game of political pass the parcel. Yes, we’re looking at yet another change of leadership in Number 10, the seventh PM since Brexit.

Chelsea managers are becoming less frequent. It’s probably worth taking stock before there is another change. You’ll remember Theresa May, who had to pick up the pieces after David Cameron let off the noxious fart that was the Brexit referendum and then quietly left the room. Then, there was Boris Johnson, who brought the UK government into a new sort of 'clown car' era before departing in disgrace. Need I remind you that Liz Truss followed, a leader who was quick to make her mark and who crashed the economy on her lunch break and then got herself outlasted in office by a supermarket lettuce, which a newspaper had stuck on a livestream to see which of them would wilt first.

Then there was Rishi Sunak, a man so unremarkable I just had to Google him for the purposes of this article. And that’s all before the latest specimen, poor Keir, a friend of Ireland but unfortunately not of many people in the UK. I think we were all quietly hoping he’d restore a bit of faith and dignity to proceedings over there but his centrist approach appears to have ushered in a new age of Reform, with Farage waiting in the wings to do to the UK what Trump has done to the US.

The man standing in Farage’s way, the last great hope from a Labour perspective, is the so-called King of the North, Andy Burnham, who is now being prepped and primed as a new PM, following Starmer’s announcement he would be stepping down.

For anyone who hasn’t been following the soap opera, Burnham is the Mayor of Manchester, only just elected to parliament in a by-election, and now the clear favourite to be the next British Prime Minister. He hasn’t been near Westminster in the best part of a decade and his policy priorities remain closely guarded secrets.

My suspicion is that any strong policy position is enough to inflame a backlash over there, so silence is the current preference. He’s got quite a task ahead. The good news is that he’s gloriously Irish. His people left Drogheda for the Liverpool docks back in the 1800s, there’s a strand of Donegal in there too, he was raised Catholic and he follows Everton.

Let’s hope he’s got some of that Irish luck in his armoury. He’s going to need it.

The Cape crusader

The best story of the World Cup, for my money, has nothing to do with the big teams. I’m sure you’ve all heard of Shamrock Rovers defender Roberto Lopes (Pico) by this stage; he’s the closest thing we’ll get to an appearance at the competition this time around.

Pico was born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a Cape Verdean father, and a few years back he was working in a bank and playing part-time when a message landed in his LinkedIn inbox.

It was in Portuguese, from a man claiming to be the Cape Verde manager, asking would he come and play for them.

Lopes did what any of us would do with a strange foreign message on LinkedIn and binned it as spam. Nine months later the gentleman tried again, this time in English, so Lopes ran the original through Google Translate, realised it was genuine, and said yes.

Three weeks after that he was on a plane for his international debut. It’s been brilliant following Pico’s Adventures In America, which, come to think of it, sounds like a children’s cartoon that I could pitch over here in Annecy.

After their historic draws with Spain and Uruguay, surely the best is yet to come for the small country off the west coast of Africa. See, it’s always worth checking the spam folder every now and again.