If drab England really are good, be afraid, be very afraid ...

● England. Venture outside gloveless before 10am or after 3pm on some days at this time of year — and within minutes the flesh of your hands will thud against the bones deep inside with every painful step.

Buy a pint to take the edge off all that, even in the shabbiest East End boozer here in London, and you will be the best part of R110 out of pocket.

Friday was the first time the sun put in an appearance in more than a week.

It didn’t come up until after 7.30am and had clocked out before 4pm. An hour later it was night. Saturday’s forecast was for rain, Sunday’s for a cold, grey blanket of cloud. Sunshine? Not for the next seven days, at least.

Turn on the radio and just about all you will hear is why Brexit is a bad thing. Or a good thing. And every flavour of opinion between those poles, not least from a confounded and confounding government that doesn’t believe in what it has been mandated to do.

Open the paper — by which I mean the Guardian or the Observer, because all the others are right-wing trash — and you will suffer death by Brexit.

That’s what happens when people are dumb enough to believe the lies that lead them to vote to disentangle themselves from a fiendishly complex organisation they were dumb enough to vote to join 45 years ago, in which time it has become exponentially more complex.

England. Place of confusion and cold where everyone who commits the smallest error — a brush of your sleeve by theirs, for instance — apologises immediately.

Funny how they don’t feel the same way about colonialism.

Or football, which never fails to light a fire in these otherwise pale, passionless people. Even estate agents, those bloodless dogs of capitalism, show a pulse when the conversation pivots in that direction.

Nothing in cricket is as satisfying as the English being given a good hiding

One, based in Bethnal Green, was asked if he supported West Ham on the perhaps naive but reasonable basis of the fact that they play down the road.

He buttoned his jacket, squared his shoulders, set his jaw, dropped his chin, tilted his brow, aimed an eye at me, and sounded as menacing as one of the Kray twins when he said, with a razored smirk: “Chelsea. That’s my team.”

Oh England, this England. Place of too many incongruities and inconsistencies to count on all the fingers and toes of all the subjugated citizens of what used to be its empire.

And place of cricket, which not least because of colonialism and empire has spread across the globe. Not as successfully as football, but having retained more of its Englishness. Which means nothing in cricket feels quite as satisfying, for the rest of us, as England being given a good hiding.

But the converse is true. And so it was that the rest of the cricket world learnt with disappointment that, in faraway, warm and sunny Sri Lanka, England had completed a 3-0 drubbing of the home side in the Test series.

Worse, it was the first successful rubber in the 13 they have played in the format in Asia or the Emirates since March 2001, not counting trips to play nonentities Bangladesh.

That a side as terrified of being out of their comfort zone as England can go to as foreign a place as Sri Lanka and win a Test series three-zip should give every other team pause for thought.

Either the Lankans have forgotten how to play or are being frazzled by their great and good being charged with corruption.

Or Joe Root’s team really are that good. If that’s true, be afraid. India are all about money, the more luridly made, the better. Australia confuse ugliness and cheating with playing a hard game.

These things we understand, and we have found ways to live with them. But a strong England team is another level of bad, a slippery nastiness that stinks of a criminal past and a boring future.

And it won’t get better soon. Their next Test series is in the Caribbean in January. C’mon West Indies!