FOR A few months now, I’ve been in the habit of arriving to work earlier than I need to.

Rather than getting logged in and stoking the coal fire that runs my laptop, I’ve been sitting with a coffee and reading a chapter or two of whichever book I’m trying to get through at the moment.

For want of a better phrase, it’s become the calm before the storm – a few minutes of relaxation before the working day begins.

In the summer, it meant a few more minutes outdoors in the sunshine, and was something I’ve looked forward to, so when that moment of Zen was cruelly taken away from me this week due to a ridiculously overlong journey to work, I felt pretty hard done by.

Sitting behind the wheel of my steadily overheating car, I cursed under my breath then more loudly at the traffic in general, the other drivers, myself, the radio, and felt nothing but rage as I sat not moving for minutes at a time.

It’s at this point I should mention that I recently realised I’ve turned a corner in my life, insofar as my radio habits are concerned.

Once upon a time, as a youngster who didn’t know better, I’d listen to Radio 1 on a morning – Chris Moyles, for all his faults, generally seemed to wake up at about the same rate that I did, despite the fact he’d been at work for 90 minutes by the time I started tuning in.

When he left and was replaced by a child, I made the decision to give Radio 2 a shot. It was the crossover between the end of the Wogan era and the beginning of the age of Evans. As I’d listened to the failed Top Gear host in my teens back when he was on Radio 1 and Virgin Radio, there was a sort of comfort in continuity there.

But after a while, I realised he was far too relentlessly upbeat for my liking on a morning, his playlist tended to consist of about 15 tracks played ad nauseam, and his interviews were either badly-researched, embarrassingly sycophantic, or both.

So recent months have seen me adopt Radio 4 as the soundtrack to my journey to work – I never thought the day would come.

Anyway, as I was sitting, getting furious because someone had pranged their front end on a roundabout and inconvenienced my reading habit (potentially derailing my book-related New Year’s resolution, no less), The Today Programme was murmuring away in the background.

Focusing on that to take my mind off the traffic, I listened to an audio diary by an Iraqi student at Mosul University. He spoke of his terror of living under Daesh, where even carrying a mobile phone is as dangerous as carrying a nuclear device in your pocket, and how he had no choice other than stay and fear for his life, or flee, and risk capture, torture or death.

There was also a report on the stalemate and failed ceasefire in Aleppo, where – despite agreements from all sides – an aid convoy was attacked leaving several dead. This is a city that isn’t even on its knees any more, just a terrified population running out of food and clean water completely under the boots of two uncaring superpowers, the pauses in attacks only offering false hope, before the barrel bombing and finger pointing continues.

By the time I got to work, everything was in perspective.

I wasn’t at risk of execution because I didn’t agree with a band of murderous fanatics. I’d had a decent night’s sleep, safe in the knowledge my home wouldn’t be bombed to pieces overnight, and I wasn’t one of the desperate thousands of people who were faced with slaughter or alienation, and had to seek safety, but instead found themselves alienated, demonised, and made subject of an inappropriate simile by the son of a dangerous buffoon who proved this week that the bigot apple doesn’t fall far from the bigot tree.

When I arrived at the office, I didn’t have time to get through a couple of chapters, but I can probably make up that time later. I did, however, just have time to listen to the excellent Grey Tickles and Black Pressures by John Grant.

If you haven’t heard it, please seek it out. Its title is a reference to mid-life crises and depression, and the song is a darkly humourous an ode to growing older, first world problems, and realising that in the grand scheme of things, for us in the west, things really aren’t that bad.