‘When a dog bites a man, that is not news, because it happens so often. But if a man bites a dog, that is news.” But over the past few years I have wondered if there might not be an addendum to that adage – a qualifying footnote to what seems like the obvious.

“You had a car that flew off a cliff,” one of OJ Simpson’s legal team says to his lead attorney in The People v OJ Simpson: American Crime Story. “It’s missing two tyres, leaking oil and flung into a ravine, and yet somehow you drove us back up the hill.” Such is the level of disbelief within Simpson’s legal camp as it stumbles upon an inchoate defence it believes might be able to counter the overwhelming evidence incriminating their client.

Three years ago, as the Republican-led House of Representatives engineered a brief government shutdown, Congressman Marlin Stutzman (R-IN) explained the strategy underpinning the protest. “We have to get something out of this,” he said. “And I don’t know what that even is.” The shutdown wasn’t a tactic so much as a tantrum, an act of collective petulance posing as politics—inexplicable to the outside world, incoherent in its aims, and incandescent in its rage.

As a parent of small children I sometimes surprise myself with the things I find myself saying. “Don’t play in the tumble dryer.” “Stop putting food in your nose.” “Try not to poo on the carpet.” The individual words are all familiar. But prior to the actual moment they are spoken, the notion that I would ever gather them together into a single sentence seemed implausible. The shock resides in realising I am in a scenario in which they both make sense and are necessary.

The rural, snow-frosted landscape of Iowa is so sparse, the horizon so broad and the sky so huge that weather can declare itself with great ceremony. Rain, sleet and snow don’t just happen to you here – when the clouds part, you can see them coming.