I have been on holiday in an isolated Pyrenean shack for two weeks. I enjoy not being approached by people who think I am the lead singer of UB40 all the time, my wife delights in juicy tomatoes and the kids love eating snails, befriending local snails and swimming with snails in the streams and lakes.

One day, having booked months in advance as required, we joined a party of 20 to venture through a secured airlock into an ancient cave and walk an hour underground to see the visionary animal artworks of our ancestors. The cave in question offers the only opportunity worldwide to see a prehistoric depiction of a weasel, which was something I had wanted to tick off my bucket list.

The guide told us, in English, that a British visitor had urinated in the hermetically sealed and temperature-controlled cavern the previous week, despite all the warnings about contaminating the cave paintings, and requested that any British people present please refrain from doing so, as the incident had left the archaeologists utterly distraught. It is always interesting to learn how others see us.

The art was so far beneath ground anthropologists assumed the artists never intended it for public display, so perhaps the urinating culprit was someone who felt the content providers should be punished for failing to monetise their work as part of a free-market economy?

I was suitably embarrassed by my compatriot’s behaviour, but wondered what British person could have such contempt for art, history and human culture that they would deliberately book months ahead on an exclusive tour only to try and despoil the unique works with their hot urine.

Returning home, I checked the itineraries of the culture secretary, John Whittingdale, and his predecessor, Sajid Javid, but they had not been in France, and yet the fact that I assumed one of them must be to blame was an indicator of how events at home were playing on my mind.

I had been worried about leaving the country in the care of the new government, like a parent trusting their family home to unruly teenage children, only to return to find a fortnight-long laughing-gas party has destroyed every precious heirloom.

Granny’s commemorative coronation commode lies shattered in the garden; Auntie Gladys’s Queen Mother-faced gas mask has been used as a bong; and the smashed remnants of the BBC have been stuffed into the lavatory and defiled.

I don’t have an iPhone, and there was no TV in the mountain shed, so the news from home came in disturbing dribs from British newspapers picked up at the nearest town, 70 miles away, of which I found only two in the entire fortnight, a Guardian dated 24 July and an international edition of the Daily Mail from 28 July.

When you are far away, and one copy of the Daily Mail is all you have to go on, the world distorts like a fairground mirror. The front page said a Labour peer had been taking drugs with prostitutes. It is to be hoped that George “Pencils” Osborne, when he is leader of the government, will take his thick brown pencil and ban from public office anyone who has ever had even the slightest connection with cocaine and call girls.

Meanwhile, on page 14, the demonstrably inaccurate writer Quentin Letts rubbished institutionalised attempts to encourage social mobility in an incoherent column that included the genuine sentence: “Middle-class parents are middle class because they have learned what it takes to succeed.”

The sentence, of course, does not bear a moment’s analysis, attempting to assuage readers’ guilt by assuring them their privilege is deserved. But it seemed so bizarre to me that such a sentence could actually be written without shame, only 12 days after I had left the country, only two and half months after the Conservative victory, that I wondered what was really going on at home.

In his 1952 short story, A Sound of Thunder, the writer Ray Bradbury, after whom I named my hamster as a child, posits a form of time-travel tourism. Clients may visit any point in the past, but must stay on a floating metal walkway, for fear of interacting with history in such a way as it alters the future.

A time tourist, Eckels, is frightened by a dinosaur, falls momentarily from the path, and returns to the future with a butterfly crushed on the sole of his shoe, only to find the world now subtly changed. Everyone is speaking Latvian and people have penises for hands. Or something like that. It’s 36 years since I read it.

Experiencing Letts’s strange Daily Mail sentence, I wondered if the unopposed Conservative juggernaut’s unstoppable forward motion meant that something indefinable was happening to the collective consciousness of Britain while I was away that would irrevocably alter the very idea of what could constitute truth itself, which would render the world I returned from my holiday to as unrecognisable as Bradbury’s Latvian penis-hands dystopia.

In the edition of the Guardian dated Friday 24 July, which I found abandoned in a campsite lavatory two days after I read Letts’s column, I saw an article on the suspension of a UK ban on crop sprays containing neonicotinoids, thought by most scientists to harm bees.

On this occasion, apparently, the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs abandoned its normal practice of publishing the minutes if its meetings in order to avoid “provoking representations from different interest groups”.

I wondered what the sentence meant. It appeared to mean that Defra, which is now mainly run and owned by the commercial outsourcing company Capita, wasn’t going to make available any information that it felt people might take issue with.

You get the result you want by concealing any information that might challenge that result? I am sure this sort of thing hadn’t been acceptable practice when I went on holiday two weeks ago. Had somebody somewhere stepped off the path?

I was afraid. I phoned my father in Coventry to see if everything was OK. His accent seemed vaguely eastern European. He seemed to be having trouble holding the phone.

Suddenly, the rain came down. I sat under an awning and rolled my red wine around in my hand, Letts’s column, the cocaine bust exposé and the Defra story spread out before me. An electrical storm crackled over the Pyrenees, vast flat planes of light flashing behind the clouds, giving the impression of impossibly powerful forces moving somewhere out of sight.