When she died, the Queen took with her a sense of serene bigness. Bigger than the small things, bigger than the silly things, bigger than so much we’ve chosen to label as important. I was sad and I knew I would be, but what I hadn’t expected was a feeling that an overarchingly powerful, calm, sound voice of reason had disappeared. Amid social media and fake news and Trump and Brexit and the swirling maelstrom of distractions from things that really matter, the Queen appeared to rise above the nonsense, and I couldn’t help feeling many needed that image more than ever.

For all the problems of the monarchy – and this is where I make my case that surely now, please, is an opportune time for Australia to become a republic, thus paving the way for a more equal and just country with a constitution that puts First Nations people at its centre and brings us all with it – the Queen got on with her job.

I was in the UK when she died but I’m writing from Munich, where the winter skidded into the beginning of September, shoving autumn cleanly out of the wings, where it had patiently waited while a gloriously long and scarily warm summer stole the show. Autumn was due to be short – trees would lose leaves in a day or two, as tinder dry as so many were – but it wasn’t given a chance. As Oktoberfest rages, scarves and hats and gloves emerge, muffling the cold, damp ceramic of freshly filled Maskrugs. The Bayerisch know how to drink, but they also know how to do winter, and, besides beer, saunas and warm public swimming pools feature heavily in their survival technique. This winter, though, is different.

Just as summer was a blasting, outlying inferno, so this cold season will be unlike many. Call-ups have spread across Russia and we’re still not sure how we’ll keep Europe running over the next few months, but we’re also four explosions in to a long winter over at Nordstream 1. As fuel prices rise, Munich council has closed all public saunas and dropped its usual 24C swimming pools to 21C. Those three degrees might seem piffling given the Caritas stands welcoming refugees to Munich’s Hauptbahnhof, but they represent the unfolding of a crisis that will leave many thousands shivering in their own homes. In the UK, the BBC’s wall-to-wall narrative, until the 8th September, was unrelenting: eating or heating, which will you chose? That all shifted in an instant as lenses were suddenly trained on Balmoral’s gates and the fuel crisis was dropped for an overwhelmingly tender, if frenzied, media moment.

It didn’t take long to fade. Under the new PM (and the new king), the pound has hit the skids, house prices have been tipped to fall by as much as 20 per cent and the IMF has intervened to point out to the UK that for any economy to work, fiscal policy really needs to complement monetary policy. The fuel price is biting. The news, again, has become what it was before the Queen died of old age and snuffed out a bigness that, for three weeks, pushed everything else aside.

Last week, I flew over Nordstream’s path and when I landed in Helsinki, I was only a few hundred kilometres from St Petersbourg. But in Munich – and I dare say London, although much of its mess is its very own – Russia feels closer than ever. It’s cold, the saunas are off. And this is just the beginning of the winter.