Back from a family holiday in blistering sunny Spain last night to find that the UK has just completed the most sunless August since records began.

But also to find that the world has changed significantly while I’ve been away: Team GB has won an unimaginable 19 golds in Beijing, and a little Russian escapade in Georgia has finally nailed the post-Berlin Wall nonsense that we live in a unipolar world of a single super-power, the USA, that can unilaterally police the globe – supposedly on behalf of all of us.

A camp-site in Catalonia is not the best place for a ringside seat at such seismic events, as the occasional international version of The Guardian together with irregular access to the TV set in the poolside bar hardly sufficed to keep us abreast of world developments. But I did manage to see some of the Olympic action and – along with others – my jaw dropped as we won medal after medal (47 in all) and came 4th in the table. I mean, Brits simply don’t do sporting success. Ever since left-wing local authorities sold off schools’ sports facilities in the 70s/80s, we’ve flunked it on the international sporting scene. Our single gold in Atlanta in 1996 (Steve Redgrave of course) said it all.

But there’s a more serious point to be made about China and their impressive Olympic Games. With its human rights abuses, one-child policy and crackdown in Tibet, the Beijing government leaves a lot to be desired. But it has self-consciously announced its emergence onto the world stage as a 21st century superpower with an entertaining peaceful event that has amazed us all, and leaves London (and my own east London Olympic Host borough, Newham) a mountain to climb to match it in 2012.

Not so the pirate Putin, who paraded Moscow’s new-found oil-fuelled virility by sending his tanks into little Georgia who wants to join NATO and the West. “Russia is back,” was Putin’s blunt message, “and the world and the West had better take notice.” The parallels with Cold War Moscow and the Russian military occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1968 are striking.

Irrespective of the rights and wrongs of Moscow’s current case, the contrast between the Russian and Chinese approaches could hardly be greater. Suddenly there are two new kids on the block; in fact one of them is simply returning to his old haunt with a sore head and a knife.

All of which poses a headache for the incoming US President.  The relative superpower status of the USA has diminished, is diminishing and will continue to diminish, and Bush’s successor will have to adjust American policy to these new realities.

Can we be confident McCain or Obama will do so? The temptation to return to the escapism of my sunny Spanish camp-site cannot be attributed solely to the awful English weather.