After the fire

On Saturday evening the hill between our  house and the sea was ablaze. We watched from the scaffold (we're currently having a chimney rebuilt) as firefighters battled to protect our neighbours' house from the advancing flames. On Monday we went out to survey the damage, which was less than we had feared - only the gorse and heather were burned, vegetation will regenerate in a season, but who knows how many nesting birds lost their lives, to say nothing of the insects, small mammals, any remaining snakes...

Soon after we returned home we received the first reports of a far more serious conflagration at Notre Dame de Paris. Again, thankfully, the destruction was less severe than it might have been, and again no lives were lost (although one of the 400 firemen in attendance was seriously injured); but the spire and the timber roof are lost, and we don't know yet about the rose windows. Nature cannot be relied on to regenerate this magnificent human artifact. That will require ingenuity, determination and resources on a large scale; itself just a small sample of what will be demanded as we hurtle into the climate crisis. On the same day Extinction Rebellion again closed down much of central London, an expression of intense frustration at the continued failure of our supposed leaders to face up to what is so urgently required. More fires to come, I fear - rural and urban, physical and metaphorical.