This week started with the sad news that a fire had almost led to the destruction of Notre Dame, and certainly Quasimodo will have to spend the next couple of years living on the Phantom of the Opera's sofa. The atrocity drove to people around the world pledging hundreds of millions of Euros to rebuild and President Macron says it may be rebuilt in just a couple of years, presumably because there's an election in 2022 and he'd like to reopen the cathedral as a last act of office before he's kicked out for being about as unpopular as Henry V was back in 1415. Mind you, the Sagrada Familia cathedral in Barcelona has been under construction since 1882 and it's still not finished, although the wine is somehow even cheaper in Spain than it is in France (if such a thing is even legal) so that's maybe got something to do with the pace of things. This being the internet of course, the conspiracy theorists showed up faster than the fire brigade to deliver a torrent of not water but crazy ideas about how the government decided to start the fire in order to distract from President Macron's unpopularity although officials said since stated that the fire was almost certainly caused by a short circuit. Hang on a minute, wasn't the robot in the movie Short Circuit originally part of a secret military programme? Maybe those conspiracy theories have something to them.

The other news this week was the climate change protest in London in which many hundreds of people assembled in order to make demands, such as the demand that the BBC wildly overstate the attendance of the protest. For the most part, the marge was a jolly good time if you didn't have a job to attend that day, which most of the rich Islington mummies frankly didn't. The actual demands of course are fairly ludicrous and only achievable if we decided to ban modern agriculture, travelling abroad and making products that contain metal, especially aluminium which uses more energy to make a single soda can than a hair dryer would if you left it running for half an hour. The other issue of course is that China and India have about as much chance of signing up to any climate deal as MPs have to signing up to Theresa's tardy piece of parliamentary paperwork. I genuinely think that if the two asian superpowers ever went to war with each other, there would be an evironmentalist on Radio 4 brought in to give a spiel on how the deaths of half a billion people was ultimately a positive step forward for the environment. Did I say environmentalist? I mean to simply say "mentalist"