It's poor consolation but at least Emma does not have to celebrate becoming 49 years old in the Trump/Farage era. Did any of us imagine a time like this back in 2003 when she was still here? In 1967 when she was born everyone assumed that the world would always progress in one way or another, not always in a straight line but nevertheless forward. What was marginal and hardly known, Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962) on the effect of the indiscriminate use of pesticides seems to have been a mild harbinger of the damage humans could do to the planet that we are now familiar with. That world had less than 3 billion people and now we are nearing 7 billion and rising. When she was one year old we were reading Paul Ehrlich's 1968 book The Population Bomb and feeling guilty about having children. What would you say now Em on finding a climate change denier in charge of the most powerful economy in the world and many people in Britain not knowing how hard it was to bring the countries of Europe together after WW2. What would you have said? What words of comfort would you have found?