Anne Sebba writes in “Les Parisiennes: How the Women of Paris Lived, Loved, and Died Under Nazi Occupation” (2016) that she felt justified in using the term “Parisienne” to describe Parisian women imprisoned in camps after learning that one of them repurposed the ounce of fat that she was rationed each day as moisturizer for her hands, “concluding that these needed preserving more than her stomach.”

Extinction Rebellion is an organisation whose ends I endorse, but whose means I find unpleasantly confrontational. Here are some hints for them:
1. If you’re going to say something revolutionary, say it in a suit.
2. If you’re waging war on plastic, don’t camp out in plastic tents. It sort of negates your message.
3. I admire your really slick website. I’m impressed you are campaigning in more than 60 cities “from Paris to Berlin, and all the way round the world including Los Angeles, Santiago, Washington DC, New York, Montreal, Buenos Aires, Dublin, Madrid, London, Amsterdam, Prague, Vienna, Cape Town, New Delhi, Mumbai, Adelaide, Melbourne, Sydney, Brisbane, Perth and Wellington.” I can’t see Beijing or Hong Kong on that list, and isn’t China the world’s most polluting economy? What about Tokyo? Seoul? Bangkok? Does East Asia get a free ride? How about Brazil and the Amazon rainforest?
4. If you have a plan, at least make it attainable. For us to be carbon neutral by 2025 isn’t going to happen without an unacceptable level of death, pain and suffering. Set a goal you can actually achieve.
5. The elephant in the room which no one dares address is that there are simply far too many human beings on this planet. When my grandfather was born the world population was about 1.2 billion. Now it’s 7.7 billion. Unsustainable.