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Mark Hedges Mark Hedges

Liberté, égalité, fraternite.

With Mrs Hedges in San Francisco being feted for her Tunworth Cheese, I have been running the home front and it hasn’t gone well. The first day saw Harry and Anna locked out of the house after school, with me still in London. Then, we couldn’t find a protractor for the mock GSCE exam, despite having bought dozens over the years. After these set backs, I made sure that Anna wouldn’t miss her orthodontist appointment on Thursday, making her set an alarm and texting her from the office to remind her—it was a pity, then, that the appointment turned out to be on Friday.

I am, at best, disorganised, but my mind last week had been caught up in the horrific events in France. Some years ago, the former Home Secretary Kenneth Baker, who helped set up the Cartoon Museum, was explaining the importance of cartoons and said that while France was undergoing its revolution, the British cartoonists had our population laughing so much at the failures of our leaders that a bloody uprising was avoided. For a time, it seemed altogether different last week, but then the great marches in Paris and the rest of France triumphed over evil.