We need to talk about Daddy

Taking a train from Brussels, I found Paris sweltering under a heat dome. Here, in the new weather, it was pushing 40 degrees.

- Charlotte Grimshaw

I took another train south. There's a hillside path in southern France that I walked up every day in the summer I was 10. Now, in 2025, there’s a change: all the butterflies have gone.

“All the butterflies have gone” is not a statement about rainbows and unicorns; it is a brutal fact, backed by science, that needs to be faced by serious people. The loss of the clouds of butterflies through which I walked as a child is a story about climate change and environmental degradation.

Today, I heard a journalist back home describing as “junk” Jacinda Ardern’s refrain that we need to value empathy.

“We have a problem with lack of empathy” is not a statement about rainbows and unicorns; it is a brutal fact, backed by science, that needs to be faced by serious people. The shortage of empathy currently wreaking havoc in international relations is a story about populism and pathology.