London | On the school run this morning, a fellow dad rushed up to me: "Are you alright? Is your family alright?" he asked anxiously. It took me a minute to realise that he didn't mean my wife and kids, who were walking next to me, but my Australian kith and kin. He was talking about the bushfires.

I reassured him my inner-city relatives were all OK. He turned to his six-year-old daughter. "Those fires are burning an area the size of Europe!" he told her. "The whole of Europe!".