We are sitting slumped on a sofa in Paris, on July 14, exhausted from the bal des pompiers held at the local fire station the night before, where my daughter was taught to waltz by a 100-year-old lady from Marseilles. The fireman gleamed and strutted in their dazzling uniforms. The concierge from our building had bought herself a new flowered pinny. The music only stopped at 9am. I felt, that night, for anyone in the neighbourhood foolish enough to have a fire.

In our apartment, the exuberant soundtrack to Annie get Your Gun is playing loudly. We have the Betty Hutton version of the lyrics, which is followed on this particular disc by the Judy Garland version. When she sings the line, “There’s no people like show people, they smile when they are low,” my seven-year-old daughter asks me, “Is it right to smile when you are low?”