I suppose, while having my three sons, fortunately not all at once, I pushed the button labelled lawyer/doctor/architect/bank teller/safe occupation like mad. To no avail, of course, for they are all action men, and Alexander, my youngest, is a fire-fighter.
At the very time that the Victorian Bushfires Royal Commission was in the Australian news, Greece was battling huge wildfires. Again. Last week, exactly two years had passed since 76 people died in the Peloponnese, which in August 2007 blazed inexorably from end to end. This time Attica had its turn, with fires raging on the outskirts of Athens. When the conflagration was at its worst, ash was falling on the island of Kythera, two hundred miles away.
In 2007 Alexander, then newly trained, had a narrow squeak while defending a village in the Taygetus mountains. And so my heart sank when I learned of the Attica outbreak. It was 36 hours before I received word that he was all right after fighting on the dangerous site of Pendeli for 24 hours. How can anyone keep going for 24 hours? I asked his older brother, my Army son. Rotation of duties, was the laconic reply.
The recipe for Greek summer disaster had remained the same: extreme heat, gale-force winds, and not enough care. On the day in 2007 that Kalamata's mountain was invisible under a pall of smoke, I saw three people throw lighted cigarettes to the ground. Greece does not have a total fire ban policy; nor does it have an orchestrated strategy for fire prevention: scattered piles of litter and uncleared tinder-dry expanses of land are simply features of summer here.
And there is certainly no equivalent of a Royal Commission.
The fires in Attica stretched nearly 50 km NE of Athens and, despite the efforts of 2000 Greek fire-fighters, soldiers and volunteers, and water-bombing aeroplanes sent by France, Italy and Cyprus, nearly 100 square km of forest and brush were burned out: an environmental disaster. Two hundred houses were destroyed, but by some miracle, such grace, nobody died.
Australia and Greece resemble each other in many ways, which helps explain the appeal that Greece has for travellers from Down Under: both countries have a very different look from the stitched, neat, over-embroidered and over-organised one that much of Northern Europe wears and bears.
But when it comes to the incidence of fire and the coping with