There’ll always be an England, won’t there?

THE world was aghast to see Notre-Dame de Paris in flames in April last year. It turned out that the damage was not as devastating as it first seemed, although the erasure of the famous silhouette, when Viollet-le-Duc’s was consumed, was bad enough. That fire gave the world a shock. ‘We’ll always have Paris,’ says Humphrey Bogart in . Well, possibly not. A thing can be of the utmost value—revered as a landmark, precious as a work of art, totemic as a manifestation of national identity—and yet, tomorrow, it could have gone. This made me wonder what we could not bear to lose in this country. What would cause national trauma, provoke