When my mother visited the Great Ocean Road a few years ago on her last visit to Australia, I tried to coax her to walk with me out across the two great spans of “our” London Bridge. ‘No’, she said, ‘it might fall’. ‘You’re right,’ I answered cunningly, ‘it might fall tomorrow, or it might fall in a thousand years. And I rather think it will be a little closer to a thousand years.’ Mother just smiled as she accompanied me out across the first span. It fell two weeks later.