Last evening’s glorious skies were apparently bearing Saharan dust – bringing out brooms and dustpans all over Europe. As my mother would say: ‘I googled it up’ – mindful that ‘there are more atoms in a grain of sand than there are stars in the night sky’ – and had my eyes opened further, enough to learn that some of the said dust will feed plankton in the oceans into which it drops, and some will fertilize the Amazon rain forest with minerals not found elsewhere. And I am awed, again, by the immense and astonishing brilliance of our planet’s ecosystems.