A few days before he took his last, mercifully peaceful, breath, my husband, Ian Reinecke, looked at me intently and asked, “Is there anything going on in the world I need to know about?”

“No, nothing,” I said as calmly as I could to the man with whom I had intensely discussed events in the world and at home for nearly 50 years.

I could not be sure he wasn’t fishing for an answer. All week the thrum of helicopters, accompanied by the scream of sirens, had filled the Bondi air. Sensitive people pick up the vibes, even when the details are opaque.

In his last year I could never be completely sure how much he was aware of. Some things he talked about seemed fanciful to me but turned out to be true. Right to the end his intuition about people and events astonished me.

But the antisemitic massacre at Bondi beach, just a few hundred metres away from where he drifted in and out of consciousness, was too much. “Please keep the TV off,” I said to his carers. “Don’t talk to him about what happened.”

He didn’t need to know that the place we had walked to several times a week, where he marvelled at nature’s beauty and laughed with amusing people, had been desecrated.

After a year of feeling powerless in the face of hideous global events, this violent assault seemed like the last straw.

At times during 2025 it felt to me that the world was losing its........

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