It is three minutes after 10. A very good morning indeed to you. It's Thursday, so mystery out will be upon us at 12. I think in the next hour we're going to do a topic inspired in part by a caller from earlier in this week. I wonder if you can guess which one it is. But we're going to begin with a bit of a strange one. Okay. We're going to begin by knitting together two, three, possibly even four separate but associated stories. We will

begin with the announcement from the member of parliament, Caroline Lucas, that she is stepping

down as an MP at the next election.

She, of course, remains the only member of Parliament ever produced by the Green Party down in Brighton and Hove.

I have to say, I don't know how much attention I was paying at the time, but when she became an MP, I thought it might be the beginning of a new era of green politics in this country. I thought she might be, if not the sort of beginning of an avalanche,

then certainly the beginning of a trickle. And she stayed there. She's been there since 2010 and

has done an astonishing job of bringing these conversation and these

issues into the mainstream but she has had enough and is moving on to pastures new i think

she wants to get involved in in more sort of if you like obviously active engagement with the issues as opposed to the political position as a one woman banned on the back benches.

I don't know. I'll read a little bit more about her resignation to you shortly.

Remarkable what she reflects on five prime ministers, four general elections, three major referendums, two Tory leadership coups and a partridge, I beg you pardon, and a global pandemic.

So that's story number one.

Story number two, you just heard in the bulletins, the wildfires that are raging throughout

Canada, pumping smoke southwards, rendering New York almost uninhabitable at the moment.

Jodie Comey, you remember her, the wonderful actress, had to stop a play last night on Broadway because of breathing difficulties.

The information that has been given to New Yorkers sounds like something that might be associated with some sort of form of chemical warfare.

You couldn't see across, I don't know how familiar you are with New York City, but there's a river

that separates Manhattan from Brooklyn, famously the sort of the bridge.

And you couldn't see one side from the other. It's a wider river

than the Thames, isn't it? But still, I mean, that notion is quite incredible. And that, of course,

is going to be linked to climate change. The world is getting hotter. Something else that brings

us to the third story that I would knit into this morning's question.

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