Some years ago the Readers Digest reported the case of Angie and David whose house burned down. Angie’s first act was to hunt through the blackened ruins searching for any photo albums that had survived. She managed to find some that were still intact and went back to show her husband. She found him carefully placing some charred pieces of paper in a box – they were their courtship love letters. ‘As I watched David kneeling there in the ashes,’ she said, ‘I was overcome with the certainty that we were meant for each other. There, in the face of our greatest tragedy, our first thoughts were not of our material loss, but of the potential loss of these precious parts of our life together. As I knelt to help him with the letters, I was certain we hadn’t lost anything that mattered at all.’