It’s extraordinary to put together the response to the tragic fire in Notre Dame and the Guardian’s video of Greta Thunberg’s speech in Strasbourg (16 April). “Our house is on fire,” she said. “Our house is falling down.” Some level of panic, she said, is appropriate and necessary in an emergency, to motivate urgent action. Millions were being promised for the reconstruction of the cathedral before the fire was out. Climate breakdown roars around us, as we fumble in our tottering house looking for our reading glasses.

Caro New

Joint national campaigns co-ordinator, Green party of England and Wales

• Can we expect to see the same generosity as shown in Paris to help with the restoration works on the Houses of Parliament (Editorial, 18 April) from the numerous millionaires in the present government?

Linda Theobald

London

• Pete Buttigieg may indeed be pretentious (Arwa Mahdawi, G2, 17 April), but that’s not to say the Odyssey is not exactly a beach read. I left my copy of the Iliad on top of a sun shade on the beach at Torremolinos at the end of the day in 1982. Would you believe it was still there the next day?

Ian Paulson

London

• Songs about Europe (G2, 12 April and Letters, 17 April)? Surely we can’t forget Ronnie Hilton’s A Windmill in Old Amsterdam. The little mouse had clogs on!

Ruth Lewis

Middlesbrough

• You referred to Theresa May as being “out of the country” (Report, 16 April). In a box attached to this article you state that she is on a walking holiday in Wales. Is Mrs May now only prime minister of England?

Keith Wightman

Barbon, Cumbria

• Join the debate – email guardian.letters@theguardian.com

• Read more Guardian letters – click here to visit gu.com/letters

• Do you have a photo you’d like to share with Guardian readers? Click here to upload it and we’ll publish the best submissions in the letters spread of our print edition