The birth of the spotless giraffe at a zoo in Tennessee, the only known one on earth, is important news to those of us who grew up as oddballs, seeing the spotted mama giraffe nuzzling her child, remembering the kindness of aunts and teachers who noticed our helpless naivete and guided us through the shallows.

And then there was the story of the cable car in Pakistan that lost a couple cables and dangled helplessly hundreds of feet in the air with terrified children inside. A nightmare in broad daylight. A rescuer harnessed to the remaining cable had to bring the children one by one to safety.

It dawns on you, watching this, that what makes a society a civilized society is the existence of rescuers who will put themselves at risk in service to others. It isn’t having a street system or social media or manufacturing capacity that define civil society, it’s public service.

The giraffe is a bony creature whose meat is too lean and sinewy for our taste and nobody has thought to saddle them up and race them and their hide doesn’t suit us particularly and so they were never bred by man as horses and cattle were, so this spotless child belongs to a species in steep decline, just as I do, being a writer.