A curtain rose on Thursday evening, and four hundred people — I know the theatre seats three hundred and eighty, but there were people standing in the aisles and I intend to round up — watched a man light seven lamps on a stage that has survived, against all reasonable expectation, to host the lighting.

The Bellvue is open. The Lamplighter’s Oath is playing. Thomas Ashworth is extraordinary and Nessa Holloway is going to be a very great actress, and Augustin Fell stood at the stage door with tears on his face and a pencil in his hand and said, “I have notes.”

Of course he has notes. A man who writes a play about a man who would not stop until every street had light is not going to stop having notes. Notes are how certain people love the world — not by accepting it but by insisting it could be better.

Meanwhile, at the Polytechnic, Dr Furness told three hundred people that the fever of 1859 came back in 1860, which means it was not a fever that visited. It was a fever that lived here. Leonard Hewitt — who has been researching this for thirty years, alone, with parish records and a retired man’s patience — offered Furness three folders of his work, and she took all three, which is a kind of justice that bureaucracies never provide but scholarship sometimes does.

Meanwhile, at the Works Committee, Isobel Dallow stood for eleven minutes and argued against a road, and the road was built anyway, but her words were written into the record, and that matters. There is a difference between losing a vote and being unheard. Mrs Dallow was heard. The conditions that Alderman Firth attached to his deciding vote — no public access, seasonal limits, a restoration bond — read like a man who was persuaded by the scientists but haunted by the farmer.

Meanwhile, on the Greymoor ridge, a professor from Caldwell looked at the glow for the first time and said it was consistent with a shallow magma intrusion, which is a phrase that sounds alarming until you learn that it means the earth has been warming itself beneath the ridge for possibly centuries and has only just now told us about it. Professor Nettleford recommends we listen. I recommend the same. When the earth speaks, it does not repeat itself.

Meanwhile, in the exhibition hall of the Historical Preservation Society, Arthur and James Bayliss are reconnecting the twelve mechanical joints that hold together Oswin Faraday’s model of Bobington — a city in miniature, a city made of wood and wire and eight years of devotion, a city that flows when you turn the pump on. Constance Faraday said it looks better in the exhibition hall than it did in the garage, and asked that her husband not be told. I have, of course, now told everyone.

And meanwhile — because this is the sort of week it has been — someone is planting wildflowers in Caldecott Square in the middle of the night. Cornflowers. Violets. Primroses and foxgloves. Native species, properly planted, by a person with a wheelbarrow and a broad hat and, apparently, better horticultural judgment than the Parks Department.

The night watchman saw them and did not intervene. “It didn’t seem like a crime,” he said. “It seemed like gardening.”

I have been alive long enough to know that a city reveals itself in what it does when no one is watching. The midnight gardener of Caldecott Square is tending something they do not own, for people they will never meet, in soil that belongs to the municipality. They are not asking permission. They are planting foxgloves.

Edmund Vale would have understood completely.