An 85-year-old man from the Struga village of Zagračani has been taken into custody for setting and causing an open-air fire near a spot known as "Lok". Police caught him on 4 September at 16:30, on the local road between Zagračani and Dolna Belica. Low scrub vegetation was burning, nobody was hurt, and the Struga territorial fire unit put it out.

A.M. is 85. That is not a detail to be taken as a mitigating circumstance, nor as a curiosity. It is a fact that tells you burning stubble and dry ground in this part of the country is not the decision of some organised criminal - it is a habit as old as the man practising it, a habit that for decades carried no penalty at all.

The fire was set in one of the driest periods of the year, in a week when the Protection and Rescue Directorate is reporting dozens of active hotspots across the country and crews working to exhaustion. The fire at "Lok" did not spread and took neither a house nor a life. That is pure luck, not merit.

Once the case is fully documented, an appropriate charge will be filed against him. What charge, and what penalty for a man of 85 - that is a question we probably will not get an answer to, because here nobody writes about what became of a case six months later.

And it matters. Because everyone who reads that a man set vegetation alight in the middle of the worst fire season and that nothing happened afterwards receives a piece of information. The information that burning open ground is free. That is a bigger problem than the fire at "Lok" itself.