I miss the days when all we had to worry about was Brexit, not a coronavirus pandemic

Who gives a stuff what colour our passports are, asks Jenny Eclair, when we probably won’t be going anywhere, anyway?

The possibility of a fortnight’s quarantine looms large in many people’s imagination (Reuters)

I was scrolling through Twitter recently – as a catastrophist does when the world is on the verge of a pandemic – when I saw a video someone had posted from Japan. It featured a couple of minutes of cherry blossom, filmed by officials in one of the parks closed due to the coronavirus, so that people who couldn’t visit the park in person could witness the flowering online. This is the stage we are now at with this terrible disease, and I for one am not sure how brave I’m going to be.

My 90-year-old mother who lives up north, on the other hand, is unfazed. “Oh, it won’t come here,” she announces breezily, whilst I mutter, “I hope not,” considering a large proportion of her neighbours are over 80.

Meanwhile, the car park at my nearest supermarket is suspiciously full at times it shouldn’t be. It’s not quite week-before-Christmas busy. No one is snatching at the shelves, but there is a determined set to the jaw of the ladies pushing their trolleys a little bit more aggressively than usual. You can almost hear them calculating, “How many bags of pasta will feed four for two weeks? How many times can we eat pesto without going mad?”