A Journal of the Plague Year

Saturday 28th March – 5.30pm That's the word they are using everywhere to describe it – unprecedented. It's not, of course. There have been plagues aplenty, viral infections and pandemics galore. We have definitely been here before. Precedent? You need only a vague knowledge of history to encounter it. From black deaths and bubonic plagues to Spanish 'flu the history of mankind is stuffed full of pandemics and waves of apocalyptic viral destruction. However, such is the success of modern medicine that in my lifetime there are only a few occasions when I really became aware of scary stuff like coronavirus. I remember the posters on public transport pleading with people to not spit as it spread TB (tuberculosis). Time was, you see, when people did spit on the pavement. Certainly my father's generation (he was born in 1925) used to, and other cultures do as a matter of course. The Koreans do, and it is not uncommon to hear and see them gob on the pavements of New Mal...

Saturday 28th March – 2pm I finished this morning's knob patrol and settled down to a cup of tea. Oh, I should explain. The knob patrol is my name for going around the house with disinfectant and cloths cleaning every blessed knob in the house. Or other place where hands may have lurked however briefly. (Supply your own jokes at this point, I am too knackered.) I am slated to do this twice a day. Anyway, it was just as I was sipping the oolong that a thought occured relating to this virus thingy. Consider, for a moment, its ability to get about. It swims or floats in the air thinking: "I'd better get up someone's nose quickly or it's goodnight Vienna." It finds a nose, drifts in close, waits for an in-breath and then get sucked in. But the journey is not over. Once in, the virus, showing remarkable athleticism, makes its way past the cocaine build-up and swerves down into the lungs. Surely science can invent a way of using the nose to repel boarders. Fre...