CAROLE MALONE Help! I’m all cooped up

SO thanks to a bunch of selfish idiots who flocked to our parks and beaches last weekend like they were extras in a scene from Summer Holiday, Boris was forced to make one of the most chilling speeches ever to come out of Downing Street on Monday night.And yes, I know the lockdown was an inevitability, a necessity.

But that didn’t stop The Husband and I looking at each other in abject horror.

THREE WHOLE WEEKS OF JUST ME AND HIM!

Don’t get me wrong. Nino and I have been married for 27 years and we adore each other – at least half of the time. But the idea of being cooped up together in the same house for the foreseeable was terrifying.

We’d already had a week in semi-lockdown and it didn’t go well. Just hours before Boris’ announcement we’d been walking on the beach with Murphy, our

Tibetan Terrier, and had a humdinger of a row.

I’d stormed off because Nino started moaning when I asked if he could connect me to Skype (my tech skills would make a Luddite look like Mark Zuckerberg) so I could do some of my TV work from home.

I got a lecture about how he was busy and why hadn’t I told him before.And I wasn’t the only one with work to do.

Suffice to say I told him to stuff Skype where the sun don’t shine (which was always going to hurt me more than it was going to hurt him) and stomped off to walk the two-mile journey home alone. To be fair, he did stop two or three times to tell me to get in the car, but I was still raging and ploughed on with an ice cold wind in my face.

Maybe God was punishing me for behaving badly but when I woke up yesterday I couldn’t see out of my right eye. It was red and inflamed. Conjunctivitis? I panicked. Where would I get the drops to fix it?

Nino told me it was probably an infection because of the wind and the long walk home and it was my fault for being so stubborn. No tea or sympathy there.

So I spent yesterday morning in a mile-long queue at Morrisons chemists waiting for the eyedrops. While I was there – in my plastic gloves and keeping three very long metres from every other living soul – I went to the aisle where the L’Oréal hair dyes were.

I’ve never dyed my own hair in my life but realise I’m going to have to learn. Is it trivial in these times of crisis to worry about my roots? Mine are grey, you see. Have been since I was 30.

And even though I’m living in isolation, I don’t want to wake up every day looking like a pound shop Cruella deVil.

For years I’ve kidded myself the grey’s not really there, that I’m a natural honey blonde with chocolate highlights. But my hairdresser Thomas at Richard Ward knows different.

Trouble is, I have no idea how to find him. Presumably he’s in lockdown too with the recipe for my hair dye. I mentioned the hair thing to Nino who couldn’t have been less interested if I’d been talking about the last episode of The Real Housewives of Cheshire. Because his solution to not being able to get to a barber is simply to shave all his hair off.

Not a great idea.The last time he did it he looked likeVinny Jones on steroids.

“Who’s going to see it?” he said when I protested. It clearly hadn’t occurred to him that I was going to have to look at him every minute of every day for the next three weeks. But then maybe he doesn’t care?

Anyway, I’m off to lie down in a darkened room. I’m exhausted thinking about what I should be doing to utilise my time usefully. All I’ve come up with so far is eating.

And worse – I’ve got toothache.Who the hell is going to deal with that if I get an abscess?Where’s the wine…