So who IS tackling a pandemic by buying up all the toilet roll?

LAST weekend my father, a Free Church minister 55 years ordained, was due to take a Communion service: preaching, handling bread and wine (the latter traditionally sipped by all present from one or two silver chalices), presiding over its distribution and running a gauntlet of subsequent handshakes.

In light of the coronavirus crisis I took it upon myself on Friday afternoon to nip out in search of hand sanitiser with which my aged parent could at intervals discreetly anoint himself.

I might as well have gone out on a hunt for the great auk. In the relevant aisle at Morrisons, a sign sternly advised that bottles of hand sanitiser were limited to two per customer – a worthy sentiment indeed, had there been any left.

A tramp down the brae to Aldi: no hand sanitiser, not even liquid soap. I puffed further, to a branch of Tesco the size of Midlothian. A few disconsolate souls milled before empty shelves, as a dozen sixtysomethings in dreadful leisurewear piled trolleys with toilet roll.

Waitrose also drew a blank – even as vast quantities of Andrex processed out the door like a state funeral. One chemist shook her head in silent pity as I made inquiry, and two more pharmacies had NO HAND SANITISER IN STOCK notices pinned to the door.

I reminded myself that regular and thorough handwashing is far more effective a defence against infection than rolling your mitts in high-alcohol goo. Sanitiser is really only of value if you brave public transport – which, for the time being, I must simply shun.

Yet the madness continued. By Saturday evening several major supermarkets had announced rationing. In Australia, two women got into a knock-down fight over bog roll. In Hong Kong, a poor delivery driver was robbed, at knifepoint, of a truckload of the stuff.

In one supermarket aisle, a man was Tasered by the cops and France has been forced to nationalise all production of face masks. And, just when you might think we could sink no lower, we hear reports of folk strutting into hospitals to fill wee bottles from wall-mounted sanitiser units – or, indeed, rip them wholesale from the wall.

One newspaper on Tuesday cheekily posted a table showing which areas reported the most abnormal sales of lavatory paper and which the least. Salisbury, in Wiltshire, is the most distinctly panicked: purchases are up elevenfold. The Western Isles, I proudly note, are one of only three local authority areas where sales are entirely normal.

THE cynical might put this down to the vast local acreage of sphagnum moss. But, on a windswept archipelago where ferries are frequently disrupted by screaming storms, island people have a certain resilience. We always have enough food in store – dried, canned or frozen – to keep us for a few days: torches and candles against the occasional power cut. One looks in on elderly neighbours and the ferry will always dock in two or three days.

Besides, in such a goldfish bowl of a community there is keen self-awareness. Dashing around Tesco in high panic, grabbing baked beans and UHT milk and tinned tuna and several miles of Cushelle as if it were the End of Days, would not be applauded as prudence: everyone would think you ridiculous.

Panic buying has kicked in elsewhere because millions are frightened for themselves and their loved ones and feel the urge to do something – anything – that restores some sense of control against a bug that, only last November, was exclusive to bats, against which none of us has immunity and for which there is neither vaccine nor cure.

In such a situation it is hard to remain entirely rational, even when – superficially – we really know that 64 rolls of toilet tissue are scarcely likely to save us. Scared by the oncoming pestilence, scared still further by uncertainty and the unknown, fight-or-flight syndrome kicks in and, in a rush of adrenaline, we hit the supermarket.

We are herd animals, too, intensely social creatures. Our behaviour is strongly informed, even in normal times, by what we see other people doing.

Thus talent-free celebrities can make an online fortune as ‘influencers’. And, as we see others stockpiling and spot the shelves in shops stripped bare, it is hard not yourself to start believing such behaviour is both normal and advisable.

It is also a commonplace that, the more you hear about something, the more convinced you become that you will be affected by it, and the more heavily it will weigh on our minds as we weigh a decision or try to frame plans.

And, bravely as you might try to ration time online or dodge the evening news, it is hard not to let coronavirus seep into everything. In three weeks I have a brief and eagerly awaited break in Ireland, but in three weeks, Britain could be Italy.

IMIGHT, then, find myself in Ireland and forbidden to return. Or I could be coughing. Or plugged into some scary machine, dampeyed and speechless, as exhausted doctors try to keep my blood oxygenated even as trundling JCBs dig mass graves down the local park and soldiers prowl the streets shooting down looters…

In reality, most of us who catch COVID-19 will have mild to insignificant symptoms and the vast majority, even the elderly, will survive. And a fortnight quarantined in your bedroom with good books and Netflix is greatly preferable to the alternative.

What I at first failed to understand is what seems to be a national and pathological obsession with toilet paper: coronavirus does not, after all, involve what one commentator daintily describes as ‘stomachrelated troubles’.

But psychologists proffer other explanations. A multipack of Andrex is splendidly

john.macleod@dailymail.co.uk

bulky – ‘a really massive product and it’s low in value’, observes one expert, ‘so when people walk into a supermarket, they’re buying the biggest-volume product they have because they think it’ll last them for longer’.

It is also hardwired into human nature that big problems require big solutions. For centuries, men have determinedly overcomplicated Christianity from simply believing the Gospel.

People died, and kept on dying, from the likes of typhoid and cholera because they refused to believe it could be caught from simply drinking water. And, when you hear the telephone number statistics, or view the turmoil in other lands, it is very hard to believe that merely washing your hands – frequently, conscientiously, after you have been out and emphatically before you eat – is the best thing you can do to protect yourself.

Panic buying is not about protection. It is born of an irrational need to regain some sense of control in a global emergency we really cannot control. And, once you can identify that fear, you can control it, and leave high panic to the Americans.

My own panic buying has been confined to two packs of Lemsip Max and four tins of rather good sardines.

As for that Communion service? Sensibly, they used individual little glasses and I am assured there are survivors.