Martin Hesp on Saturday

This story would be binned as unbelievable

AT two in the morning the sound of distant gunfire pierced the darkness. A minute later, a military helicopter flew low over our valley. Logic told me the two things couldn’t possibly be related. Someone was taking potshots at deer and we’ve had a lot of army helicopters flying over Exmoor recently, so presumably the pilots were on a night exercise.

But in the small hours, imagination can run away with itself… What if this was some totally unexpected, full-on, military invasion?

Crazy, I know. But if there is one thing this pandemic has taught us, it is that nothing is impossible. Just because events might seem like the plot of some half-baked novel, it doesn’t mean they could never happen.

If, 12 months ago, someone had described what was going to happen over the next year, most people would have thought they were talking about a Hollywood disaster movie or some far-fetched thriller.

Imagine some soothsayer with a long white beard predicting, one year ago, what you’d be doing in January 2021. You would have declared him completely potty. This is what the old wiseacre might have said to me…

“You will attend a virtual chocolate tasting session on January 17 – staged online because you and the other journalists will not be allowed out of your homes. And you’ll be delighted – not only because Lindt will send some of their finest chocolate for the occasion – but because the event will represent the only human contact with strangers you’ll have experienced in months.

“You will not have seen your daughter for a month, and then only for one day at Christmas. And you will not have seen your son for almost a year. You will only leave the valley once every two weeks for essential supplies. And every night watching TV news you will sit opened-mouthed in horror as the UK death toll rises.”

The prophet might conclude: “This is just a description of your life at that time, but do not be alarmed. You will not be alone. Everyone will be in the same boat.”

It’s like some crazy TV panel game. You are the contestant and you have to gamble on how accurate certain predictions might be. A smoothhaired twit of a presenter is saying: “If you think this description of your future life in January 2021 is totally daft and that it could never happen, press Button A. If you think there’s a 20 per cent chance it could occur in a year’s time, press Button B. If you’re unsure, go for 50-50 with Button C. And if you believe it is highly likely, hit Button D! There’s half a million quid riding on the right answer!”

No one from the January 2020 show would have come away winning the dosh.

Anyone who tells you they predicted all this is either a fantasist or a liar. Yes, novelists write apocalyptic stuff about plagues, but they don’t really believe any of it will ever happen. Which is why we’re happy to watch disaster movies about the end of the world. We feel a frisson of fear mixed with just a little excitement as we murmur: “Blimey! Imagine that!”

And when it comes to fantasies, I think most of us used to vaguely believe there were plenty of experts out there who’d look after society if anything big ever did go wrong.

Now we’re wondering why there weren’t better plans in place when the whatever did hit the fan. You can have all the professors, virologists, epidemiologists, and statistical modellers you like, but not many have come out of this covered in glory.

If it wasn’t for their clever colleagues who invented the vaccines, we’d be in really big trouble right now.

The people in charge of what happens when a pandemic strikes might come across as knowledgeable on TV or radio, but it seems none of them has been able to pop around to Downing Street and say: “Here we go Boris. Here’s the road map. Follow it and in a year’s time we’ll have kept it down to the 20,000 deaths we were originally predicting.”

Or maybe they did, and Messrs Johnson and Co weren’t listening. Who knows?

Certainly, some experts have done better than others. Take Vietnam, for example, a country where millions live cheek-by-jowl in absolute poverty. At just under 97 million, its population is almost a third larger than the UK’s.

Total Vietnamese Covid 19 deaths since the pandemic began? Just 35.

That’s not 35,000. We are talking one death short of three dozen. The reason for this astronomical disparity is not clear. Maybe there’s dodgy counting going on in Ho Chi Min City.

Like my midnight nightmare of a military invasion, it’s a story that seems just too fantastic.

Imagine a novel in which a wealthy Western nation had a pandemic death toll 2,971 times greater than that of a so-called Third World country… You’d probably chuck the book in the bin for being just too unbelievable.

And yet at the time of writing statistics show that, for every one Vietnamese person who has died of Covid-19, nearly 3,000 British people have perished.

We are in a new world. A world in which, we are beginning to realise, just about anything can happen.

Like my midnight nightmare of a military invasion, it’s a story that seems just too fantastic