Roll up, roll up, get your

Fellow New Zealanders, hunched behind a fortress wall of toilet paper rolls, I bring good news, sort of! Death is coming to us all. But it probably won’t be Covid-19 that brings it, not for most of us, perhaps not any.

Let’s hope, let’s use soap. We can’t run, we can’t hide. Death knows where to find us.

But we can be prepared for it. We can also overprepare, and for the wrong things.

What a gift the great run on toilet paper has been for comics like Australia’s Chaser news.

There’s an almost gleeful gratitude in headlines like ‘‘Widespread panic hits as coronavirus found to transmit via toilet paper’’ and ‘‘Local man ready for pandemic if it involves nothing but going to the toilet for 12 weeks’’.

It looks farcical; it looks tragic, it looks like over-preparation for the wrong thing.

It also looks like a fatal incapacity to see that things work best when we all take our fair share and no more.

This is not to treat a deadly disease with disregard. But a sense of proportion and presence of mind seems to have vanished faster than a pallet of toilet paper from New World.

Death is coming to us all, but the slower this