Like a panda, my diet includes bamboo... shoots, with chicken and black bean sauce

Make your own sanitiser with normal cupboard items, it said. OK, I’ll give it a try. Take two parts alcohol, two parts aloe vera, two parts citrus juice and mix. How did they know I had vodka on the shelf ? Then use a funnel to pour into a hand spray and do the bathroom first. Wait, with those ingredients all I needed to do is add tequila and I have a Margarita cocktail. So maybe the bathroom is not quite as clean as I planned but, hey, the days are going past quicker.

The UK Government is not coping and so much is being hidden. Boris Johnson announced on May 6 he wanted to up Britain’s testing capacity to 200,000 a day by the end of the month. How is that going? Well, the target of building capacity for 200,000 coronavirus tests a day has been reached a day early, ministers have announced. Hurrah. Excellent. We love Matt Hancock. But he won’t say how many tests are actually being done.

You can have capacity of 200,000 but actually only do one. Ah. They’re not saying. And they won’t go on TV with Piers Morgan to explain why.

Meanwhile, the covidiots are coming out to play. They gather on beaches, at parties and anywhere they can show how low their intelligence is. And they are really low. Who ever thought that in 2020, advice from scientists and medical professionals would be considered political?

Like the gullible people who are falling for the social media scams. Have you seen the one about the people buying the £339 Bioshield USB keys with shielding software to protect from the “terrible 5G threat”? Its page has just been shut down on Facebook but its other web pages are doing great business. The USB Key comes, they say, with a nano-layer that uses “quantum holographic catalyzer technology” for the balance and harmonisation of the harmful effects of imbalanced electric radiation. Wow, great. Here’s the thing. It’s all nonsense.

Get a technician to carefully prise open the USB key and inside is a useless lump of semi-conductors and unconnected wiring. Before its social media shutdown, this pile of junk was apparently bought and well-reviewed by many happy but deluded souls, who were £339 lighter – after falling for all the “likes” on Facebook.

The “verified” buyers were in places such as Stonehaven, Dingwall and, yes, the Isle of Lewis. Can these people not exercise their brains and little grey cells? No, obviously not.

Mind you, exercise of all kinds is still difficult for some of us. Mrs X and I do our best but we have to find a stretch of road where we are unlikely to be mowed down by a car and also not meet people who insist on being too close. It’s not easy. Eating loads of garlic works well.

You can have capacity of 200,000 tests but actually only do one

When we are out, we walk apart. Actually, the pavements are so narrow up Plasterfield way that we have to walk Scalpay-style, that is one behind the other. There are sometimes big gaps between us. We are not social distancing or anything like that, I just can’t keep up with her.

Because we have to go round the island to do deliveries in the van, we sometimes walk on quieter roads outside Stornoway. Despite the wide open spaces, I still cannot keep up.

I have discovered the reason for that problem. It’s my hair, you see. My hair has suddenly become really heavy. Ten weeks without a haircut and the bathroom scales say I’ve put on half a stone.

OK, the truth may be a little different. I now think that I may be eating more. Like a big, cuddly panda. Did you know that a panda eats pretty much non-stop for almost 12 hours every single day? In its case, it is just bamboo. In my case, it is bamboo shoots and chicken, stirfried in black bean sauce. Or it was last night, anyway. We are just like pandas. Is that why it’s called a pandemic?

One great Chinese restaurant is Panda Cuisine in Glasgow. I love Glasgow. It’s where I was born and brought up until I was at a height to be walloped. I don’t get back often enough, which is why I don’t speak like they do. For instance, my Glesca cousin will say: “Get yer flip-flops on, hen. It’s roasting.” Here in the posh part of Plasterfield, we will just say: “Haoi, blone. Leave your wellies. The fleeking mercury is rising.” Posher or what?

Weegies are great people but there are still some parts of the Dear Green Place that are rough. A couple of years ago, I was in Paisley for a few days and went for a stroll one evening. I came across a wee pub that was having a quiz night so I thought I would nip in. They were just about to start but that quizmaster was not keen on a stranger coming in uninvited. His first question was: “What are you looking at?”

Giant pandas eat for up to 12 hours a day, relying on a steady diet of bamboo – I am also partial to bamboo, but only the tender shoots when they’re included in a favourite stir fry