Virus fears reach my home in the hills

WHAT’S happened to all the toilet paper? Coronavirus is already causing havoc, misery and personal tragedy, but right now we mere mortals tucked away in our Westcountry communities can’t do much more than worry about the onslaught of the disease – and wonder why it is that so many local supermarkets have run out of toilet paper.

Anti-bacterial hand-wipes and paracetamol, yes. You could understand the shelves being empty of such things. But as far as I know Corvid-19 doesn’t have the sort of symptoms that require copious amounts of loo paper.

And so it gets closer. On a single dog walk just now I met three people and had three conversations about coronavirus, each more weird and outlandish than the next…

First I met Dave, the district’s parcel delivery guy who knows more about what goes on in our area than the local weekly newspaper.

“Don’t talk to me about coronavirus,” he growled when I asked if he knew of any cases in West Somerset. “I’m fed up with it already. It’s bad enough that half the people don’t want to sign for delivery on my touchpad device saying it’ll be covered in other people’s germs.

“But now it’s got more crazy - I’ve just had a chap throw a parcel back at me. I handed it to him and he looked down at it, then threw it back in my face! ‘I’m not having that!’ he screamed. ‘It’s from China!’…”

Next I bumped into an airline pilot pal and asked how the epidemic was affecting his globetrotting life.

“Don’t tell Greta Thunberg,” he shrugged. “But I am flying empty planes around the world at the moment.”

He said his airline was asking employees to take voluntary unpaid leave and he was thinking of doing just that.

“Once it gets among our flight crew it will ground all of us in two days,” he said. “I can fly three different planes in a day and each time I get into one I put on a headset that’s been on someone else’s head just minutes before.”

He concluded: “My theory is you’ve got to take everything as an opportunity. I’ll spend time off playing with stocks and shares, because if you use your brains you can see new opportunities. And I’ve always fancied owning a little place in Italy - the prices there are rock bottom right now.”

The third conversation was perhaps the most bizarre. I came across a fellow dog-walker from up the road who also travels internationally for his work.

“Best catch it as quickly as you can, and get over it,” he said. “The hospitals will all be crammed full in three months time and if you are going to have complications you’d be better off having them now while they’ve still got room to treat you.

“If it was legal, I’d kiss every Chinese girl I could get my hands on next time I’m in the Far East. That would be a guaranteed way of catching it.” I moved hastily on, and even the dog looked up at me with an expression which seemed to say: “Did I hear that right?”

Back at home I found my wife scrubbing every surface. And I’m talking about scrubbing things with anti-bacterial wipes that have never been de-bugged before.

I knew why. We’d just had a visit from a friend from Tokyo. My wife thought it was crazy that I invited him to stay, but he’d been back in the UK for the past fortnight after his dad died. Of old age, I hasten to add.

I thought the visit posed a zerorisk because my mate had phoned to say he was feeling fine.

But the lady of the house wasn’t so sure.

But then, she’d already been worried about our son who was at a conference in the USA a fortnight ago. After he left, the office complex where he’d been working was closed because someone there went down with Corvid-19.

Now back in the UK, Harry is sneezing. I’m no medical expert but I’m pretty sure he has all the signs of the classic common cold, which is responsible in the UK for the loss of more than 27 million work days a year. Snuffles and sore throats are not going away just because there’s a new bug in town.

Very few people have the coronavirus in this country so far. Of course, a great many will succumb, we know that – but I’ll tell you what threequarters of us have managed to catch already, and that is some degree of fear.

I won’t be chucking parcels back at the delivery man just yet, but even I find myself thinking morbid thoughts in darker moments.

For example, I am pretty fit and have a robust constitution, but the phrase they keep using about “older people with pre-existing medical conditions” doesn’t help. Does being over 60 and having had a major heart operation count?

However, I am not losing any sleep. Yet. I hope our readers aren’t either.

But no matter how frantic you do get, I’d advise against racing about trying to find Chinese girls to kiss or even chucking parcels at the delivery guy.

A friend told me that if it was legal he’d kiss every Chinese girl he could, to try to catch coronavirus