Flupocalypse

I have a sore throat and I'm short of breath for a couple of days, following which I spend a couple of weeks coughing up dockyard oysters. My wife gets it too, about a day behind me, and then the kid. I've noticed something or other called coronavirus bubbling away at the corners of the media but I haven't been paying it much attention.

Two weeks later, it's the only show in town. Social media is divided into panic stricken statistics about how this is the big one and we're all going to die; calmer statistics about how it's serious but it's simply that we need to be careful and no, we aren't all going to die; and then - riding in on the crest of a righteous wave surfed by those who just need to set the rest of us straight - crazed statistics about how it's true that we won't all die, but the hospitals will be full of corpses so actually we are definitely really going to die and should upscale our panic levels accordingly, but don't panic because that will make it worse, so actually do panic, but don't.

I don't panic. I just find it a bit depressing - apart from all sporting events being cancelled, which is quite cheering.

I phone my dad because I'm flying back to England to visit in April, and I really should have picked a better time to call. As usual, he's turned into a one man Daily Express opinion column. I need to cancel my flight because the airport will be full of dirty foreigners coughing and spluttering, and anyway, Donald Trump was on the telly and he said there won't be any flights to England because everything has been cancelled.

'He didn't say that,' I suggest.

'Yes, he did.'

'No, he didn't. He specified flights to mainland Europe, not flights to the United Kingdom.'

'No. He was on the telly and he said flights to the United Kingdom were suspended.'

'No. That wasn't what he said.'

'Yes, it was.'

My dad is not having anyone take his righteous terror away from him. I probably should have said something like, 'oh - so you've rejoined Europe, have you?' but you only ever think of these things afterwards. I try to explain how I'm kind of tired of scare stories, recalling him having warned me about all those Mexicans flooding north across the border, heading directly for my wife's underwear whilst drooling and making lustful grappling gestures with their hands; but it's difficult to convey my disappointment without actually calling him a twat, which I would prefer to avoid doing; and so frustration forces my voice to an incoherent upper register rant. Strangely, I find it reminds me of when my parents were still married, and I sound like my mother used to sound when arguing with him, usually with some justification as I recall.

I've had a moderately depressing couple of months in some respects, and it would be nice to at least be able to mention how I'm still a little devastated by the loss of Fluffy, our cat, but as ever, conversation with my father is on his terms, and will be about what he read in the newspaper this week, or what he saw on the television. If there's nothing proposed as the apocalypse in the newspapers this week, he'll simply give me a minute by minute account of a recently viewed episode of the Hairy Bikers. They visited Texas on one of their shows, and my dad spent the call describing the sort of thing that people who live in Texas like to eat.

I should have seen it, he suggested.

The call ends, and I wonder about cancelling my flight but assume it's most likely to be cancelled for me, or at least rescheduled. If I do fly in April, maybe I'll just see my mother and tell my dad it was cancelled.

Life continues, except the local supermarket runs out of bog roll, but our household collectively produces only an ordinary quantity of poo so it's difficult to regard our having only six rolls left as a problem. I see a few people wearing face masks, including one woman whose entire head is bandaged beneath her hat, complete with sunglasses in the style of the invisible man. I wash my hands and try not to touch my face, which is actually fairly easy. I think my capacity to panic has been broken at least since Brexit, so what will be will be.

Who fucking knows?