If we can’t go to the Veneto, we’ll drink to it

We live in a world where yesterday’s inconceivable becomes today’s commonplace, but even so. I never thought that the day would come when I took a political problem less seriously than Boris Johnson. The PM is having a good pandemic: the tone just right. Yet as the streets of London empty faster than the supermarket shelves, and a chap finds it harder and harder to stumble across a social drink, I remain a closet heretic. I do not accept that the position is anything like as serious as the authorities would have us believe, and as for the notion that anyone over three score and ten has suddenly become a contagious invalid — in that famous phrase of Sir Bernard Ingham’s, ‘bunkum and balderdash’.

I suppose that some sceptics would question my credentials as an expert on public health, though I cannot see why. I have always obeyed sensible dietary rules, avoiding cheese made with pasteurised milk, scoffing lots of raw fish, plus beef grilled (barely) saignant, when not indeed raw and above all, never eating on an empty stomach. I am convinced that such basic common sense will help to see off the plague.

‘Plague’ made me think of Venice, as did the recent passing of Max von Sydow. What does The Seventh Seal mean? Would I still find it as gripping as I did at 15? Returning to von Sydow, I have always though that Dirk Bogarde was miscast as Gustav von Aschenbach in the film of Death in Venice. He came across as a fussy valetudinarian, throwing away the drama of Aschenbach’s crumbling and collapse, as his refined, ascetic self-disciplined morality proves powerless against subconscious stirrings. We observe him succumb to forbidden beauty, the lures of the south, the overthrow of caution: all ending in illness and death.