What a relief to no longer have to pretend to be sociable

Hulking fat chavs pushing shopping trolleys full of lavatory paper back to their Nissan Micras. I can’t think of a better image to sum up the coronavirus crisis right now. I saw a bunch of them outside my local branch of Morrisons on Sunday morning, their expressions uniformly defiant and smug. One family had at least ten multipacks in their trolley — and nothing else. Surely one cannot live on toilet tissue alone, no matter how agreeably scented it might be? I assumed they were part of the panic-buying crowd, although having seen the size of their arses it may well be that this was simply their requisite amount for a single day of copious wiping.

I had driven to the supermarket in time for its opening, at 10 a.m. All I needed were a few breakfast rolls and some cigarettes. There and back in half an hour — it’s usually deserted first thing Sunday. Not this Sunday, though. There were vast queues outside the front doors and the car park was full. As soon as the doors opened they stampeded — if you can stampede in a sort of wheezing waddle — towards the stacks of bog roll, pausing only to loot any remaining paracetamol from the medicine counter. Official injunctions not to be selfish work only with people who are not, er, selfish. But it is a long time since we had a communitarian ethos — for 40 years at least it has been a singularly individualistic and grasping ethos, so we shouldn’t be surprised by the greed of the bog-roll fetishists.

Perhaps this bout of misfortune will tilt us all in a different direction. That sounds, on the face of it, counter-intuitive, given that we are all self-isolating.