Explain, please. What is stopping the government from admitting, ‘Since 2010 we underfunded the NHS; the Lansley reorganisation, which not even Lansley understood, was a catastrophe; our denigration of junior doctors and nurses was a public-relations disaster; when the virus came, we were slow to react because we took a wrong road and the prime minister’s mind was elsewhere; we lied when we pretended contact tracing was suspended in March for scientific reasons, when in fact it was because of a testingcapacity shortage; we’ve been short of PPE throughout; we neglected care homes; we should have closed the airports’?

What would it actually cost to confess that we were talking through our hats when we claimed, at a press conference, to be ‘an international exemplar in preparedness’?

Apart from anything, wouldn’t it be so much easier?

Is the labour of lying really worth the effort?

Isn’t it draining on everyone’s ingenuity, conscience and resources?

Wouldn’t Johnson himself look and feel far less exhausted if he were liberated from a corrupt narrative the whole electorate knows not to be true? With one bound, wouldn’t he be free?

Does it never occur to the great minds of British politics that there is a direct connection between honesty and popularity? Why is that idea so hard to grasp?

Has no one in the current government ever met the bereaved? Do they not remember Hillsborough? Or Bloody Sunday? Or the residents of Grenfell Tower?

Have they really not yet learned that the most soothing possible bandage for the wounds inflicted by grief is the truth?

Do the families and friends of the dead not deserve it?

*

I’m tired of reading that people want to be spoken to like adults. In my experience, it’s adults who lie. I want to be spoken to like a child. It’s to children all decent people tell the truth.

*

Perhaps this desire is in line with my new personality. I’m so glad to be alive that I wake every morning wanting to thank the universe for continuing to host me. In recovery, I am suffused with joy. Unexpectedly, my character now allows me to say things like, ‘This is a beautiful glass of water.’

I am startled to come out of this experience a hippy.

Nicole notices that in recovery I have developed a new-found over-sensitivity to fiction. When, in a film we are watching, John C. Reilly whacks Gwyneth Paltrow hard across the face, Nicole asks me if I am aware that I have just shouted, ‘Don’t do that.’ When Edward Kennedy drives Mary Jo Kopechne off a bridge in Chappaquiddick, then swims to safety without rescuing her, do I realise that I have just shouted, ‘Bastard!’?

Yes. I guess the virus is in me and always will be.

*

The day will come when Covid-19 will be forgotten, just as Spanish flu is forgotten.