After five days in bed, I get up and do something phenomenally stupid. I reach for the wok to make Nicole and me Chinese lunch. My whole family loves my chicken in black bean sauce with bean sprouts. It’s my set piece. So that’s what I do, in my dressing gown, in the kitchen, to prove that I am putting Covid behind me. Nicole even takes a photo for WhatsApp. But I must have misremembered the recipe, because this is the first time it’s ever tasted of sewage. From the first mouthful I’m wondering who made this god-awful muck? And the fact that two hours later I’m rolling around in agony, rushing to the lavatory, spluttering, coughing and groaning, suggests that the disease has just been waiting for a beansprout cue to get its notorious second wind.

On the Friday when I first went to bed, the prime minister has made the first of two decisive interventions, which will take us all towards lockdown. Later, his allies in the press will claim that critics of his performance are enjoying the benefit of hindsight. Not me. From the moment the pandemic was headed this way, the prime minister scares me because I keep thinking, ‘Johnson doesn’t quite seem on top of this.’

He’s spent the middle of February on a twelve-day holiday among the 530 acres of mixed woodland at Chevening – time, it later turns out, divided between celebrating his girlfriend’s pregnancy, negotiating the final details of his most recent divorce and skipping COBRA meetings. He leaves it until 23 March reluctantly to announce the full measures. He seems to be struggling with his own instincts. ‘I do accept that what we’re doing is extraordinary. We are taking away the ancient, inalienable right of free-born people of the United Kingdom to go to the pub, and I can understand how people feel about that.’

In fact, of course, I hardly need point out, no such right exists. It’s a piece of journalistic invention. Inns and public houses have been regulated in the kingdom since the fifteenth century.

A friend of mine, a journalist, once said to me: ‘I’m a journalist. I like journalists. But, Christ, I’d never put a journalist in charge of running the country.’

*

It’s on the evening of Chinese lunch that my regulator goes crazy. Since neither Nicole nor I are confident of successfully using a thermometer, we assume that my bedtime reading of 40 degrees and then some is down to the thermometer not having been used for years. But then when I wake in the middle of the night, not in a puddle, but in a lake of sweat – I have to change both pyjamas and sheets – we decide maybe it was 40 after all. It feels like it.