And for the first time, my doctor is seriously worried. ‘I don’t like the sound of you. You need to go into hospital for them to take care of you.’ I say I won’t go. It’s too dangerous. Hospitals are full of people with Covid-19. ‘You’ve already got Covid-19,’ he replies. ‘How can it be worse in hospital?’ ‘I don’t know,’ I say. ‘I just feel it is.’ ‘All right,’ he says. ‘But I’m not letting this go on much longer.’

The doctor is bombarding me with horse pills, antibiotics of industrial strength, which he says may explain the permanent taste in my mouth. Next morning, I wake after a torrid night convinced that Polos will solve the problem. Nicole is so relieved that there is something I actually want to eat that she buys me ten packets. Unfortunately, it’s some time since I had a Polo, and in the interval it’s obvious from the first one I pop in that the manufacturers have changed the formula. They’re now flavoured with sewage.

I can’t believe they sell as many as when they tasted of mint, but it’s a commercial choice, I guess.

*

On the tenth day, my sole diary entry reads: ‘Total despair.’

*

My mood is aggravated by the dense blizzard of cliché which is fogging up my television. You would think, given that by the second week of May more people will have died in the UK than in any other country in Europe, a note of contrition might begin to be heard in the public realm. But no, the preferred route through the crisis is bullshit.

Government ministers must now, every man and woman, toil their way doggedly down the centre of the bullshit highway.

Words like ‘failure’ or ‘mistake’ are forbidden and replaced with the anodyne ‘challenge’.

‘Yes, we faced challenges’ is government-speak for ‘Yes, we failed.’

‘Ramping up’ is government-speak for ‘finally doing something we forgot to do’.

‘We followed the science’ is government-speak for ‘Don’t blame us.’

The word that’s getting beaten up worst is ‘mediocrity’. The only qualification for being in a nodding-dog cabinet is that you must possess a mind vacant of all doubt about Johnson’s scorched-earth approach to Brexit. If you have any reservations, you’re excluded.

This has left the prime minister with as good a statistical chance of forming a strong administration as if he were to insist that all ministers must have ginger hair, or stand in their socks at over six foot ten.