The corona curtain-twitchers are watching

Welcome, then, to a country in which the police send drones to humiliate people taking a walk and dried pasta has replaced the pound as the national currency. ‘Gimme that pappardelle, mofo.’ ‘Not until you prise it from my cold dead hands, punk.’ A week is a long time in politics, but also a long time in pestilence. And the next time someone uses the phrase ‘the new normal’, I may well break my social distancing regimen and chin him.

The lockdown has come as a great boon to the police, who seem to be enjoying it immensely, and indeed to Britain’s vibrant community of curtain-twitching, onanistic, meddlesome ratbags. Police forces up and down the country have been inundated with calls from these people dobbing in their neighbours for having taken the dog for a walk twice, or returning from the shops carrying only a packet of fags instead of the mandatory 12 tons of lavatory paper and a six-pack of canned tomatoes.