We’re all guilty of recruiting this virus to our cause

There must be a quote from Shakespeare for this, but so far I haven’t found it. It’s the way we all of us contrive to see in cosmic events the evidence, the signs and portents, for what we already believed even before the cataclysm had occurred. These are the days of miracle and wonder, sang Paul Simon…

The way we look to a distant constellationThat’s dying in a corner of the skyThese are the days of miracle and wonderAnd don’t cry, baby, don’t cry, don’t cry…

Somehow there never was a plague, earthquake, flood or epidemic that was not also a sign that the human race must mend its ways according to wisdom we had long recommended, even during less extraordinary times. One fine day, perhaps, something remarkable and strange may happen that causes us to review, even (horrors) abandon, a dearly held belief. But not yet, baby, not yet, not yet…

Not we of the print and broadcast commentariat, anyway. And I hasten to say this starts with your columnist: at least as guilty as any one of my journalistic brethren. There was a sort of inevitability about my take on the latest emergency. You’d have guessed, wouldn’t you, that your predictably and sometimes tediously contrarian columnist, ever anxious to take a side-kick at Boris Johnson’s government, would find a way of representing this pandemic as overhyped? And your columnist — this hurts even to type it — may be wrong.

But so could others. So, chuckling this Easter weekend as I listened to the Archbishop of Canterbury remind his flock of the eternal Christian truths and values that Covid-19 is bringing home to an anxious nation, I made a little list of other familiar voices in our media: respected, every one of them, and rightly so, but very various in the opinions they publish, and each with his or her own slant on a sub-microscopic little virus that any objective observer, surely, would describe in the same way.