I hope you are well. This is not the usual start to one of these blogs, but these are not usual times.

While it is natural to panic, I try not to because if you are married to a natural panic merchant, having two play that game is unsettling.

But my attempts to stay cool while saying the coronavirus won’t be all that bad have unravelled. I don’t want to join all the amateur epidemiologists lining up to have their say, as that should be left to those who know what they are talking about. But still.

Here are a few snapshots of how our life is unravelling a little, as yours might be too.

We went to a friend’s birthday party on Saturday and only ten of us turned up, as opposed to the 30 or so who usually roll along. The birthday boy enjoyed himself, but later said he was going into self-chosen quarantine: not because there was a problem, just because he’s in his mid-60s and has certain health problems.

An old friend of mine unmet for two or three years cancelled a planned lunch for this week, as he’s in his mid-60s, has asthma and has been advised by his doctor to keep a low social profile.

My long-since separated parents are in their late 80s, so that raises other concerns. My in-laws are in their early 80s and perfectly fine, but still.

One of my brothers is on holiday with his family in Spain and is confided to the hotel balcony. The brother who lives in Hong Kong is seeing his life changed by the coronavirus (students sent home and so on), after seeing it changed by the protests and riots.

Our eldest son and his partner have had to cancel an Easter trip to New York. They’d decided not to go because everywhere in the city was shutting down; and now Trump has banned flights from Britain anyway.

We went to our local bar last night, a small weekly treat. It was pleasantly filled with drinkers and their dogs (it’s a canine-friendly sort of place). Will that bar and all others be forced to close and what will Sunday look like if it does?

I do work for two universities, both still open for now, although others are closing. My office work is being done from home on Friday as an experiment in remote working.

As I said, I try not to worry; but still. What if my works stutters or stops; what if the shop where my wife works is required to shut for a while? We all face such questions, or most of us do.

While not wishing to join those amateur epidemiologists, I do wonder about advising everyone aged 70 and above to stay indoors for their own protection. Some 70-year-olds are fitter than they’ve ever been (one I know a little is still playing squash) and no more at risk than a younger person in poor shape.

But still. These are small ways in which life is being changed, infringed, made worrying. Some people are facing bigger and more tragic difficulties. All we can do is carry on (when that’s allowed) and hope everything turns out OK for those we love.

My mother has started a family WhatsApp group for keeping everyone in touch. I have two more such groups for friends. My phone is pinging all the time, but it’s good to be in touch, especially if you can no longer touch or see.

I try not to worry; but still.

Our eldest (born Lewisham, lives York) is trying to buy a house. Recently he stayed with my mother (Essex, Bristol, Cheadle Hulme, Knutsford) and showed her the house in Bristol where she grew up. As it had been sold relatively recently, there were photographs online.

A house is just a house, yet memory is mortar to those bricks. From the front this terraced house looks much as it did. And out the back the garden is still walled and beyond you can see the roof of the school. Further away and not visible is the prison against whose outside walls children sometimes kicked balls; perhaps they still do.

Inside only the front room, where my grandfather would hover at the net curtains while giving a running commentary on what the neighbours were up to, coincides with memory. Most other rooms have been changed and the attic seems to have been colonised.

The kitchen is unrecognisable from memory, smart and modern behind the remembered version; the old kitchen haunts it like a negative ghosting a new photograph.

My grandfather, an East End boy, did office work in the London docks. During the war he was sent to Bristol (I think it was a reserved occupation) and liked the place so much, he moved his family there afterwards.

We lived nearby in a house where, aged three, I fell from a bedroom window and fractured my skull. My grandmother kept a diary which my mother found years after she died, and the potentially tragic incident loomed large.

My grandfather had an allotment around the corner, to which sometimes he would retreat. His wife was known to the grandchildren as Nagging Nana, although she rarely nagged me (eldest grandson, victim of a childhood mishap).

We moved from Bristol to Cheadle Hulme shortly before one Christmas in the mid 1960s, two parents and three boys, with Christmas packed into the removal lorry. That house in the cul-de-sac pops up in a search but without any photos. About three years ago, visiting the area for a mini-reunion, I drove into the road that goes nowhere, parked outside, had a look, then left.

One of my brothers (Bristol, Cheadle Hulme, Cardiff, Paris, Lyons, and now Hong Kong) once told me he’d never liked that house or the road. I did but perhaps I am more sentimental. My other brother (Bristol, Cheadle Hulme, Barnsley) has never said much about the house that I can recall.

I try the same trick for where my father (Southampton, Bristol, Cheadle Hulme, Prestwich) grew up, but discover no details. In a street-view photograph the house in Southampton shares a glancing similarity to the 1920s semi in York where we moved so that my wife (Macclesfield, Cheadle Hulme, Nelson, Wetherby, London, York) could have the garden she complained she’d never have.

Our daughter (born in York, lives in York, loves York) is back home while training to be a teacher. The other day dad and daughter walked past the old council offices in St Leonard’s Place. This Georgian terrace was turned back into houses and flats (sorry, apartments) some years ago.

Those prices are astonishing, we say to each other, while heading to meet her brother for a drink, the York brother and not the Salford brother. Two out of our three stayed around, the other lives where he was a student. I did that too and that’s how we met: happenstance and rented rooms in a shared house in Lewisham.

Eventually we bought a flat converted from a large house with a monkey puzzle tree outside; a flat that, according to Zoopla, is now worth a dizzying amount.

The day after dad and daughter were discussing the old council offices in York, an estate agent’s advert popped up on Facebook: £1.1m for an apartment. That seems bonkers and a social wrong. As does the apparent worth now of that flat halfway up the hill in an ordinary corner of south-east London.

Takes deep breath, gnashes teeth and reminds himself there are different kinds of worth…

The TV is on all day in this office, with screens showing sport or the news. Right now, President Trump, in a red baseball cap, bomber jacket and enormous white trousers, is talking to a group of men who are smarter than him.

The sound is down so Trump is muted (hallelujah) but you can’t miss his gee-you-know-I’m-a-genius-really face.

I check later and his visit, repeated endlessly like Groundhog Day at the lip of time, was to a centre for disease control and prevention in Atlanta.

The other men, the ones who look more like presidents than Trump, are experts in disease control. Trump is an expert only in being Donald Trump. He holds up an image of the coronavirus, as it if were a drawing he’d just done in class that morning.

Trump doesn’t like experts. He has disparaged experts since his election. Experts tell him things he doesn’t wish to hear. Experts say the climate crisis is real and not something cooked up by the Chinese. Out with experts.

Trump deploys his lack of knowledge as vacuum shield that sucks in everything around. He spouts nonsense as if it were a magic mantra.

He insisted the coronavirus crisis did not exist, but suddenly that crisis has put experts to the fore again. Who you gonna trust – the world’s most infamous gobshite or experts who know that they are talking about?

Suddenly people in the US want to listen to experts. It’s the same here and never mind all that pre-Brexit idiocy from Michael Gove about how, “People in this country have had enough of experts”.

Trump’s first instincts were to ignore the experts, politicise the crisis, and blame Barack Obama (everything is always his fault). All that self-serving bluster wasted valuable time. Then he visited experts in suits and said he could do their job as he had a good mind.

He is still popping up on that screen when the late shift ends. On social media, which after all is Trump’s playground, people are sharing scurrilous theories about how beneath those capacious white trousers the president now wears adult nappies. It is not possible to know if this is true, so let’s hurry on.

In the supermarket the next day, amid reports of toilet roll riots, everything is calm. Lavatory tissue is lined up in abundance, although pasta is in short supply and, oddly, nearly all the bread flour has gone. This suggests my fellow bakers are more panicky that I realised.

There is an odd irony in selling out of pasta, the unacknowledged national food of Britain. Most pasta comes from Italy, the European country hardest hit by the coronavirus.

This morning northern Italy is in lockdown, while we all go hunting for dried pasta shapes. Boris Johnson is telling us that we don’t need to panic buy, and he may be right, but people will still panic. That’s what they do; what we do.

I try not to panic, but no longer know if I am being too sanguine by half. The thing is, does panicking help? Is stockpiling toilet paper sensible? Almost certainly not, but once people start grabbing everything off the shelves, it’s hard to stop them.

Boris Johnson came to power promising to see off the “doomsters and gloomsters” but now his slyly arranged cheerfulness runs into a real crisis. One where the ability of the NHS to cope with rising numbers of coronavirus sufferers could be harmed by a decade of cuts imposed by his party.

Johnson, like Trump, would surely believe this to all be a fuss about nothing, a distraction from the yellow brick road he pointed us along. But those yellow bricks no longer seem to be pointing in the right direction.

A handshake, a handshake. As I walk across the university car park, a colleague coming the other way extends his hand for a firm welcome.

This doesn’t bother me as I like a handshake. I don’t rush off afterwards to wash my hands while ‘singing’ Happy Birthday twice, as is being recommended.

That, by the way, is the suggested routine for staying away from the coronavirus, not government advice on what to do after meeting friendly colleagues in the car park.

A handshake, a handshake. Yes, I like a handshake, but they may fall out of fashion for a while. What, you might wonder, will Paul Hollywood do if he’s no longer allowed to bestow the Hollywood handshake on the more promising oven drivers of Bake Off?

Other greetings are available, including a recommended one of bumping elbows that I haven’t got my head around yet; or my elbow. The traditional cheek-kissing greeting in France is being discouraged for now, with France 24 reporting that the ‘bise’ may now be considered a health hazard.

In the US the traditional banging of heads whenever two Trump supporters meet is thought not to have been threatened.

On the BBC Today programme this morning there was a charming little interview with the Hungarian conductor Ivan Fischer, who has rewritten the infamous birthday dirge to release its musicality. Fischer believes the traditional version puts the emphasis on ‘to’ rather than on ‘you’, and his reboot certainly sounded better on the radio.

This isn’t a new story, as film clips of Fischer playing his version have been available online for four or five years, but it was dusted off because of the coronavirus crisis, panic or whatever it might be. And that advice to sing the birthday tune twice.

As for hands, I’ve never heard so much about washing them, and this can only be for the general good. On the BBC PM programme recently, presenter Evan Davis asked a doctor how we should wash our hands. The recording took place in the gents at the BBC, not the sort of thing you expect at five o’clock, but the advice was sound.

I’m always shocked, as I stand there tunelessly humming Happy Birthday to the mirror, how some men just dash straight off without watering their hands. It’s the same through the women’s door, according to my spy.

I don’t wish to dwell again on Boris Johnson and his second-rate Churchill karaoke act. But the washing of hands is seen as a fitting image for a man who has washed his hands of wives, inconvenient colleagues and others foolish enough to stand too close.

At least the coronavirus has forced the prime minister back into public from wherever he’s been hiding for ten days. When it comes to being prime minister, he seems keener on the hunt than the prize. The hunt, you see, can be framed however you wish (Rule Brexit-annia with Boris the Great) whereas the governing part is deflected by uncontrolled issues, such as coronavirus.

The dad-to-be (again) said today he will be taking two weeks’ paternity leave in the summer. Glad he told us or else we might not have noticed the difference.

As for coronavirus, I can’t decide how worried I should be; and that’s a worry of its own.

Work and life have kept me from this little ledge for a week, but Boris Johnson’s baby (mark six, apparently) drags me back.

Yesterday’s headlines were full of the happy news. A cynical person might wonder at the clever management of it all. Less harmonious headlines about coronavirus, floods, Home Secretary Priti Patel and the resignation of top civil servant Sir Philip Rutman were temporarily overshadowed by the Boris baby blimp.

Of course, even such an arch manipulator as Boris Johnson can’t have arranged for his partner Carrie Symonds to fall pregnant at such a convenient moment, although you wouldn’t rule out him having tried.

What’s interesting about this story, if it’s interesting at all (discuss without shouting) is the attention it garnered. The Sunday Telegraph devoted most of its front page to the story under the headline: “No 10 wedding – and a baby too.”

The Mail on Sunday devoted six pages to this ‘news’ – six whole pages on two people having a baby and pity the poor hack who had to come up with that sickly sludge.

Johnson generally has an easy ride from the newspapers, too many of which lavishly support everything he does, seemingly forgetting the difference between a news story and a press release.

It is interesting to imagine how similar news would have been reported under different circumstances. Imagine if a twice-divorced Labour prime minister was having his sixth child with a much younger woman. Those “and a baby too” proclamations would have been replaced with headlines about how the prime minister’s conduct undermined the morals of society, or some such swill.

Imagine if a woman prime minister was having her sixth baby to different fathers. Imagine if a Labour woman prime minister (unlikely at present, it is true) was having her sixth baby to different fathers. It is easy to see the barely disguised slut-shaming that would have unleashed.

But Boris Johnson having his sixth child? Oh, shake those happy clappers and don’t worry about anything else. Ring out the embarrassing headlines and forget about the journalism.

It’s all oddly depressing but of the grubby moment. We’re stuck with Johnson and Dominic Cummings pulling the strings that make his arms jerk around.

And we’re stuck with a government that refuses to be interviewed by leading BBC or Channel 4 news journalists. A government that threatens to tear the BBC apart (having forgotten to mention that before the election). A government that stamps its foot with the EU, still playing by bully-boy Eton rules instead of finding a sensible way forward.

And soon there will be two babies in No 10. With luck looking after the smallest one will keep the bigger one busy for a while.

As the Guardian feature writer Simon Hattenstone tweeted…

“How to cope with bringing a baby into Number 10. Burp him, change his nappies every few hours, and do your best to stop the little f***er destroying the country.”

Can’t see that one making headlines…

Never mind that lovely old Jimi Hendrix song The Wind Cries Mary, I just walked round to the shop and felt like shouting into the wind.

Shouting doesn’t make you feel any better, for the wind is stronger. But there has been so much weather lately, and so much wind, it was good to toss a futile howl of despair into the gale; or a sweary moan at least.

Wind wears you down and frays your nerves; it haunts in the inside of your head and batters the outside of your bedroom, especially up in the attic with a roof designed to flex in the wind, and to slap down afterwards, a sound so conducive to a good night’s sleep.

Wind batters the garden and takes down trees, only the one at this house so far, a hawthorn tree weakened by standing too long in sodden soil. Wind wears you down and keeps you awake at night and sends you on a cautious wobble when it is time to cycle anywhere.

This spot on the west side of York often takes the full force of the westerly wind, and here there are all those trees too, a blessing until they threaten to fall and become a worry or worse.

I thought the wind had gone, blown itself off, blown away someplace else and good riddance. Instead the wind has returned to harry and howl, to bother trees and tiles, to redistribute the recycling, and to make us all feel a little bit madder (please say that isn’t only me).

This morning there was a touch of real winter, a dusting of snow, enough to slow the cars on the road outside, enough to make me nervous about Horsforth. The lecture was in the afternoon and by then the snow had gone, introducing rain as a support act for the returning wind.

The twisting road along the bottom of the valley beyond Harewood was flooded in three or four places, once quite deep and all the way across, the adjacent fields turned to muddy tarns. I came back on the Leeds ring road, and the other road must have been bad to make that a good choice.

If you must drive some distance to work, and I don’t recommend it, a snowy winter is a worry, and we have escaped that so far. It its cold favour, a snowy winter is a proper old-fashioned winter, sharp and crisp and slushy and, well, yes, horrible and inconvenient.

This February has had nothing much in its favour so far, especially not for anyone who has been flooded.

As for shouting at the wind, sometimes that is taken to be a metaphor for life. This quote is from the science-fiction writer Pierce Brown, not a writer I know, but the words are fitting…

“I will die. You will die. We will all die and the universe will carry on without care. All that we have is that shout into the wind – how we live. How we go. And how we stand before we fall.”

OK, not the cheeriest, but I like that notion of shouting into the wind.

This morning there is a vile tweet doing the rounds as ill-advisedly put out by the BBC. It’s another of those Question Time moments when a member of the studio audience spouts inflammatory nonsense.

I don’t intend to give more details, as the woman going off on one about immigrants deserves no further prominence.

Her ill-informed words chimed with the government announcement about immigration controls. You’ll have spotted how Boris Johnson likes to chunter “Australian points-based system” as if reciting some sort of Harry Potter spell. He campaigned by slogan, and now he governs by slogan.

“We got Brexit done and put on a tea towel” has been replaced by this less catchy catechism. Incidentally, you can play at being Boris Johnson by endlessly repeating meaningless blather, as suggested below…

“Yes, people, our sky will be made of blue cheese. We will turn the sky into blue cheese. We will have a Stilton sunrise, come what may, do or die. Come what may. I believe the people want us to get on with some fantastic blue-cheesy things for this country. Do or die. Our sky will be made of blue cheese. We will fight them at the cheese counter…”

Pardon the distraction, but sometimes it’s tempting to give into distraction altogether.

The required 70 points sounds tough, but such a system is open to being manipulated, as helpfully pointed out by Stephen Bush of the New Statesman the other day, who said that governments tinker and tinker often with the point-scoring requirements.

There are so many displeasing aspects to all this, not least the bullying tone of Home Secretary Priti Patel, who insisted that banning low-paid foreign workers from entering the country was no problem as there are 8.5m economically inactive people in this country.

Turns out this ridiculous figure included students, those lucky enough to have retired before 65 (13%), carers and the sick, among others. That figure is an invention and a nonsense, but Patel clearly missed a trick, as she forgot about all those inconsiderately dead people cluttering up graveyards who could otherwise be put to more productive use.

There is an obvious question for the Home Secretary on this matter, and luckily Nick Ferrari of LBC was on hand to oblige. He asked Patel if such a points-based system would have prevented her parents from coming to this country from Uganda (and prevented his own family from moving here, too).

She initially denied this, blustered and said: “This isn’t about my background or my parents”, but then admitted that may be the case.

As they spoke, Ferrari remarked: “But it’s interesting, isn’t it? I don’t think I’d be here and I sense you wouldn’t. I wouldn’t be sitting in my studio and you wouldn’t be Home Secretary in one of the biggest offices in the land, under your system.”

The Times has a sobering splash this morning, claiming that an unpublished report on the Home Office’s “hostile environment policy” that led to the Windrush scandal has been toned down after concluding that the department was “institutionally racist”.

The term reportedly appeared in an earlier draft of the Windrush review into the treatment of people from the Caribbean, but then apparently disappeared from later versions.

The Home Office told the Times that it had not yet seen the final report, which you can believe if you wish to.

Setting a salary cap and attempting to stop “low-skilled workers” will certainly create problems for those businesses that rely on such workers. But it’s also horribly restrictive and frankly depressing.

Can we really say that someone’s potential lies in how much they earn at a certain point; can we limit all human possibility and the richness of society to an arbitrary figure set to appease racist women mouthing off on Question Time and designed mostly to give an impression of toughness?

Anyway, here to cheer you up is the cover of the present edition of Private Eye.

Twitter was how I first discovered that Caroline Flack had died, apparently by suicide. Twitter was also where a maelstrom of opinion swirled into angry life, mostly directed at the tabloid newspapers.

As a reader of what used to be called the broadsheets, it is easy to share some of this anger. Tabloid newspapers often exploit the famous, especially women.

If you want to know what a tabloid attitude looks like made flesh, just think of Piers Morgan on ITV’s This Morning, where his crowd-baiting, political-correctness-gone-mad guff and diminishment of famous women takes sweaty three-dimensional form (I don’t watch but you can’t escape those clips on social media).

Many of those shocked by Caroline Flack’s death at the age of 40 sought to blame the tabloids. And, certainly, it was difficult to stomach over the weekend the gush of emotion about Flack unleashed from the very newspapers and shameless operators who’d splashed her sometimes troubled life all over their pages.

They’d had their fun with the Love Island presenter while she was alive; and now that she was dead, they weren’t about to stop, only now they were operating in the convenient shadow of public distress.

But is it fair to blame the tabloids alone for her death? When someone commits suicide there can be many reasons for their awful decision. Part of what we learn here should perhaps be about the unknowability of other people.

Caroline Flack appears, like many people, to have been complicated: successful, glamorous, confident on screen, living the sort of life others might envy, and yet she was deeply troubled too.

The harsh spotlight cannot have helped; the prying, uncaring headlines cannot have helped; but her decision raises other questions, not least the relentless amplification of her plight on social media.

It also raises questions about how some journalists behave in pursuit of a story. Journalism does require toughness; sometimes the job can only be done with a degree of perhaps uncomfortable persistence.

Yet is is also a job that requires humanity – most stories are about people, and you can only hope to understand other people if you respect them as sometimes flawed and troubled human beings, not merely as the latest salacious plot twist in the story you wish to print or share.

Many people have observed since Saturday’s news, not least Flack’s friend Laura Whitmore, that we should all be kinder. That seems the wisest lesson to draw from this tragedy.

If people don’t wish to buy or support tabloid newspapers that print unsympathetic and sometimes vile stories, that is fine and may be for the general social good.

If there was no market for these stories, perhaps the papers would stop printing them, although their unkind habit cuts deep (as apparently does our desire to read stories of which we say we disapprove).

One aspect less commented on is that social media has made some newspapers lazy.

Why bother to ask important questions about business, politics or the people running the country, if you can scrabble through the social media bins and come up with a story?

Why spend time, effort and money investigating something of genuine importance when someone famous, usually a woman, is falling apart in the public eye?

With Caroline Flack we are dealing with the loss of someone who was widely known, yes, but who was also loved and cherished by those who held her dear. Their loss is far greater than ours, although the death of a famous person does remind us that loss is all around.

As for Twitter, well I love spending/wasting time on there. It’s often a fun and occasionally enlightening place, but it can be nasty sewer, too. We should listen to Laura and try to be kinder.

“You say that every year,” she says with a pout.

Ah, my slow brain drags itself from the soup of male forgetfulness.

It’s a tasteful little card with a mug and the words: “You’re my cup of tea.”

Last year when faced with the same scenario, I dashed out from work on a late card mission. And that’s what I do again later, diverting myself from the coffee shop (“Cappuccino man is here”) and scouring the gift shops in this tiny town.

Nothing catches my eye in the first shop, as the cards are too sickly or vaguely smutty. There is a better choice in the next shop where I am not the only panic buyer. I spot a card around the back of another late man. The card that is fine but something in the bargain basket catches my eye.

This is not meanness, honestly, just that I like the look of this card. It is a bright and colourful painting of two people in a garden. One is shyly giving the other a plant. My wife likes gardens, that could be me and her, so bingo. The Valentine’s rescue mission is a winner.

The shop owner is pleased with my choice and tells me that the artist who drew the card lives in Brighton. He does mugs too, the man says, spinning out back to retrieve one to show me. It’s a lovely mug.

The friendly man sees me off with my bargain card and we both seem happy with the purchase. And he seems very pleased that I picked that card.

In the office, I glance at the picture and think, oh, I see. I sign a few words inside, something about it being from her fond forgetful friend, adding that there is a story about this card.

Back home after work, I hand over the late card. My wife opens the envelope and admires the well-chosen card with the colourful painting. Then she says something about there being two men on the front. Ah, the nicest card in the shop was a gay card. One of the men is naked and his manhood is on show.

My wife photographs the card and sends the picture to our daughter, who is with her man for Valentine’s Night. “You can see his willy,” she messages back, adding that she is crying with laughter at her father’s misunderstanding.

“This is the best Valentine’s card ever,” my wife says.

I’m not sure if she is pleased with the card, which truly is tasteful, or with the attached story showing what unobservant twit she married all those years ago. A man who buys cards in a dash without full textural analysis.

“She says we should buy a frame,” my wife says, looking at the latest message from our daughter.

I open the wine and congratulate myself on an accidental success.

This isn’t about Boris Johnson, or not really. You see people hear that name and think, good man, doing well; or they shake their aching heads and mutter, dear God, how did that happen?

Anyway, I fall into one of those categories, and if you guess correctly perhaps you will win a holiday. Or perhaps you won’t.

Boris Johnson won an election, as my aching head cannot deny. Then he appears to have ‘won’ a holiday, too. He didn’t enter a competition or anything, or not so far as we know. He wasn’t scouring the internet looking for ‘win a holiday’. One seems to have just rolled into his lap.

He probably wasn’t surprised, as if you come from his background, free stuff and holidays in the Caribbean with your girlfriend are just what you expect. Ah, thank you, waffle-waffle, could do with a break, been prime minister for all of five minutes, jolly decent of you.

At this point, we should come clean and admit that it is not known whether Boris Johnson had a free holiday reportedly worth £15,000. But that not knowing leaves a few questions blowing in the air like prime ministerial swimming trunks hanging on a line.

Labour suspects that the holiday was paid for by the Tory donor David Ross, one of the founders of Carphone Warehouse. It was said that Ross had allowed Johnson and his partner, Carrie Symonds, to use luxury accommodation for a private holiday in St Vincent and the Grenadines.

The businessman reportedly denied this to the Daily Mail, saying he didn’t own the villa on the island of Mustique where Johnson had stayed and that he hadn’t paid for the holiday. Instead he had “facilitated accommodation” (whatever that means).

We facilitated a short family trip to Poland last year, or my wife did, and two-and-half years ago we facilitated a trip to Australia. Earlier today I facilitated a return trip into York on my bike.

Being from the middling orders, I have no idea how these things work, but it seems probable that someone paid for the holiday, unless I’ve been misunderstanding how holidays work for all these years. Seeing as holidays are thin on the ground this year, I’ll happily soil my principles for a bit of sunshine in exotic surroundings.

Labour is chuntering about benefit in kind and so on, quite rightly, but you do wonder if they couldn’t find someone to send Jeremy Corbyn on holiday. Seeing him still knocking around is like having the Ghost of Elections Past hanging about the place, reminding everyone why they went off him.

Anyway, this isn’t about Jeremy Corbyn. It isn’t really about Boris Johnson either, other than to wonder why the prime minister needed a free holiday. According to the Full Fact website, his job comes with a generous salary of £152,532 a year (plus free accommodation), or that’s what Theresa May picked up, and Johnson will be paid something similar. He also earned a fortune writing the same column for the Daily Telegraph every week, until he got demoted from that job and became prime minister.

Johnson comes from wealth, he has earned plenty, and he still earns a decent whack. So why doesn’t he pay for his own holidays? Answers on a postcard to 10 Downing Street.