All the Important People Survived

Normal years do not begin quite like that.

The release of a Bond film has been seriously delayed, and the South by Southwest festival has been cancelled. It seems that Hollywood, ever more risk averse and paradoxically efficient than government, is staking a good deal of its money on black.

An international football fixture has also been called off, as have a number of conferences and expos. The Olympics simply may not happen this time around.

What do the organisers of these events suspect, then?

And how do their views differ from the perspectives of the middle-aged people who, at roughly this time, have all decided to remember the Millennium bug — and remember its example with fondness and frequency?

I’ll leave those questions temporarily unanswered.

There’s a lot of discussion at the moment about panic buying: not just of toilet paper and soap and hand sanitizer — the sort of things it might always be good to have in and that some people may even have been prompted by recent events into remembering that they were running low on anyway — but now also of vodka, which a few have oddly alighted upon as a way to wash their hands.

Apparently it’s to do with the alcohol content. It’s cleaning. You dunk your hands in vodka, and the…