What do you think of when you hear the word “pandemic”? I don’t know about you, but my TV, video game, sci-fi, comic book addled, barely adult brain thinks of zombies.

I have watched/played/read probably dozens of versions of how the zombie apocalypse begins, but not a single one starts with a worldwide shortage of toilet paper.

No zombie-fighting hero has ever said, as they gaze into a post apocalyptic camp fire, “That’s when we knew nothing would ever be the same again. When the last roll of toilet paper was gone.”

Personally, it’s not the lack of toilet paper which I find most frightening. It’s not the unsurprising governmental callousness and incompetence.

It’s not even empty pubs, although that is pretty horrifying. Personally, being a selfish and petty-minded parent of small children, the thing that is really frightening me about this crisis, is... the schools closing.

Parents can almost hear the hordes of moaning creatures approach, their simplistic brains driven only by their desire for food and mindless entertainment. Somehow, we hope and pray, this disaster will be averted.

It’s at this point in my personal story line that the twist comes. Life has decided to give me a medical condition, one which suppresses my immune system, popping me, just in time, into the category of those most vulnerable to the coronavirus.

“Why has life done this thing to me?” I wonder. Then, of course, I realise. To punish me, in a very specific way, for wasting so much of my life day-dream-prepping for a zombie apocalypse.

Life has prepared for me a kind of personal zombie apocalypse, if you will.

Yesterday we had to take our children out of school. There is no prepping for that.