RICHARD LITTLEJOHN: My position on health scares is scepticism… but there must be something in it 

This morning I was due to have my annual medical check-up. Having read in the Sunday papers that, because of coronavirus, the over-60s should avoid routine visits to surgeries, I emailed my doctor to confirm the appointment.

Naturally, I assumed this latest piece of official advice was alarmist nonsense and my MoT would go ahead as scheduled.

Ralph, my GP, is a level-headed chap and I expected him to tell me there was no reason to put it off. So you can imagine my surprise when he replied that it was probably wise to postpone things for a few weeks, just to be on the safe side.

My default position on all these health scares is weary scepticism. We’ve been here before. Sars, Mers, Ebola, Bird Flu, Swine Flu . . .

All passed — in Britain, at least — without the catastrophic death toll the so-called ‘experts’ confidently predicted.

With the advent of coronavirus, the usual suspects have come over all Hilary Mantel.

Bring Up The Bodies!

The most absurd scaremongering so far is the suggestion that London’s Hyde Park will have to be turned into a open-air morgue.

What next? Will someone propose piling the corpses onto giant funeral pyres, like they did with millions of healthy cattle during the foot and mouth panic?

What you have to remember is that pandemics are their World Cup Final, their Six Nations, their Wimbledon tennis championships, all rolled into one. Out come the hi-viz jackets, the face masks, the tented decontamination units.

With each day that passes, the drama is cranked up another notch. Yesterday, the Prime Minister chaired a Cobra meeting to discuss the Government’s response to the virus.

Cobra sounds like something out of a disaster movie, conjuring up images of West Wing-style hotlines, war games and giant TV screens linked by satellite to a high-tech bunker on some remote Pacific island.

The reality, as Boris pointed out last week, is more mundane. Cobra actually stands for Cabinet Briefing Room A. If they held it in Cabinet Briefing Room C, for instance, they’d have to call it something less exciting. Given Boris’s Churchillian sense of showmanship, I’m surprised the Government hasn’t relocated for the duration to Winston’s old war rooms under Horse Guards Road.

And yet. If Ralph thinks I should steer clear of his surgery, even if the chances of contracting coronavirus are remote, there must be something in it.

But how should we react? How can we assess the potential risk? I’ve read all the Q&As and I’m still none the wiser.

We’re told to avoid crowds, but on Sunday I went to what we used to call White Hart Lane along with 60,000 others. The only people wearing face masks were South Korean tourists, who had travelled halfway round the world to see their national idol, Son Heung-min, who plays for Spurs. Unfortunately for them, Sonny is spending two weeks in self-isolation after returning from South Korea, where he had surgery on a broken arm.

You couldn’t make it up.

We’re also advised not to travel on public transport. But how else am I expected to get to a meeting in Central London, given the gridlock caused by Mayor Sadiq Khan’s hideously expensive road ‘improvements’?

Maybe I should pull on the full Hurt Locker kit before I venture onto the Piccadilly Line. Now that we know surgical masks are virtually useless at preventing the spread of the disease, how long before Tube carriages are packed with commuters wearing gas masks and frogmen’s suits, like Dustin Hoffman in The Graduate?

People will inevitably follow the lead of celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow. When I saw her wearing that designer mask on a plane to Paris, I assumed she must have just fired up one of her intimately scented candles.

Yesterday, the Government upped the ante still further, with never-knowingly-understated health secretary Matt Hancock unveiling plans to quarantine entire cities.

Have you also noticed how they’ve started calling it COVID-19, to make it sound even more menacing?

Coronavirus is probably a little too cuddly, suggesting it might have mutant strains called vimtovirus and fantavirus. Of course ministers and NHS chiefs are right to take sensible precautions. The problem is there’s no joined-up thinking here. Schools are closing across the country, but on Friday thousands of kids were allowed to play truant so they could huddle together in Bristol to hear that preposterous Greta child screeching about how the earth is on fire — oblivious to the torrential rain which turned College Green into a quagmire.

She even got a police escort in an electric car, for heaven’s sake. What if one of those children was a ‘super-spreader’ carrying the coronavirus? Then we’d have a real epidemic on our hands.

Look, I’m not suggesting that we ignore the threat, even though my natural inclination is to ridicule the predictable knee-jerk reaction to these health scares.

I especially enjoyed a letter in the Daily Telegraph from a reader who said he’d drunk so much Corona when he was young, he was probably immune.

Another columnist wrote that her husband had stockpiled 100 toilet rolls, just in case they are forced to Netflix and shiver in splendid self-isolation for a fortnight.

If the fear factor keeps on rising, a supply of adult incontinence pants may come in handy, too.

Here in Britain, we associate the Corona brand with fizzy pop rather than that overpriced Mexican lager you’re supposed to drink from the bottle with a slice of lime in the neck.

In the U.S., it’s been claimed that drinkers are boycotting Corona beer because they think they’ll contract the virus.

And if that sounds daft, on Saturday night I went for a curry at our local Indian, Tandoori Nights. It was heaving.

The owner told me that business was even brisker than usual because customers were frightened to eat in the Chinese restaurant a few doors down.

It’s an ill-wind . . .

Meanwhile, I must wait a few more weeks for my medical. No great inconvenience. Let’s hope I don’t catch coronavirus in the meantime.

A nice bit of posh from Burnham…

Essex tourism chiefs are trying to give the county a makeover after a decade of being associated with downmarket reality show TOWIE.

They want to cast off the fake tans and debauchery and emphasise the beauty of Constable country and historic towns such as Saffron Walden.

As a native son of Essex, I must confess that I probably played a minor role in helping to tarnish the county’s image. Long before The Only Way, I co-wrote The Essex Girl Joke Book with my friend Mitch Symons, under the pseudonyms Ray Leigh and Brent Wood. Our Essex Girls made the women in TOWIE look like demure debutantes. A few of the gags were mildly filthy, others downright disgusting, and some would no doubt by today’s standards be considered a hate crime. Mind you, Ian Dury, the Bard of Upminster, didn’t do the reputations of Essex Girls any favours, either.

Who could forget Joyce and Vicky in Billericay Dickie? Not to mention Janet, from the Isle of Thanet. And then there was Nina…

Had a love affair with Nina, in the back of my Cortina.

A seasoned-up hyena could not have been more obscener . . .

 Kevin and Catherine Lorryman, from Snaith, East Yorkshire, will have to demolish their bungalow after the River Aire burst its banks. They are understandably heartbroken. Their home is almost totally submerged. Only the roof is visible, complete with solar panels. More heavy rain and flooding is forecast. I suppose they could always use the solar panels as a life raft.

The empty plinth on Trafalgar Square has played host to an assortment of eccentric sculptures. The latest is a huge dollop of whipped cream, topped with a cherry, a fly and a drone.

Mail reader Chris Hey, from Smethwick, thinks it’s time for a more dignified monument. He suggests a statue of war hero Lord Bramall, a permanent reminder to the police and the Establishment of their disgraceful behaviour towards innocent men caught up in the Paedos In High Places witch hunt.

Better still, Chris, put the Nonce Finder General in the stocks, so we can throw rotten fruit at him.