It’s a classic Sydney Christmas Day here in Sydney – 29 degC, and not a cloud in the sky. The Omigod variant is overtaking the common cold in the rapidity of its transmission, spreading immunity as fast as it spreads its largely innocuous symptoms. It looks to Harrumpf as though within a matter of days every single person in Australia will either have the virus, have recovered from it, or be a close contact of someone who has. In theory, therefore, the entire nation should be self-isolating – a patently insupportable state of affairs which, repeated around the world as it must be, will, we can only hope, at last bring to an end this dismal, fatuous, shameful episode of mass panic.

Happy Christmas, Harrumpfers!