Nerve agents? No sweat. Get the baby wipes out.

There is something so bizarrely British about the health response to the assassination attempt in Salisbury on former spy Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. A week after the event, everyone who was in the vicinity of the deadly nerve agent has been urged to wash their personal possessions.

Now, let’s think this through.

This chemical was so toxic that it left two people fighting for their lives. A police officer involved in the early response was also hospitalised and made severely ill by it. The table in the restaurant visited by Sergei and Julia was reportedly so contaminated that it had to be destroyed.

But if you happened to be nearby – perhaps even dining in the same part of the restaurant sometime after the unfortunate victims departed – no need to worry.

Run a baby wipe over your phone.

A week later.

What about clothes? The Chief Medical Officer Sally Davies recommends washing them. In a washing machine preferably, she says. Err… as opposed to the old-fashioned handwash and mangle still favoured by the backward denizens of this sleepy cathedral town?

Dry clean only? No problem. Just stick a couple of layers of plastic around the clothes and await further instructions.

It’s astonishing to contrast the military personnel in biohazard suits wandering around Salisbury with the barmy and utterly useless advice being given to members of the general public. But it sums up the whole weird relationship of the NHS to pathogens, toxins and other deadly threats.

The British response is always not to worry.

A touch of Ebola? I remember my local surgery advising patients who thought they might have been affected while travelling overseas to inform the staff at reception and get them to call some helpline on their behalf. And try to avoid touching anything.

Remember Pauline Cafferkey, the British nurse who contracted the killer disease? When she had a relapse, she went to an out-of-hours clinic in Glasgow and was told to return home, as she probably just had some regular virus.

It’s hard to imagine that conversation, isn’t it? Someone arrives saying that she’s the nurse who caught Ebola recently and has been all over the news, but she’s told her current condition is probably nothing to worry about. A bit of bed rest and paracetamol and she’ll be fine in a day or two.

To some, this extraordinarily British approach to medical matters is perhaps one of the things that gives the UK its endearing charm. But I suspect it’s small comfort to restaurant-goers in Salisbury.

A Fawlty Towers script? Si, senor!

Ok, so I gave ChatGPT the following scenario: "Imagine a theatrical script for a situation comedy set in a hotel in Torquay, England. The proprietor is called Basil, an eccentric man who believes the calibre of guests to be low. His wife, Sybil, is often frustrated by Basil's incompetence. They employ a Spanish waiter called Manuel, who struggles to understand English. Basil suspects that two guests, who claim to be married, may be lying." Here's what our favourite AI came up with: Scene: The hotel lobby in Torquay, England. Basil is standing behind the reception desk, looking at a piece of paper. Sybil is standing next to him, looking annoyed. Manuel is hovering nearby, trying to look busy. Basil: (to Sybil) I don't know why we get such low-calibre guests at this hotel. Look at these two - Mr. and Mrs. Smith. They claim to be married, but I suspect they might be lying. Sybil: (sighing) Basil, it's not our job to judge the marital status of our guests. Just m...

Becoming a Twister board

I spent yesterday evening in an old factory building off Brick Lane playing kids' games with an organisation called Fun Fed. The idea is that a bunch of adults get together and act like children for a couple of hours. We played tag and stuck big coloured discs on ourselves so that we could become human Twister mats. There was an awful lot of running around and I was thinking that I ought to get to aikido a bit more often. Being a child is very hard work.

It's been a tough year. Let's give ourselves a clap.

If something didn’t smell right about the UK handling of the pandemic, the British public was never going to notice. But they knew that if they couldn’t smell something, they really ought to get a Covid test sent to them in the post. There has been something incredibly British about the DIY swabs and their delivery via the gig-economy workers of Amazon, hasn’t there? Touch of corona? I’ll pop something in the post to you. Should be with you tomorrow. I suppose it was inevitable that we’d need some new kind of system. After all, the coronavirus outbreak was the first thing in the history of the NHS that couldn’t be cured by paracetamol, rest and plenty of fluids. This understandably left GPs flummoxed and anxious. The UK decided pretty early on that if you were ill with a novel pathogen – which proved deadly in maybe 1% of cases – you really shouldn’t go to the doctor. You should STAY AT HOME and spread it quickly to your flatmates or family members. And because they were now at ...

WASHED AND READY TO EAT

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