THE doom-and-disaster stories pour upon us from our wintry landscape but it is nice to note that some of the catastrophes never happened.
What about Mexican swine flu? All right, we are having the usual seasonal winter flu but do you recall the now retiring government chief medical officer Sir Liam Donaldson telling us of the apocalypse that was coming upon us all?
Sixty five thousand corpses, we were promised. We’d be tripping over them come muck-spreading, he said. We needed a trillion doses of Tamiflu, he said. Visions were unavoidable of handcarts pulled through the streets to the cry of “Bring out your dead”.
Nostradamus was portrayed as an optimist compared with Sir Liam D. It seems to have gone the way of the Millennium Bug, the computer virus that during the first seconds of 2000 AD would destroy every cyber-gizmo we have and terminate civilisation as we know it. Never happened.
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