My doctor was coming to see me one evening last week to discuss an article he was writing on the medical consequences of climate change, so I bustled home, to a message saying he couldn't come. The surgery was overwhelmed by swine flu and he was out making visits. Until then, I'd thought of swine flu as something that happened in cities, not in rural Wiltshire, and I was shocked. But it didn't fill me with terror.
Why was I not terrified? Stories of the flu epidemic of 1918 have always frightened me, and I have sometimes tried to imagine the horror of its threat, just as, reading Thucydides, Defoe or Pepys, one can feel the horror of the plague. So far, of course, few people in this country have died, and, we are reassuringly told, they all had "underlying health problems". Mostly, it seems to be an identifiable, not agreeable but relatively minor disease (although we know it may change its nature).
In Thursday's statement to Parliament, the government, in my view, struck exactly the right note. Unlike most parliamentary statements, this one carried a tone of honesty; a sense of competently rolled-up sleeves. The time for attempts to contain the epidemic is over, it is time now to concentrate on management and recovery, with drugs for those especially vulnerable to complications.
Schools should be closed only if too many of the staff are absent for teaching to continue; offices should carry on as best they can. A vaccine will be available for everyone by the end of the summer. Don't panic. (Somehow faith in the Department of Health has increased since the arrival there of the irresistible Lord Darzi, surely just the kind of surgeon into whose handsome care one would commit oneself, trusting and starry-eyed.)
Of course, for the families of those who have contracted the disease, especially if they are young children or others especially at risk, this message must seem intolerably complacent. And of course it is horrible to think of people "going down like flies", even if they will almost certainly get up again (also rather like flies, in my experience).
And I can imagine the dread of those parents who know that their children must be sheltered from infections of any kind. Where can they go?
In the Great Plague, even though there were no antiviral drugs to be had, people could at least try to get their families out of London. But now nowhere is safe, even the airy slopes of the Wiltshire downs.
It's easy for the aged, those over 80, to be unafraid, and therefore, I suppose, to seem complacent. For one thing, they seem not to be especially at risk, either because for many of us our immune system has built up naturally or because it has been helped along by flu jabs, possibly effective even though directed against a different strain.
Another factor is the difference in our attitude to life and death. Many of us no longer have anyone dependent on our survival. We are more care-free than at any time before in our lives. However much we may enjoy our life, it is more possible to contemplate the end of it with equanimity than it was in the days of great passions and ambitions. It genuinely matters less whether we live or die.
For some of us it might be a blessing to die in the great pandemic of 2009 rather than in some more humiliating way. Perhaps swine flu may turn out the "old man's friend".