“Like flying a plane while designing and building it!”

The number of confirmed cases in the UK has just topped 100, with the first death of an older woman in Reading.

How am I handling the challenges? Doing as instructed. Washing my hands far more frequently than ever. Skin is showing it.

But… I am already irritated with mentally tapping out a verse of God Save the Queen, or Happy Birthday twice. I opt for humming Led Zepellin’s Stairway to Heaven (when Jimmy Page’s guitar brilliantly picks up pace) or Comfortably Numb by Pink Floyd (the ‘Hallo is there anybody out there?’ bit with Dave Gilmour and Roger Waters). Or Bon Jovi’s ‘Tommy Used to Work on the Docks’ from Livin’ on a prayer.

As I dry my hands under a Dyson hot air machine, I wonder if the heat is fast incubating any corona nasties in the air. I hold my breath until well away from the machine. But how else to dry hands if there is no paper dispenser?

First thing today I needed to fill my car with fuel, then get cash from the ATM. (I know cash is retro! But I do sometimes have to use it! And yes, I am a full convert to contactless and digital transfers).

First Hmm! What do I do with the fuel dispensing nozzle? I have to use a hand. But somehow I must avoid skin contact in case I pick up the virus from the gun or trigger. I clutch the nozzle with a tissue and hope that this provides an adequate firewall. (Or am I naïve? Someone please tell me).

Then to the ATM. Hmm again. I have to punch four times on the keypad with my PIN code, then punch again with answers to questions. But I know I must not use my index finger any more. So it is knuckle time again. A solution. But then … .: I realise I must not wipe my (just possibly contaminated) knuckle on my face while driving. I rapidly rummage in my backpack for one of the many Lufthansa wet wipes that I accumulate during my usually intense global travel schedule.

Similar anxieties at a Post Office later as I stand in the queue to post a parcel. Who is around me? What might be on the package or anything else I touch? I can’t wash my hands every few minutes. And I have no more alcohol-based sanitiser. At the chemist I just visited around the corner, the smiley but weary pharmacist says (as I expected) that they have run out.

At our Thinking the Unthinkable project we have been meeting online for months. But sometimes we have to meet in person. A colleague and I met at a new workspace we were trying for the first time – the excellent ‘Kindred Place’ in Hammersmith, West London. Bad moment for me: as I descended from the upper floor to reception, there is a long banister down the stairs. I realised too late that I was running my hand down its whole length. Slapped wrist. But on the bar as I pay there is a generous bottle of hand alcohol sanitizer. I use it as I settle the (contactless) bill for coffee and tea. Full marks.

I listen to Nick Robinson’s excellent BBC Radio 4 ‘Decision Time’. Six medical and ex-Whitehall practitioners enact the kind of stark and unnerving challenges faced by today’s Whitehall warriors in the Cabinet Office COBRA war room. Lucid. Sobering. Unnerving. Together they highlight a large number of very tough decisions, and the daily, hourly pressures on top public servants and ministers to make them.

Perfection by our government leaders is not possible. Some listeners will be scared. But this programme is precisely the reality check needed as public anxiety escalates into the ‘delay phase’ to what some already willingly call hysteria. Radio and the BBC at its best.

My usually chockerbloc diary is being stripped increasingly bare. Instead of writing this I should have been a moderator at the Delphi Economic Forum in Greece. That was cancelled five days out - last Saturday (29 Feb). On Thursday afternoon, next Tuesday’s Sustainable Investment Forum in Paris – another vital step to energising investment to tackle the Climate Emergency and meet the 17 Sustainable Development Goals – was called off.

My heart goes out to Symeon Tsomokos and his huge team in Delphi, plus Nick Henry, Iolanda and their great colleagues from Climate Action. I know them well. Ten gigs I would have been involved in around the world have now been wisely called off in recent days. The impact is well beyond disappointment. I dare not think of the financial and contractual implications, plus the emotional impact on often inspired organisers when months of planning and work vaporise like this.

I speak to the organiser of another big conference in the US. She is still making huge commitments for June. Should her organisation keep planning or accept the warnings from the health experts and epidemiologists that – based on the China experience - we will confront months of this uncertainty with much worse to come. So is it better to abandon hopes now?

And rather unusually I agree with the Daily Telegraph’s Editor Chris Evans. His round-robin email to subscribers has just landed on my iPhone. He urges: ‘No panicking please: we’re British.’

Nothing of what I am sharing with you is about panic. But my run-of-the-mill daily experiences show how we all have very difficult decisions to make. How do we change and adapt our lives in a new time of the kind of unthinkables and unpalatables our Thinking the Unthinkable project has been warning about for a considerable time?

The words of that health expert I heard on the radio echo repeatedly in my mind. Tackling Covid-19 is ‘like flying a plane while designing and building it at the same time!’

Read our other personal stories of Coronavirus:

Nik Gowing: Diary and experiences on the Coronavirus front

Carley Bowman: How Coronavirus uncertainty infects daily life