Rome’s streets are empty, the supermarket shelves loaded with food. My fellow denizens, for once free of the tourist hordes, are enjoying their lives in a state of limbo, waiting for coronavirus to come crashing down around their heads before they start stocking their larders and hunkering down.

At least that’s what things were like yesterday. I can’t say about today, because I just arrived in San Francisco to begin a two-week book tour cum working vacation scheduled months before that damned virus jumped the species barrier deep into China.