On Monday I broke lockdown, or at least a recommendation, by travelling more than five miles to Troon beach for a long walk. It was much as it had been before the pandemic – no face masks, even by staff in the esplanade kiosk, or noticeable social distancing, kids running around, dogs fruitlessly chasing seagulls.

The only marked difference was the absence of couples furtively canoodling in the dunes and tattooed Buckie boys swilling and brawling. There was a police car idling up and down occasionally, but the polis seemed to be taking as relaxed approach to it all as the participants.

It was Nicola Sturgeon who imposed, well suggested, the five-mile excursion limit. By all accounts she’s had a good Covid war, probably because she doesn’t grin and gurn when reciting the latest mortality figures, but she has been in lockstep with the buffoons down south, albeit developing a bit of a limp of late, although she’s still doggedly on the same path.

Apparently there aren’t going to be any weekend press conferences from Downing Street and fewer during the week, which spoils the entertainment for those of us who enjoy blood sports, probably because, despite blandishments, promises of honours to come, they can’t find a minister credulous enough to appear, and that really is saying something.

One of the mantras of this dismal, scandalous and deadly affair has been “I’m not an epidemiologist but …”. Why not just follow the measures in successful countries? In the scientific community they’re probably saying “I am one, but no-one listens to me”.

And if they have any translators in Westminster or Holyrood no-one listens to them, because if they had tuned in to Italian or Spanish ministers – or heaven forfend – Chinese or South Korean, we’d have done what they did then, rather than now, six weeks or more later, and fewer people would have died.

In fact, our leaders wouldn’t need to be fluent in any other language – they could have just followed New Zealand’s Jacinda Ardern, who isn’t just 11 hours ahead of our lot.

In the bubonic plague, the Black Death of the 17th century, the greatest scientific mind of the time was Sir Isaac Newton, who had his own theory on how to deal with it – although if tried today it would break clean air acts and rouse animal rights activists. “The best is a toad suspended by the legs in a chimney for three days, which at last vomited up earth with various insects in it, on to a dish of yellow wax, and shortly after died. Combining powdered toad with the excretions and serum made into lozenges and worn about the affected area drove away the contagion and drew out the poison.”

We’re now sitting aloofly at the top of the league table we should be bottom of, deaths per capita from the virus. Perhaps a vaccine will be developed shortly, not involving the above recipe, and perhaps there won’t be a second or third wave. Perhaps we’ll stop arrogantly believing we know best and follow the lead of others, although that’s unlikely. So I’ll be following my own lockdown rules, based on that old Greek physician Hippocrates: First, do no harm.

Separated at birth?

IF Dominic Cummings had just blamed it on his doppelgänger, Preston boss Alex Neil, he’d have got away with it. Mind you, he’d have had to take training at Deepdale.

Close but no cigar

WHEN I sold my eighty quid limousine I informed the insurance company, at least I left messages on the automated lockdown system. And I cancelled the direct debit. The car had been sold before we all retreated to our bedrooms.

The insurance company was some outfit called Covea (why not Coveyah?) I had never heard of until last week because I had been paying to a financial outfit called Close Brothers, who presumably take commission.

The day after my direct debit would have been collected (had I still a car) a hefty package of threats went into the post from Close, demanding not just 20 quid for cover of a car I no longer owned but a "fine" of £30. After one day they were issuing legal threats. Doubtless it’s moves like this which keep their bosses in champagne and cigars. I’m not paying, of course.

Goon too far

SPIKE Milligan, older readers may recall, wasn’t so much eccentric as genuinely, if lovably, completely batty.

He once was refused planning permission to build a roofless house – in Hampstead I think, so it may have been a spoof on his neighbours – but if it was his desire to stare at the sky through a snowfall why shouldn’t he be allowed?

His fellow cast members in The Goon Show weren’t far behind him in the stone mad stakes. Peter Sellers, who had his own mental health issues, once turned up at Milligan’s gothic pile in New Barnet entirely naked, clutching his clothes. Spike confiscated the clothes and sent him away naked.

Milligan identified as Irish and in his comic novel Puckoon (I have a DVD of the film) sent up sectarian division and Irish partition. A man wakes up to find his village divided by an incompetently-drawn border and cheap beer on one side with a border patrol demanding passports to cross for a pint.

His posthumous punchline, in Irish Gaelic on his gravestone in St Thomas the Martyr’s churchyard in Winchelsea, is, “Duirt mé leat go raibh mé breoite” (“I told you I was ill”). Although, characteristically, there was a family squabble which uprooted it for a couple of years so that his third wife’s name could be added.

It was Billy Connolly, I think, who wanted his epitaph to be “For f***’ sake is it that time already?”

You’d have thought that if it was your final wish it should be honoured, however unseemly it might appear to others. Not so, apparently.

A judge in England has ruled, after a two-year battle, that a family of Irish descent could not have “In ár gcroíthe go deo” (“In our hearts forever”) on their mother’s gravestone because it could be deemed as political. Only to non-Irish speaking bigots. But their right to stupidity and prejudice has been upheld.