THERE’S a moment we all experience when we come down with a cold. In bunged-up and feverish desperation, we torture ourselves by recalling what joy it was to breathe freely through our noses. We wonder why we never previously appreciated that most simple of respiratory delights and pledge that when we get well we will thank the universe for our clear and unencumbered nasal passages.

Such is the lesson to be learned as we reach delirium in the snotty mess that is Brexit and remember simpler times and political life before we embarked on this ill-fated journey.

We learned this week that the British Government is planning to ramp up its contingency planning for a No Deal scenario. They are soon to issue weekly advice to households and businesses on how to prepare for an increasingly likely disorderly Brexit.

The English Health Secretary, Matthew Hancock, has already met with industry leaders to discuss building up NHS supplies of vaccines and blood products as part of No Deal planning. In an interview the Prime Minister Theresa May was asked whether this should be "alarming for people’’ and – ever in touch with the mood of the public – she replied that we should "take reassurance and comfort’’ from the fact the Government is planning for the worst because "we don’t what the outcome is going to be.’’

Because nothing screams "BE REASSURED’’ more than warehouses full of blood and a government that admits it has no clue whether we will need them.

Ordinarily, a government stockpiling food and medicines in anticipation of an armageddon of its own making would be too strange for fiction. Welcome to the new normal.

In the past month alone we have watched key ministers resign and the Georgian crank Jacob Rees-Mogg seize control of the government and Brexit agenda, though his stewardship of that cabal of hard-Brexit Tories, the European Research Group.

We’ve observed Boris Johnson, the most embarrassing Foreign Secretary of our lifetime, invite a photographer to capture the moment he signed his resignation letter. Such vacuous posturing is as good an analogy for Brexit as you are ever likely to get.

Each day brings with it more news than we can possibly handle or analyse effectively. And the longer this political instability continues the more desensitised to it we become.

That’s partly why this beleaguered and hobbling Prime Minister has managed to confound all the odds and remain in office if not in power. There is no appetite in her cannibalised party for a leadership contest and a scarcity of able candidates willing to take her place.

The EU referendum was a lesson in how to market snake oil. Imagine if we’d had a crystal ball and could see the calamity currently unfolding today; of real, grown-up politicians, Ministers of State no less, telling journalists not to sensationalise reports of the food shortages ahead. This is the point we’ve reached: an Orwellian dystopia where up is down; fiction is fact and self-harm is democracy.

This new normal didn’t happen overnight. It was like boiling a frog.

Last week we saw the Government under pressure on key votes in the Trade Bill. They were predicted to be close: so close that the Tory chief whip instructed some MPs to break with convention and ignore pairing arrangements. Desperate and underhand these tactics may have been but they were eclipsed by the Trumpian denials that came after.

What was first sold as an "honest mistake" quickly unravelled. The chief whip said he "might" have told some MPs to break the pair but if he did; only one listened to him and it didn’t make a difference to the outcome of the vote anyway.

The public gets a sense that as politicians come to understand the chaos engulfing the country they sense too that the limits of what they can get away with are stretched.

It was like that day when there was a power cut at my high school and for a joyous few minutes there was a nervous, mischievous energy in the room. Teenagers aren’t as reckless as politicians though and we settled for throwing balls of scrunched up paper around, rather than burning down the school.

Scotland didn’t vote for any of this. It didn’t vote for the softest of soft Brexits let alone the rancid, fermented egg of a deal that is being shoved down our throats.

As Westminster begins its summer recess, journalists lament the so-called silly season. This is when news grinds to a halt and in its place come stories of escaped zoo animals, killer bees and whatever new malady the tabloids have decided causes cancer.

As exit day from the EU fast approaches, it seems more likely that this summer’s heatwave will be accompanied by the same political turbulence, destabilisation and overload of news to which we have become accustomed. As we watch with a mixture of horror and confusion there is little we can do to prepare … aside from stockpiling baked beans for the apocalypse ahead.