And of course (the “and” in this sentence being akin to δε in Ancient Greek: absolutely meaningless except to get the sentence off to a bit of a kick-start) when you’re a Centre Forward (scroll back a few days, to the trainers-post) you start the day with half a dozen pizzas before you’re even awake.

Which is fine when you’re taking as much exercise as a mediæval knight limbering up for the annual joust.

However, eventually – assuming Shaun’s trajectory is typical, and I have no reason to assume it’s not – you get to the age of thirty-ish, look around you, realise with a shock of pain and pleasure in equal measure that you have four little nippers under the age of being able to launder their own nappies without prompting, and suddenly breaking your neck at this stage of your career doesn’t seem quite such a smart idea.

The flaw in this argument being why it ever seemed such a smart idea ten years earlier, when you were an undergraduate at an establishment where they are supposed to test the correct functioning of your little grey cells before admitting you.

But hey: life is full of little mysteries.

So, understandably and very responsibly, you kick the habit of going out and risking quadriplegia every Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday afternoons.

But habit is a funny thing. You may have dropped the amusement which burned calories in seven figures on a tri-weekly basis, but your body is still in the swing of your daily eight thirty am black pudding, farmhouse sausages, baked beans and mushrooms, half-a-dozen rashers and two slices of fried bread topped with eggs of a morning. Main course. After a porridge appetiser.

Which… well, you’re an intelligent readership.

Two plus two equals whatnot.

Now, the thing is, I’m not particularly nervous about international killer viruses (or even viri, for the ignorami not among us) as a general rule. Never having suffered ill-health in my life.

(Except, arguably, mental ill-health, as a result of one or two life-experiences that haven’t been entirely a barrel of l.)

But it hit me one day around last March, when we were supposedly isolating (what’s the difference, someone please tell me for the love of the English language so precious to us all, between “isolating” and “self-isolating”? And when did “distancing” become a verb and please why do we prefix the adjective-now-hijacked-as-adverb “social” when we’re all on Zoom night and day and it’s the last thing we mean and we have a perfectly good word that we actually do mean… I know I know, it’s an occupational hazard: to want words to be used to convey their dictionary definitions instead of something randomly plucked out of Dominic Cummings’ bizarre and now unemployed imagination… As we were then: isolating) having shut ourselves away because Ben had a little temperature, asked the neighbours to shop for us and never put a foot outside the door for a fortnight… that we had a lodger who went out half a dozen times a day no matter how often we explained to him.

He simply said, I know, I know, and went out again.

Whereupon it suddenly occurred to me, much as we needed said lodger’s rent in these dark times, that if he brought said virus into the house and Shaun happened to catch it… well, all the rent in the seven oceans of the world wouldn’t make his stay worth it, if Shaun were no longer around to give a bit of oomph to one’s existence.

Or, more accurately, his pertinent little quips and observations on life that make Eeyore seem manically cheerful.

I got over my momentary fear about five minutes later, when I reflected that more people probably die of traffic accidents on a daily basis when we aren’t all in lockdown.

But it left a lingering inclination to asses the risks.

Tens of thousands of calories in, to a few hundred calories out, over a decade or several, being one of them.

Which is how it came about that I decided to take a good long hard look at what we ate.

And if Shaun and I were going to be away together, with no one to tempt us but the dog and none of Ben’s curries to die for, it could be a good opportunity, so to speak…