EVER SINCE I became a mother, part of my mind has been on permanent secondment to Emergency Planning. I have military-style responses ready for every possible eventuality: what I will do if the kitchen catches fire; if Father Christmas comes down the chimney with a crowbar; if a giant GM tomato lands on the children — believe me, everything. Once I would have squinted at the words “bird flu” and rendered all newspaper articles on the subject a comforting blur. Now I read every scare story with avian — I mean avid — interest.

I started to wonder whether I was getting a bit bird-brained about all this when I found myself surfing the web to buy Tamiflu. That’s the antiviral drug that our Government has heroically stocked to ensure the survival of a few doctors and nurses and a great many civil servants and MPs — but no one else — to populate the brave new post-pandemic world. Despite having read that Tamiflu may prove to be no more effective than budgie feed — it hasn’t helped the poor Vietnamese — I wanted my share. I wanted to feel “prepared”. And there was an illicit frisson about the black market websites that lured me to order various “bird flu remedies”, including another anti- viral that turns out to be mainly aimed at old people with a degenerative condition. Its contraindications (death, suicide, hallucinations, “patients should have their dosage carefully adjusted”) make you wonder why it was ever set free from the lab. This drug should be hunted down by men in rubber suits and pulverised, not hoovered up by middle-class mothers who think a prophylactic is a condom. I have now thrown it away, figuring I would worry even more about the easy-to-open bottle (“Do not leave within reach of children! Do not even let children see the bottle!”) than about the Big Sneeze.

Most mothers I know are too embarrassed to admit to such contingency planning, but they’re almost all doing it. Barely had they used up the stockpiles of Volvic and spare radio batteries they’d ordered after 9/11 (“Dirty bomb attack? Heavens no, dear, I’m just stocking up on a few things for New Year’s”) than along came Killer Flu. A colleague at work, who got onto the Roche website too late, muttered “at least I know where you live” in a tone that was only half-joking. Another has been cosying up to civil servant friends who she thinks will have secret supplies. A friend in Fulham has just scored the last box of Tamiflu from a nearby chemist, a man who claimed he had been keeping it under the counter waiting for a “normal local mother” to come along. He didn’t spot that she had been transformed by worry into a ferocious hunter-gatherer, willing to defend her cubs at all costs — or at least thirty quid per cub.

We mothers are armed with remedies, and we are dangerous. In fact we could be endangering the lives of our children if they inadvertently find our secret hoards of pills before the sniffles have even set in. Our response to bird flu is not unlike the Chelsea Tractor phenomenon that makes some people buy giant killing machines in which to transport their little darlings four feet off the ground, in the completely misplaced belief that they will be safer that way.

Humans are not rational beings, of course. And what, in any case, is a rational response to a small but real probability of something truly awful happening? Should we now lay siege to spice shops and Indian restaurants, since the main ingredient in Tamiflu is star anise? The medics are no help; they seem entranced by visions of apocalypse. Professor Colin Blakemore, head of the Medical Research Council, said on the BBC yesterday that he was hopeful the disease would not cross over into the human population this winter, though “there’s always a possibility of transition into pandemic form”. Well, thanks for allaying our fears, Professor. So you think we should still buy Christmas presents, but on hire purchase?

“Mutation could happen at any time and anywhere,” he said, with more than a trace of glee. Well, whaddya know? Viruses are constantly mutating, that is the whole point. What matters is whether the H5N1 virus, which luckily isn’t too good at passing from birds to people, let alone from person to person, mutates into something nastier. No one knows which way it will jump: its next move could be perfectly benign. But as John Adams says in his seminal book Risk: “Wherever the evidence is inconclusive, the scientific vacuum is filled by the assertion of contradictory certitudes.”

Government, of course, is consumed by contradictory platitudes. The Health Secretary cannot even order the right number of winter flu jabs, despite widespread predictions of a shortage. Last week she blamed doctors for not ordering enough, and the “worried well” for getting jabs that should have gone to old people. Hang on. They were only reading in every paper that flu jabs might help to stave off an avian flu that was almost certain to become a modern Black Death. It’s a bit much to be told off for trying to do the right thing. The “worried well” must be worried sick now that it has become clear that Patricia Hewitt’s only interest in them is to keep them out of hospitals in the event of an emergency. And ministers have doubly missed a trick, since the best way to encourage vaccine manufacturers to increase capacity for a future flu vaccine would be to increase demand for the current one. Doh.

It is deeply irritating to be panicked by institutions that could do very little if bird flu struck, but that are simultaneously talking up the risk and failing to do what they should. In the US, an H5N1 vaccine is being tested that might help if the virus mutates — but here our ministers still cannot get their heads round how our factories could ever make enough.

Only a few years ago, another devastating virus was predicted. It was called the Millennium Bug. Everyone had a contingency plan, but none was needed. It may be our duty as mothers to worry — but not quite so much.

camilla.cavendish@thetimes.co.uk

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