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The parents I know who a month or so ago were thinking everyone should get the swine-infected kids together with the healthy ones, much as you deliberately make your child catch chickenpox so it’s over and done with, have done a U-turn. At work I hear everyone has thoughtfully been provided with a couple of packets of mini-Kleenex and some antibacterial wipes. All the families I know are wondering whether to cancel their holidays: what if they end up in some swine-swamp, some fatal hotspot, by accident?

In between thinking about the plagues of Israel and Camus’s La Peste, I’ve tried not to become hysterical — and mostly succeeded. There’s a lot to be said for being sanguine. We’re all going to get it or look after someone with it. Most of us will be fine. There’s not a lot we can do about it, short of observing basic hygiene rules. A vaccine will scoot along at some stage and perhaps won’t be made by a company with a history of making vaccines that sometimes, er, kill people. And that’s it.

There’s been a poster that’s been popular in middle-class homes for some time. It’s a reproduction of a second world war information ministry poster that says, “Keep Calm and Carry On”. I note that the company that manufactures it has now created a companion poster that reads, “Now Panic and Freak Out”. Like most people, I’m hovering between the two.

Calm wins, until I start wondering whether we couldn’t maybe put red “X”s on the doors of the infected, plague-style.

A Bridget too far?

It has been reported that a third Bridget Jones movie is in the offing, with Renée Zellweger reprising her role as Helen Fielding’s endearingly dizzy creation.

Bridget Jones was 32 when the first film appeared in 2001, which means she would now be 41, although the book the film was based on was published in 1996, making our cutesy singleton heroine a gamey 46.

I love Bridget Jones and I’m 43 myself, but the idea of a cute, scatty 46-year-old “girl” about town, feeling the baby hunger (hm, good luck with that) and unable to decide between boyish 48-year-old Hugh Grant and the charming, similarly aged Colin Firth, doesn’t necessarily strike me as an immediate barrel of laughs.

Piercing and resonant social commentary, yes. Grim kind of film that makes you want to go home and slash your wrists, sure. Ditzy comedy, not so much.

india.knight@sunday-times.co.uk

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