Falling Short.

I was thinking the other day that somewhere in this world is a living, breathing individual who is mercifully unaware that he or she will be the last person to die before the coronavirus finally gives up its own ghost. That person will be the soldier returning home from the war who gets knocked down and killed by a runaway vehicle at the end of his own street. In such a situation, the word ‘nearly’ must surely be the cruellest in the English language.

But how do we know when the virus will bite the dust? Maybe it will hang around for seven years as the Black Death did in the fourteenth century. Or maybe it’s now a permanent fixture and the remedies currently being prepared won’t always work, in which case the last to die won’t have been born yet.

I wonder why such things occur to me. Maybe I’m just waiting for the world to change.