Talk about Christmas. Somebody on television saying they'd break the rules to get their family of seven together for the celebration. Then apologising.

We're still talking about rules.

Yes, I suppose I drive on the left because that's the rule - no, wait. There's another reason. Duh.

I get the idea that lockdowns "buy time" for scientists to work round the clock, etc., to find a vaccine, and I can work out why certain politicians - blah, blah, blah. I really need to snap out of this.

There was rain earlier. Now the sky's got that marbled look that suggests it could go either way. Fewer leaves on the big tree; they're fluttering in the wind. Cold day.

We're used to the virus now. We know what to do.

No, we don't need government inspectors turning up on Christmas Day to count the places laid at the table.

Mind you, New Year.

Dark-haired government inspector turning up just after midnight with a lump of coal in one hand and a bottle of, hmmm, Lagavulin in the other...

Maybe there is a role for government after all.

Maybe the value of social media is that it keeps the Russians and Iranians busy.

I remember back when the DDR fell, the Stasi were revealed to have recruited practically everybody as informers. The way to get out of any arrest-type situation was to agree to be an informer.

So maybe the performance metric applied by Stasi management was: number of informers recruited this week. That would be an easy number to report, and an easy number to approve, especially with the weekend coming up. The words "but none of them have told us anything" were probably never spoken out loud by anybody at any level.

Imagine the head office of a "hostile state actor", I think that's the phrase, come election time in the USA.

So many fake Facebook accounts created; so many fake tweets tweeted. These are impressive numbers! Well done!

Quora sends me so many questions to answer about Brexit (no, I don't bother) that they must have latched on there as well. Most of the questions I get are asked anonymously, although I get quite a few from Oleg [surname redacted]. A question from Oleg that managed to combine Cambridge Analytica, Birthday Honours, Coronavirus and the class system got me thinking about this.

Somewhere out there beyond the Urals, or perhaps in a nondescript building tucked away in the forests around Moscow, a young hacker is being congratulated on how many questions he's managed to feed to me on Quora. Up there in a converted shelter in the mountains around Tehran (good wifi), another youngster is receiving a merit award for Most Facebook Accounts Created In One Week.

Never mind that all those accounts have been closed; never mind that I never answer. Those numbers look great!

Never mind either that social media doesn't win elections. Back in 2019, the UK election, social media spent a lot of its time telling me that Jeremy Corbyn would save the nation. Now, it's on about the all-encompassing badness of [candidate's name redacted; this isn't about that].

But ... the electorate goes its own way. Yes, there's a lot of fuss about clandestine attempts to influence elections. Yes, I'm sure every enemy agent has a go. But we're so focused on the technology that we miss the essential point: everybody does it but it doesn't work.

Yes, I know that [insert surprise result here]. But are you telling me that demographic voted en masse for that candidate on the basis of what social media told it?

Yes, okay, one day it is going to come out that Covid-19 was developed for Chinese Intelligence by the Trilateral Commission working out of a top-secret laboratory north of London funded by the British Aristocracy, and okay, the truth is sometimes What The Government Doesn't Want You To Know (to take a line from the playbook). But - come on. Sinister foreigners? Really?

Got it! The Overton Window. That's the term I was trying to remember.

The Overton Window is "the range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time". Thanks, Wikipedia.

We might guess that, say, policies emphasising human rights fall within today's Overton Window, while policies designed to exclude on grounds of discrimination, race, gender, et cetera, fall outside it.

The Overton Window shifts over time. It expands, contracts, moves left, moves right, across a spectrum ranging towards more freedom at one extreme and less freedom at the other. More relaxed at one extreme and more uptight at the other. More intolerant, tolerant. Nice, nasty.

You get the idea.

Why has the UK government just introduced a three-tier restriction system? Because the idea of a national lock-down has moved outside today's Overton Window for anti-Covid policies.

And actually, because none of our political leaders seem able to think of anything else. While the government's pushing a three-tier restriction system, the opposition is calling for a circuit-breaker.

By now, I'd guess, the mainstream population has worked out that lock-downs are just a way of kicking the proverbial can down the road.

So our politicians are arguing about different ways of using foot-power to convey the cylindrical metal container further along the street.

This isn't leadership. Seems to me that leadership would be acknowledging what the mainstream population is beginning to understand - that we're stuck with this virus for the foreseeable future.

Which would mean finding ways to survive, prosper, socialise, support each other, et cetera, with the virus ever-present in the background. Not just finding euphemisms for: "Stay indoors until the clock turns back to 2019."

I suspect that even the government's assertion of control over the situation is moving outside the Overton Window. Nobody wants to hear that we're going to "beat" the virus, or indeed that we're going to fight it on the beaches, et cetera.

Because we're not.

There may be a vaccine, and it may eradicate the virus as effectively as we've eradicated flu or, say, the common cold. There may be enough doses for everybody to get one without argument.

But.

Seems to me we've got to the point where we're crazy to argue about lockdowns being harsh or not-so-harsh. Long-term or just a couple of weeks.

What's killing us is that we live in a world where low-paid workers can't afford time off just because they're infected with a life-threatening virus.

"I know I'm contagious, but I can't afford to self-isolate."

One of the flaws in test'n'trace is that the vulnerable-to-infection, soon-to-be-contagious people can't afford to be found by the test.

They walk among us, selling us things.

Maybe we should care for them?

Would that be a more effective strategy than depriving them of their livelihoods?

Irrelevant footnote. The film Deep Impact (1998) surfaced on Freeview the other night. I know this because I switched on just in time to catch [spoiler] the briefing scene, in which US President Tom Beck (Morgan Freeman) announces, first, that the world is facing an "extinction-level event", an ELE, and secondly, that the world's governments, together, have worked out a way to deal with it.

Fiction, eh?

Test and trace, eh?

You text positive today, and all your contacts are traced tomorrow. They're warned to stay inside. They do that.

So simple. The virus will be eradicated in three tomorrows.

Simple like those architect's drawings and models, all clean and airy and white-spaced with tiny trees and neatly sharp-pencilled-in figures, of public building projects that turn into urban nightmares.

Or those car ads in which the empty roads curve through scenic hills under blue skies, to music that doesn't sound anything like a traffic jam.

Maybe planning "to beat" coronavirus should take into account the human element.

Oh, hey, I get it. A "circuit-breaker" is a slightly clever-sounding, slightly technical-sounding lock-down with a slightly cool name. "Circuit-breaker" - sounds like the tech people are onto something, doesn't it?

There's talk of a "circuit-breaker" being imposed in Scotland and probably south of the border as well.

Key feature of a "circuit-breaker" is the promise that the lock-down will be short. A circuit-breaker is a politician's lock-down - never mind the R-rate, the voters won't stand for another lock-down so let's re-brand it as a "circuit-breaker" and tell them it'll be over by Christmas.

We can talk about a circuit-breaker in the way we can blather on excitedly about Artificial Intelligence. What we get is a lock-down. What we get is an algorithm deciding our A-level grades.

Circuit-breaker = lock-down. We all go back indoors - not for long this time - and when we come out of hiding, the virus will, um, still be there. Nothing will have changed.

I guess we're all waiting for the vaccine that will wipe clean the world - every surface free of Covid-19; all viruses cancelled.

That's absolutely going to work, isn't it?

We go in for a circuit-breaker, come out, get sick, go in for another one, come out, get sick ... and then on some glad confident morning a few months into the future,  a pharmaceutical company announces "We've got the vaccine!"

They'll price it affordably and produce enough doses to fix the entire world population.

There will be no politics in the distribution.

Within a week the virus will be as totally eradicated as polio was, er, twenty-three years after the World Health Organisation declared the Global Polio Eradication Initiative.

The future is so very simple, really. We just unplug ourselves for a while, do it again maybe a few times, and then we come out, get an injection, and covid is history.

I was going to suggest a switch in policy away from short-term catch-phrases towards preparing us all to live with covid for a while - you know, build bicycle lanes rather than a third runway at Heathrow; put university lectures online (behind a pay-wall?); pay nurses a living wage - but it hardly seems necessary now.

There's a circuit-breaker coming up! That'll fix it!

[By way of a footnote, I want to mention a weird cognitive dissonance I've been experiencing lately. I think I can call it a weird cognitive dissonance - I've been hearing one thing and it's been reminding me of another.

It's just that lately, when I hear people talking about the end-game with Covid-19, they sound like senior military officers talking about the military end-game in Afghanistan or maybe it was Iraq. There was always some kind of amorphous victory-situation beginning to coalesce in the near future that somehow over-rode the simple truth that they were only talking to the media because something had gone wrong. We could be optimistic because, despite conditions on the ground, some kind of metaphysical victory-condition was beginning to be met.

Is that unfair? I hear a similar weightlessness in all the verbiage about how we're going to beat this virus, et cetera, world-beating, blah, waffle, blah. People are dying. Young people are presented with the possibility that it's their fault if their elders fall sick.

My thought is - if you can't describe victory in clear, simple terms - black-and-white tanks on the streets of Paris, population cheering - you're not winning.]

Mind you, the decision to go home was the only decision he could have made.

Let's see if I can do this one without p*l*t*cs as well, shall we?

If he was wrong to go home - well, okay, game over. Same as if he had stayed in hospital.

If he made the right decision, in the sense that his recovery continues, he gets to look stronger by coming out earlier.

So I guess he's gambling on that.

What makes this so compelling is that it's so visibly character-driven. I would argue - not taking sides - that we're in the middle of something that has (will be seen to have had) all the character-driven inevitability that Shakespeare or Sophocles would have brought to the screenplay.

What's really challenging is to keep in mind that this is real.

We should wish him well.

Partly because we're all human. But also - what happens to us if we don't?

Reader, I watched the Trump/Biden first debate. Let's see if I can write this without intruding into US politics.

I streamed the beginning, and then I couldn't put it down. One of them won it, I think, and one of them didn't. But if p*l*t*cs are as polarised as they seem to be in the US, I guess everybody saw and heard what they wanted to see and hear.

It will be such fun to come back to it in a few months' time and explain - with the benefit of hindsight - what was so obvious at the time. But without a result to give the event its context and meaning, maybe I'll just stick to one hopeful forecast.

There's a film in that. Or perhaps a drama. Five, maybe ten years hence, it'll be given a rating and put out in cinemas, if they still exist, or streaming services.

Failing that, it'll be transcribed and run on Broadway, as UK government inquiries sometimes transfer to the West End (or BBC2/Channel 4 post-Covid).

Such a character study.

I turned on the radio this morning to find Melvyn Bragg and a cast of scholars discussing the Scottish play.

Might look for the whole programme later, on iPlayer, but I heard enough to get me thinking about the role of character in destiny.