For some, it’s all about stockpiling loo paper. Others are going nuts over whether the Fairtrade coffee is going to run out.
But for many women like me, if we can’t get to the hair colourist, a supply of home dye must be added to the list of key necessities.
Now ‘home’ and ‘dye’ are not two words I type lightly. The last time I attempted something of the kind on my hair, as opposed to a tie-dye T-shirt, was around 1976 when I would dump on sacks of henna paste and pray that I emerged looking like Kate Bush.
Currently, my hair is by no means silver – at least I don’t think it is. I’ve actually no idea what my natural hair colour is now since I haven’t been acquainted with it for at least 15 years. But a rough guess would place it at piebald.
Bright spot: The Queen in her trademark red lipstick as she leaves Buckingham Palace for Windsor last week
Mel, at Josh Wood Colour, has done a sterling job at keeping me in blissful ignorance of the reality of the situation for many years and, as I type, I’m booked in with her in a few hours time.
Phew! At least I’ll be newly painted if London does get put into lockdown.
And I will have had some tuition on the basics should it get to the point where I have to go DIY.
Sadly, Mel’s expert ‘caramel highlights around the face’ are not going to be possible when it’s just me and the bathtub. It’ll be more of a slam-dunk Morticia Addams, I fear.
Keeping hair coloured may seem trivial amid the current tsunami of terrors but to some of us this is big stuff. Quite a significant number of us, I’d say, judging from anecdotal evidence.
This is not about age. It’s about maintaining a sense of self in a time of crisis and my self does not have grey hair. At least it never wants to see itself with grey hair.
In some ways, I wish I had joined the glad- to-be-grey brigade as going without colour would be a whole lot easier and cheaper.
I have real admiration for those who have allowed nature to take its course and, when I left my job at Vogue, I did contemplate taking this route. For about half an hour.
I thought about how, since I would be under lighter public scrutiny and not heading up a magazine about fashion and style, I could let it all just go hang. Elasticated waist trousers were on the list too.
Then I realised this was the last thing I wanted to happen. I am not that smiling silver-haired person and coronavirus is not going to turn me into her.
In fact, the virus has thrown into sharp relief how important it is for all of us to do whatever it takes, to feel the best we possibly can.
Paying attention to our appearance as the world falls apart isn’t shallow – it fulfils a deep-seated psychological need.
Leonard Lauder’s famous Lipstick Index that deems sales rise as economies plummet will rarely have been proved more correct.
When the bad times roll, we all need a quick and easy pick-me-up. And for millions of us, lipstick is that very thing. Look at the pictures of the Queen driving off to Windsor with her trademark bright colour.
As a single friend said yesterday on the phone: ‘I’ve just put on the lippy and sprayed on the perfume – and I’m here all on my own.’
This is not about who else is going to see us. It’s about self-nurturing. Nul points for anyone who’s giving into whole days in pyjamas.
And, of course, as well as not turning into slobs, table-up dressing (focusing on the top half that can be seen) has rarely been more relevant now so much of our communication will be via Skype, FaceTime or Zoom (confession: until three days ago I’d never heard of Zoom), both when it comes to remote working and for keeping in touch with friends and family.
Unfortunately, those webcams don’t provide the most flattering of images so I’m all for anything that makes us look better since we’re going to be spending hours staring at screens filled with those pixelated little videos of ourselves.
After all, it’s not ideal to be greeted, as I was by my mother on Skype last week, with the cheering words: ‘You don’t look too hot!’
I never imagined a time when the guilty secret of the week would be that you had sneaked out to a restaurant.
And no – we haven’t.
Speaking of Skype, last week brought a new social revolution with the arrival of our first e-meal invitation.
I’m not entirely clear what it involves but it seems to be a video-gathering where we all munch our way through our separate dinners. Help!
Do we all agree that we will eat the same thing, or are one couple going to be fiddling around with millions of boxes of Chinese takeaway, another dishing up a three-course meal, and yet another sticking to a speedy bowl of soup?
Are we all going to be shouting over each other for half the dinner?
And, most importantly, how do you go about refusing an invitation?
After all, who will believe you when you say you have to be somewhere else, now that we’re all meant to be housebound?
We keep seeing pictures of empty shelves at supermarkets and long lines to buy the shrunken number of supplies available.
But a street away, small corner shops have no queues and almost everything you could wish for. And they are the ones who need our support.
Driving to deliver supplies to someone who needed help, I saw my saddest sight so far of the effects of the virus on our daily life.
On the street corners there were lollipop ladies, standing proudly and helpfully brandishing their high-vis signs, waiting to help the children safely across the road. But children were there none.
Lockdown’s as bad as Boxing Day with the family
Living through these times heightens the gulf between how we imagine things to be and how they actually are. And right up there on the front line is the matter of family relations.
Theoretically, we should all take consolation from being together. We think that contact with our nearest and dearest is reassuring and that we feel safer if they are close to us.
We consider the family a supportive and caring unit that will help us get through all of this. I don’t know about everyone else but I’m not seeing it exactly like that.
Families are already driving each other crazy with all this unusual togetherness.
It’s a bit like an endless Boxing Day when everyone has eaten too much and can’t wait to get away. Only without the feast and with the grim knowledge that this could all go on for some time [File photo]
As members of all ages fly back from foreign lands, return home from university or have simply decided that the best course of action is to hunker down together, there’s quite a lot of – shall we say friction? – being generated.
It’s a bit like an endless Boxing Day when everyone has eaten too much and can’t wait to get away. Only without the feast and with the grim knowledge that this could all go on for some time.
Just because you’re family doesn’t mean that you necessarily have the same attitude on how to deal with coronavirus, any more than you share opinions on how to load the dishwasher or who should govern the country.
But the current bickering is more along the lines of where is safe to visit, who is safe to allow out and who is safe to allow in. Will something we’re considering doing be judged selfish by the others?
The fact that we are all in uncharted territory makes us more emotionally volatile than usual. As does our genuine underlying concern about each other’s wellbeing.
However, around our kitchen table there are a lot of discussion about how to proceed in daily life that end: ‘Well, you never want to listen to anyone else anyway…’
It’s business as usual to some extent. But then again, not really.