Hardly Hannibal crossing the Alps. Yet that hour and a half of a soft October evening included serious dangers. I had to cross two very busy main roads, roam a crowded supermarket amidst a global pandemic, pick items that had been handled by who knows how many other people and, on return, prepare a meal that, of necessity, involved raw meat, sharp knives, live electricity and a huge pan of boiling water.

Not that I was stupid. I used two signalled pedestrian crossings. I donned a mask before I entered the store and glooped my hands in sanitiser. I kept social distance as best I could and washed my hands as soon as I returned home. Indeed, in the course of cooking I washed them half a dozen times.

We seldom realise it, but every day each one of us takes multiple risks; make dozens of learned, largely subconscious decisions as we leave the house, do our jobs, move about our world, interact with strangers and care for loved ones.

Disease, danger and death are always near at hand, but – for the most part – we do not brood on it. It does not do, as Dumbledore nearly said, to dwell on doom and forget to live.

In 2020, all our lives have been turned upside down, not so much by novel coronavirus – an airborne respiratory infection with a mortality rate south of 1% – as by our political and cultural reaction to it.

I do not make light of Covid-19. It is a nasty, potentially dangerous illness. A dozen people I know have had it, and one of them died.

I have gone to determined lengths not to catch it. I have not shaken a hand or entered anyone else’s house since February. Worn a mask while shopping since mid-March and, given the latest uptick in infections, now again wear it when I must walk a crowded street.

Nor am I eager to play Captain Hindsight. Boris Johnson and his ministers have undoubtedly made mistakes, but no government will emerge from Covid with an unblemished record and the virus itself, in all sorts of sneaky ways, makes the process of ruling very difficult. MPs cannot pack the Commons chamber; any sort of meeting is distanced and fraught.

Blindsided by the Wuhan virus and appalled by the scenes unfolding in Spain and Italy, we were thrown with little warning into lockdown.

You cannot really argue there was an alternative. At that time there was a great deal about Covid-19 we did not know. We have since learned that many – perhaps even most – who catch it never have symptoms and are not in any meaningful sense ill; that victims are at their most infectious before becoming unwell; and that it poses no danger to children. Indeed, prepubescent younglings rarely catch it.

And, while every death is a tragedy, we must remark that the mass of Covid fatalities were elderly people, many with dementia and assorted co-morbidities, and most of whom would have died in 2020 anyway.

Yet it is far easier to frighten a people into lockdown than, as we have learned, to reopen society afterwards – to say nothing of the colossal economic and societal cost of shuttering shops and business and offices, cancelling sports and entertainment, banning travel and all but imprisoning the frail and old.

As the aged residents of care homes and sheltered accommodation are invisible, it is too easy to forget what they have endured – forbidden to meet friends, unable to join social clubs, restricted even in visits from family. And that pandemic loneliness is a killer in itself.

We assumed that lockdown would choke coronavirus and that it would burn out and dissipate, allowing a return to entire normality by the autumn. Now we realise that lockdown is only a pause-button. As soon as we could, once more, move around and visit each other and eat out, Covid-19 inevitably began to circulate.

And, despite the ‘rule of six,’ pub curfews and so on, infections continue to rise exponentially. They may continue to do so in Scotland despite the latest strictures now imposed on us by Nicola Sturgeon. A long winter looms before us and all we sacrificed from March and through summer, it would appear, has been for nought.

The First Minister’s latest decrees infuriate because they largely target the hospitality sector, whose role in spreading infections has been negligible and where many publicans and restaurateurs are already at the abyss of ruin.

In breath-taking cynicism, the new rules were announced on the same day as other stories broke highly damaging to the First Minister and her party – and they are of ridiculous complexity.

Worse, they are underpinned by a myth: that Scotland could rapidly be made Covid-free if only we, the pesky people, would zip it, and sit obediently at the back of the bus.

In particular, both sides of the border, our rulers have increasingly demonised young people. It is not enough that they have been robbed of schooling, denied examinations, lured into university residences on false promises of live, in-person teaching – and, on one fraught weekend, actually (and unlawfully) incarcerated.

And, to cap everything, and under a government helmed by a man known to have begotten an indeterminate number of children by at least three different women, there has even been a preposterous ban on casual sex – proof, surely, that those in power are dreaming up ever more involved and self-contradictory rules, in blithe disregard of police resources and the reality that is human nature.

Saner voices now increasingly call for a national conversation we are, one day, going to have to have – acknowledging that novel coronavirus is here to stay, that there are going to be some permanent changes in the way that we live, and that we are going to have to live alongside coronavirus just as we have learned to do with every other pathogen.

Earlier this week 3,000 scientists signed the eminently sensible ‘Great Barrington Declaration,’ urging a herd-immunity strategy that would allow younger adults to resume their normal lives while providing focused protection for those most at risk.

And researchers from the University of Edinburgh the other day completed close scrutiny of Imperial College London’s infamous Report 9 – the one helmed by Neil Ferguson and which confidently predicted 500,000 British dead if lockdown were not imposed immediately.

Even in America, with a far greater population and under its circus-clown of a President, fatalities have been nowhere near that figure.

The Edinburgh experts now assert that, while lockdown – and especially the closure of our schools – did reduce the reproduction number of Covid-19, it had the unexpected result of increasing the overall number of deaths.

‘Lockdown does mean that the number of deaths goes down,’ Professor Graeme Ackland starkly observed, ‘so there is a short-term gain, but it leads to long-term pain.

If you had done nothing, it would all be over by now. It would have been absolutely horrendous but it would be over. It wouldn’t even have been completely lunatic to do nothing.’

In truth, the lockdown was never about beating the virus. The central Government policy was to protect the NHS – by telling us not to use it – while trying to flatten the epidemic curve.

And we might yet rue the day we chose not to let coronavirus wreak its worst through spring and summer, instead of damping it down till the inevitability of winter and when it will be far more dangerous – especially if we also have a particularly bad seasonal flu.

The belief – which seems genuinely to be SNP policy – that novel coronavirus can be exterminated is for the birds. It is extraordinarily difficult to eradicate a disease, and the more so in an age when millions of paranoid, gullible people campaign against vaccination. Polio is still a problem in parts of Africa. Bubonic plague pops up now and then in hot, ratty parts of the planet.

The only malady we have ever annihilated is smallpox, and in that we had two huge advantages – an effective vaccine, and because smallpox had no animal host. Forty years after its first appearance, no vaccine has ever been found for Aids, though there are now most effective treatments and, unless you inject yourself with dirty needles or have a particular kind of sex, Aids is actually very difficult to catch.

Novel coronavirus may eventually ‘attenuate,’ become weaker and less dangerous. It is not in the virus’s long-term interests to kill a lot of people very quickly: that proved a bad career-move for ebola.

And there is growing evidence that many more of us may be immune to Covid than was at first thought, probably on account of T-cells granted some muscle-memory against it by a cold you caught last winter.

Facemasks, too, when widely worn, weaken the ‘viral dose’ someone else might otherwise spray on you. If you do not catch much virus, you will not have very much illness.

How long you remain immune to Covid-19 after having it is, of course, not yet known. A year ago, after all, the virus was exclusive to bats. There are also a significant number of ‘false positives’ in standard coronavirus testing.

But only a handful of people, worldwide, have been identified as having a second infection, and none of them experienced it as a serious illness. For that matter, and despite the summer hysteria of the unions, not a single teacher anywhere has been infected by a pupil.

We should be able to have a rational public discussion about easing restrictions and, while taking every personal precaution, resuming our lives and let the virus do its thing.

But Covid has been marked in Britain by extraordinary hysteria. We have let it dominate our media and our broadcast news. Thousands tune in fearfully for the latest and-furthermore-I-say-unto-ye daily musings of Nicola Sturgeon.

Respect for the NHS has become practically the national religion, its staff (who are actually, you know, paid) vaunted as saints, angels and demigods.

Dominic Cummings did not just go to Barnard Castle – he imperilled lives, we howl; police do not just ask crowds to move on, but scream that they are killing people. It feels less like a pandemic and more like a particularly crazed hostage-situation.

We have been here before. In fact, we have had worse. Our last truly lethal pandemic was the Asian influenza of 1957-58. Doctors were appalled how fast it swept the world. Staff in British restaurants quickly began wearing masks.

Around twelve million British people caught the flu and around 33,000 died of it – though the true figure was, probably higher. Most victims were under forty and, of that group, half were under fourteen. It killed so quickly that many youngsters were dead by the time they arrived at hospital.

Yet all this we took in our stride. It received very little media attention. The British Newspaper Archive has just 427 cuttings on the pandemic. You will probably find more references to coronavirus, any single day and across all its platforms, on the BBC website. Harold Macmillan was not forced to hold daily briefings. People did not catastrophise the 1957 flu: worry, aloud, say, about the death of the office. And it is quite forgotten.

As one observer has quipped, the issue here ‘is less that the 1957–58 pandemic was airbrushed from history, and rather more that people living in the 1950s didn’t quiver like aspens every time the world reminded them that life could occasionally be a little difficult.’

Grown-ups of that time had, after all, weathered world war, German bombing and a host of ailments that, until the advent of vaccination and antibiotics, killed one or two of your schoolfellows every year.

And it was also, of course, a much churchier age. People accepted that life holds much mystery and uncertainty and risk, and that there was much that they could not control.

Had there been a calmer Covid response back in March, based on all we know now, this pandemic would almost certainly be over. We must, eventually, for the sake of the economy and for our young people, unlock. The virus will not destroy us; fear and irrationality assuredly will.