A bald fact about this most famous of sex pests is that his appetites were, by their very nature, destructive — bad for society and positively pestilential for women. But the lending of his name to that sainted acronym, BDSM, has brought about a rehabilitation which blows the central problem of this muzzled cult wide open: that it’s not at all concerning for men to want to hurt women in the first place, and that instead of addressing these grim tastes, they should indulge them. The moral crisis of sadism is the engine of two parables of celebrity scandal this month, about author Neil Gaiman and the spidery metal rockstar Marilyn Manson (real name Brian Warner), and their frightening magnetism among vulnerable women. The first emerged in a mega-viral Vulture article with harrowing testimony from one principal accuser, Scarlett Pavlovich. The second came in the form of a three-part Channel 4 documentary, Marilyn Manson: Unmasked, with accounts from fans, bandmates and ex-girlfriends.

If the testimonies prove correct, both Gaiman and Manson saw sexual sadism as a way to challenge boundaries — a positively sophisticated indulgence, and evidence of their cultivation. But as Angela Carter argued in 1978, de Sade himself was no proto-liberator, no feminist libertine. From its roots, BDSM has served the ill intentions of violent men, and it remains predicated on the violation and humiliation of women to this day. Yes, there are exceptions; yes, the “community” is hot on consent. But as Kathleen Stock argued last week, consent is tenuous in a scenario where arousal requires people to suspend disbelief, to pretend someone is in pain or unwilling. The acceptability of BDSM now, couched as it is in flexible doctrines of consent, cows women into compliance for fear of being labelled intolerant — intolerant, that is, for wincing at the tastes of men who only want to fuck women they can frighten or hurt. In this (allegedly), Gaiman and Manson are in esteemed company — remember when Armie Hammer was accused of saying he would “barbecue and eat” a lover’s ribs?

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The opening scene of the Manson documentary might begin to explain why sadism holds such sway among certain male celebrities. In Manson’s case, it was part of a pompous artistic endeavor: “Marilyn Manson is about transcending morality and sexuality,” he tells admirers in a backstage clip from early on in his career. Beneath his towering form, two young girls inexpertly kiss, awkwardly writhing for the singer’s delight. Grand statements of creative intent like this always seem irredeemably cynical with hindsight; this clip now reads as a group of perverted prats gassing off in lipstick and leather trousers. But the performativity of Manson’s sadism is important: at one point, his satanic persona is described as having a “WWE feel” — that is, an aesthetic of villainy which belies a careful, risk-assessed choreography. But it was not play-acting: according to one ex-girlfriend and accuser, Manson was able to “hide abuse by doing it during sex”, excusing away violence and coercion as part of exaggerated sexual roleplay. Equally, his cartoonish, evil lunatic persona does the same thing: beneath all this white paint, I am a serious artist. I will hurt you, but it’s all part of the show.

Similarly, Gaiman’s towering popularity in the world of fantasy fiction is contingent on the aesthetics of sadism. His message of sainted victimhood, of the way the young and powerless might prevail over their oppressors (notably explored in his semi-autobiographical novel The Ocean at the End of the Lane) relies on a preponderance of dangerous, monstrous freaks to be vanquished. Coraline, his young-adult hit, is awash with the blacks and reds of BDSM. The villain at its heart, the Other Mother, has hair “as black as coal” and teeth “as sharp as knives”, dark, red fingernails and a “jagged red slash” for a mouth. He could almost be describing Manson. And it’s telling that Gaiman’s alleged private endeavors mirror the strange darkness of his own villain.

An uncomfortable part of the Manson documentary’s “hiding in plain sight” narrative is the naivety of the fans. One interviewee is a woman who, at 14, established a group called the “lunchbox girls”, so called because they mimicked the band’s habit of posing with kids’ lunchboxes. The way she describes her friendship with Manson certainly sounds like grooming — he asked the girls to call him “Daddy”, received underwear pics from a graveyard photoshoot where the teens posed with sex toys and, autographing the girl’s lunchbox, wrote “To Jen, you cum-guzzling gutter slut, love Marilyn”. All of this, as an accuser called Bianca says elsewhere, was exciting rather than skin-crawling for the mere fact that it would have shocked their parents.

That’s how things go when you’re 14; indeed, it seems rebellion drove many of Manson’s young fans to buy into his predatory aesthetics. In one clip from outside a concert, a goth girl, who in another era might have been a blushing teenybopper, shouts “I wanna rape Twiggy!”, referring to another member of the band, Twiggy Ramirez. That she was compelled to say this shows how the language of sexual sadism is connected to rock-and-roll rebellion, and so is ultimately “safe”, part of the performance — an “in-joke”. But by definition, the power dynamics preclude this. If the documentary’s claims are to be believed, and Manson did pluck underaged girls from audiences and rape them on his tour bus, that young fan becomes a symbol of his victims’ vulnerability, and her joke about rape is sickly turned in on itself.

Manson’s own view on the matter is a little more straightforward: in an unearthed interview, he told Rolling Stone: “I’m not into rape whatsoever… I prefer to break a woman down to the point where they have no choice but to submit to me.” In this unbelievable defense, Manson says he cannot be a rapist because he’s not into it — he prefers other methods of leaving women with “no choice”. Little matter that this would seem to be precisely the same thing.

The magnetism of metal or goth scenes for awkward and vulnerable young girls is fascinating in itself and has parallels within BDSM. In each case, women seem drawn to these subcultures for their vague promises of being progressive and alternative, a respite for the marginalized and a way to process darkness. The tour-bus accuser Bianca speaks of a sense of kinship with other teens at Manson’s shows, who were invariably troubled, from “broken homes”. There is a similar black-lipsticked brokenness to Gaiman fans who, just as hypnotized as Manson’s, were taken in by his nerd-centric apparent sexiness, described in the Vulture piece as a “penchant for dressing in black, a shock of unruly black hair, and an erotic power seldom possessed by authors of comic books and fantasy novels”. “Women would turn up to [Gaiman’s] signings dressed in the elaborate Victorian-goth attire of his characters and beg him to sign their breasts,” we are told. One “fell to her knees and wept”. Gaiman’s look — that of the floppy-haired, mild-mannered intellectual — combined with his outspoken feminism was, if the allegations prove true, all part of the act, communicating a certain effete harmlessness.

A world preoccupied with shallowly designating men as “toxic”/”alpha” and “safe”/”sweet” disarms women against the fact that hot nerds are often the worst of the lot, beset as they are by the long shadow of teenaged awkwardness and rejection. Many of those men see themselves as outside of the dynamic of “women and their rapists”; rapists are hypermasculine bullies, but tender loverboys or gangly outcasts would never do that. Manson, conversely, leaps from the pages of a Gaiman novel — a villainous Sadeian caricature. This is not to say that Warner embodies the cruel core of sadism, rather the flatness of its grand claims about breaking taboos and sexual sophistication. If Gaiman’s public face was all children’s charities and comic books, it was equally confected — both men, in light of their respective allegations, were sad, aging clowns whose costumes furnished shameful appetites. In Manson’s case, there is a profound emptiness, a sense of wretched impotence, to his intent to shock for shock’s sake and in Gaiman’s, to his simpering desire for progressive acclaim.

Marilyn Manson, for his part, is no longer shocking anyway: the provocateurs of the 2020s are more about ribald female sexuality than male violence (allow me to introduce our readers to 21-year-old rapper Ceechnyaa, who has gained international fame for the line “I’m peggin’ that man at the back of the bus”). But the inheritance of those Nineties goth sex freaks is still rich, and the cult of violent satanism still has great purchase among young weirdos.

Only last week, a 19-year-old internet forum nerd called Cameron Finnigan was jailed for encouraging a girl to kill herself on camera as part of a Hitler-worshipping satanic cult linked to the Order of the Nine Angles. That same group had inspired 18-year-old Danyal Hussein to kill sisters Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman in a London park in 2021. The Order’s tenets, which a brief glance suggests involves Aryans taking over the Milky Way in a galactic empire, are tellingly tailored to sci-fi dorks. Members are encouraged to commit acts of violence and human sacrifice as part of a spiritual endeavor; it is no coincidence that this resonates with Manson’s stated aim to “transcend morality and sexuality”. The O9A, as it’s known, has inspired various metal groups, particularly among provincial Euro-goths, for decades, and satanic aesthetics more generally underpin metal as a genre, if only for its pearl-clutching potential.

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Neil Gaiman and the perils of BDSM

By Kathleen Stock

So, sadism continues to hold sway — and is as dangerous for women as it ever has been. The home of BDSM is not cellophane-sheeted “playrooms” at ticketed, consent-centric sex parties. The true consequences of sadism play out in quiet corners, abandoned buildings, internet forums, Hinge dates gone wrong. They play out behind closed doors — and women really get hurt.

In a noxiously “sex-positive” culture which increasingly privileges the titillation of men above the safety of women and girls, the only solution is this: we must return to stringency on the simplest demands, and jettison kink/casual-sex apologists. Don’t choke me, don’t hit me, don’t frighten me, don’t use me. Be intolerant, be prickly and uncool, if it keeps you safe. After all, a system in which it is fine to strangle a girl you meet on an app, or (allegedly) make a girl who nannies your young son vomit during fellatio then lick it up, is not one which is remotely feminist, even with that golden ticket, “enthusiastic consent”. Obscuring that fact, and keeping the lines between exploitation and experimentation hazy, is essential for predatory men if they are to continue to intimidate women into silence.

In the arts, the thrilling aesthetics of dark, twisted desire will, and should, always belong — think of the electrifying strangeness of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, or the strangled strains of the Velvet Underground’s Venus in Furs. This is no Mary Whitehouse manifesto. But when it comes to the real sex lives of real people, these celebrity stories show us that some men have used the grim utopia of BDSM, and its atmosphere of progressive sophistication, to conduct horrors. So do not be afraid to be disgusted — even if it is at the cost of some weirdo’s grand artistic and sexual mission to, as one of Manson’s school friends glibly puts it, “push boundaries”.

Alongside Gaiman, the main protagonist — also in the Tortoise podcast series which preceded it, containing some of the same allegations — was New Zealander Scarlett Pavlovich, now a mature student in the UK. We first encounter her as someone with a major crush on the performance artist Amanda Palmer, who also happens to be Gaiman’s wife and the mother of his child. Pavlovich is 24 when she first meets Gaiman, having been hanging out with Palmer for two years following a chance encounter on an Auckland street. Hours after arriving at his house to babysit, he inveigles Pavlovich into taking what she wrongly presumes will be a solo bath in an outdoor tub. He then allegedly subjects her to unexpected acts of nudity, digital penetration and facial ejaculation, and tells her to call him “master”.

Next, Palmer invites Pavlovich to live with her at a nearby property, and she enters into a loose nannying arrangement with the couple, albeit unpaid. Over the next few months there are further allegations of traumatic encounters with the lecherous sexagenarian: episodes of unexpected and forceful sex, as well as beatings with a belt, and the unwilling ingestion of various disgusting bodily fluids.

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Gaiman’s penchant for sadism has been confirmed to the magazine by various former partners, with one woman saying he was always “pressing her to do things that hurt and scared her”. Equally, though, the magazine related that “all of the women, at some point, played along, calling him their master, texting him afterward that they needed him, even writing that they loved and missed him”. In a statement on his website, Gaiman wrote this week that he has “never engaged in non-consensual sexual activity with anyone”. Though Pavlovich sent texts which suggested compliance with at least some of what was happening to her, she now says it most definitely was not consensual, describing it as rape and assault.

From this distance, it is impossible to say who is right, though the general grotesque opportunism of Gaiman’s behavior seems clear. The arguments about specifics will run and run, and I have no intention of getting involved. I simply point out that ascertaining the truth here is surely complicated by blithe acceptance of a thing called “BDSM”, a practice believed to possess the magical transformative powers of turning scatological acts of torture and degradation into a fun and sexy stolen afternoon.

The author of the Gaiman article, a journalist called Lily Shapiro, nicely sums up the ludicrousness of the prevailing cultural position. Straight after a description of a violent, physically painful encounter, Shapiro explains that “Had Gaiman and Pavlovich been engaging in BDSM, this could conceivably have been part of a rape scene, a scenario sometimes described as consensual nonconsent. But that would have required careful negotiation in advance, which [Pavlovich] says they had not done”. Later, she describes BDSM as “a culture with a set of long-standing norms, the most important of which is that all parties must eagerly and clearly consent to the overall dynamic as well as to each act before they engage in it”.

We are supposed to believe this, Shapiro declares, because there are experts that tell us so: “practitioners, including sex educators like Dossie Easton and Janet W. Hardy who wrote some of the defining texts of the subculture”, who “have stressed over decades” that active consent “is the defining line that separates BDSM from abuse”. Say what you like about the progressive’s tendency to think the worst of people, but the image of the sadist carefully doing his homework, underlining passages from dog-eared texts before venturing off to buy handcuffs and muzzles, surely speaks to a refreshing strain of optimism about human nature.

The fantasy that violence somehow becomes neutral or even good when accompanied by a resounding “yes” is crazy when you actually think about it; and is also belied by the heavy emphasis in the sexpert rulebook upon obtaining resounding expressions of consent at every stage, making it look more like a liability waiver than a responsible exploration of what participants really want. Meanwhile, back on earth, the whole point of BDSM is to mess around in the borderlands between yes and no; for what else does dominance and submission mean? Strictly speaking, it doesn’t count as either of these things if consent is fully and unambiguously present.

Aficionados might protest that what is sought is a pretense or play of dominance and submission, rather than the real thing — but presumably not too loudly or often, for fear of losing their erections. In order to be lost in the moment, it helps if you can mentally distance yourself from the recollected “yes” and focus only on the present “no”. And that’s not a fact about BDSM specifically, but more about the limits of immersive pretense; no theatregoer transported to Elizabethan times appreciates a mobile phone going off.

This preferred gap between the submissive’s vocalization of consent and the act itself makes the whole process somewhat risky for the sadist, as Gaiman has learned to his cost. Even in the best-case scenario, between these two moments there is likely to be enough time for the other to inwardly change her mind and so mentally retract her “yes” — thereby rendering what comes next as a violation according to BDSM health and safety protocols. And there is a further complication, relating not to the moment of the sexual act, but later. Namely, given the nature of what is often being done, submitting to a sadist (whether in “play” or otherwise) tends to produce certain desires in the submissive person that are particularly apt for later disavowal, after the fog of masochism has cleared.

This is because psychological as well as physical domination is a conventional part of the modern sadist’s repertoire. (For some reason, academia has an enormous interest in these transactions, thereby offering ample proof.) Verbal aggression and humiliation, insults, gaslighting, negging, and other pressuring tactics are all often priced into the erotic buffet along with pain, and here too the thrill apparently lies in pushing boundaries. Yet in other contexts — for instance, those said to involve coercive control — prolonged exposure to such strategies is recognized as likely to undermine a person’s secure sense of self. Some philosophers even argue that a person’s desires are “unfree” and not part of her “true self” whenever they are induced by such underhand and manipulative methods.

If this is right, there’s little reason to think the same tools must operate differently in explicitly sadistic relationships; a fact which leaves the “yeses” of submissive partners especially vulnerable to later retraction in the cold light of day. Perhaps even worse for ongoing mental stability, the gospel according to sexperts says that acts of punishment are supposed to be alternated with moments of solicitous affection from the sadist: what is grimly known as “aftercare”. Unless you are completely dissociated, it’s hard to think of a more deranging pattern of emotional engagement. Shapiro laments in her article that Gaiman didn’t offer any aftercare to victims, but it was surely a blessing.

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Delving into the past, and trying to remember what you actually wanted in some particular situation from months or years ago, is usually not just a matter of fishing about for the memory of some inner feeling. Most of us don’t have good memories for this sort of thing anyway. It is much more likely you will try to consider the situation you were once in with fresh eyes, and work out from first principles what was actually desirable about it (or otherwise). And if now, in retrospect, you find the situation you are recalling positively undesirable — if, say, you now realize you were being manipulated and pressured into doing things which, you now see, were really very bad for you — then there is a chance you might now say you never truly desired them in the first place, even though at the time you said (even “eagerly and clearly”) that you did. And you might even have a point.

To be clear: this couldn’t work as a legal argument, and nor is it an attempt to adjudicate Gaiman’s guilt or innocence. But it is certainly an argument against getting involved in sadomasochism in general. More often than not, it is very bad for the submissive in the scenario — not just because it leads her to physically dangerous situations, but also because it tends to put her in a state of mind in which agency is undermined and subsequent choices aren’t those of her true self, however confidently things started out. Meanwhile, for the sadist — and especially the famous one, as Gaiman has discovered — it leaves your good reputation a hostage to fortune, hoping that those with whom you had degrading sex in the past never properly get to know their own minds.

All the more shocking, then, to hear the allegations of sexual misconduct levelled against him in recent months. And how strange the silence that they were met with. Until now, that is. 

In a six-part podcast series by Tortoise Media, hosted by Rachel Johnson and Paul Caruana Galizia, a succession of women air allegations of sexual impropriety or abuse against Gaiman, author of Good Omens and The Sandman series. They raise serious questions about consent within relationships that were, at best, highly asymmetrical. Writer and broadcaster Julia Hobsbawm, for example, says Gaiman “jumped on her… out of the blue” in an “aggressive, unwanted” pass in London in 1986, when she was 22. Another, “K”, claims she and Gaiman began a romantic relationship in 2003, when she was 20 and he was in his mid-40s. She alleges she was subjected to rough and painful sex “she neither wanted nor enjoyed.” In 2007, she claims he performed non-consensual penetrative intercourse on her after she had repeatedly asked him not to. 

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Scarlett, another accuser, claims Gaiman assaulted her in a bath at his New Zealand home, hours after they had first met. He was 61, she a 22-year-old nanny. Gaiman said that they “cuddled” and “made out” in the bath — and that the encounter was consensual. But Scarlett claims that Gaiman also assaulted her with “rough and degrading penetrative sexual acts” she hadn’t agreed to. When Scarlett attempted suicide, Gaiman’s response was to say that he was also suicidal. In May 2022, after her employment with the author had ceased, Scarlett signed an NDA with Gaiman which was backdated to her first day of work.

When I spoke to Scarlett last week, she told me how it felt impossible to not be impressed by Gaiman’s fame and status, while at the same time not feeling at all sexually attracted or drawn to him. “I’ve never read any of his books,” Scarlett tells me. “He just talked about himself all the time.”

For Scarlett, “Gaiman’s superfans somehow seem to think that they have personally been betrayed by the allegations because they see him as sharing their own tick-box ‘progressive’ values,” she told me. “It’s beyond belief for me that people just aren’t acknowledging that a man in his Sixties has admitted that he got into the bath with his 23-year-old employee within the first few hours that they met.”

Scarlett, as with the other women who have come forward, was vulnerable at the time she met Gaiman, and, as she describes it, “desperate for love”. “Pretending to myself I had fallen for him was a way to kind of trick myself to think that I had not been sexually exploited,” she said. 

Given the seriousness of the allegations made against such a famous author, you might have expected the Tortoise podcast to have been met with righteous anger. And it was. But not the sort that you might think. Despite the careful reporting — which includes regular reminders that Gaiman denies any wrongdoing whatsoever — many of his fans have expressed their outrage at the podcast, claiming that Johnson is a “Right-wing Terf” with an axe to grind. The podcast, they say, is an attempt by anti-trans activists to smear him. As Rachel Johnson tells me, “The trans activist lefties discrediting the podcast as ‘terf’ made by the sister of Boris is purest misogyny. It’s meticulously researched and it’s fair to a fault.”

Perhaps his impeccable Left liberal feminist credentials have confused people. A whole book has been written about how women-friendly Gaiman’s work is: Feminism in the Worlds of Neil Gaiman: Essays on the Comics, Poetry and Prose. The podcast also found two female advocates. One says she’s known Gaiman for 12 years, and that while she’s alive to his faults, doesn’t believe him capable of sexual misconduct. She says she would “go to the wall for him on this” and be “stunned if the allegations were true”. Yet the same friend also said that Gaiman has autism, suggesting that perhaps “some of his mistakes” may be explained by its contribution to what she called his “naivety”. 

That she talks about “mistakes” nods, perhaps, to the fact that these women were all in consensual relationships with Gaiman. But to claim that he was “naive” is to disregard the fact that the vast amount of sexual abuse takes place within consensual relationships. I have heard women who should know better describe the allegations against Gaiman as “not really abuse” because there was no force involved, and the women did engage in certain activity willingly. But each of the women who has come forward about Gaiman described instances of coercive control.

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At least one of the women that have made allegations against Gaiman has approached the police — but with limited success. In October 2022, Scarlett filed a complaint with New Zealand police. In response, Gaiman has claimed the police have not taken him up on his offer to assist the investigation, claiming this showed the complaint’s lack of substance. But officers said they had made a “number of attempts to speak to key people as part of this investigation and those efforts remain ongoing”.

How did the big corporations who profit from Gaiman’s work respond? While Disney and Netflix quietly paused their Gaiman adaptations, it took Amazon until last week to announce that filming of the final series of Good Omens had been halted due to the allegations. “I may be cynical,” Scarlett told me, “but I don’t imagine that Amazon or Disney have paused production because they altruistically care about allegations of abuse. Amazon and Disney have likely suspended production because they are a business, and the only thing that drives a business is cost. This is about cash and not care.”

As ever with allegations of a sexual nature, we have a “he said, she said” situation, complicated by highly asymmetric nature of the relationships, the vulnerability of the women and his claims of their “false memory syndrome”. And unless — or until — there is a criminal trial, there will be no resolution. 

As for Gaiman, he has said very little, only issuing a statement denying the allegations. The storyteller has fallen unusually silent. 

That might be an easy one for you to answer. But what about dinner four days from now, or six? The fact that many people would find that second question hard or even impossible might just tell us something about the way Britain will be changed by Covid-19.

When I started reporting on politics almost 20 years ago, Tesco and the people who shopped there every Saturday were pretty much the centre of the electoral universe. Tony Blair was almost supernaturally attuned to Tesco shoppers, their concerns about petrol prices and the rest. Tesco, driven by its big-box edge-of-town stores (which also sold petrol), was the company of the moment; even political journalists knew that one pound in every seven spent on British retail went to Tesco.

Then the financial crisis and competition in the market changed British grocers and the way we shop. People suddenly short of cash, or just worried about cash, become reluctant or unable to spend a big slice of their weekly disposable on one big shop on one day. Lidl and Aldi arrived, mostly in the centre of towns in small- and medium-sized stores, not in big boxes. Incumbent supermarkets, too, chased shoppers who wanted to shop more often, to spend smaller sums more frequently.

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Tesco tried to keep pace with consumers, with Tesco Metro, a shift that meant many things, including a reduction in staff numbers.

Essentially, Britain became a nation of just-in-time shoppers, making regular and even daily trips to the shops for that night’s dinner. A few years back, the Co-op found that 27% of us chose our evening meal on the day; only 9% of people in its survey planned their meals a week ahead.

Waitrose has also noted the death of the weekly shop​, observing that a staple of the high street is shrinking and maybe even disappearing:

“Just a few years ago, an average Waitrose would open with around 200 big trolleys and 150 shallow ‘daily shopper’ trolleys lined up outside. These days the tables have turned, with 250 shallow ‘daily shoppers’ and just 70 big trolleys needed.”

More recently, the aversion to the weekly shop and to preparing to feed ourselves has sparked a new trend in food retail: recipe boxes, where someone else plans and weighs and measures the components you need to prepare your evening meal — Hello Fresh, Gousto, Mindful Chef.

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Not only do we no longer want to fill our cupboards with food, we can’t be bothered to measure and weigh the stuff either.

This shift surely informs Britain’s response to the coronavirus emergency, and will shape the way that emergency changes us. When the crisis really hit, how many people didn’t have enough food in the fridge or cans in the cupboard to last out the 14-day isolation period Boris Johnson asked of any household with a symptomatic resident?

To anyone — and yes, the younger you are, the more likely this is to be true — who relies on that daily trip to the shop, perhaps on the way home from work, the idea of spending two weeks cut off and relying on the kindness of friends is almost inevitably daunting, even frightening.

Some might shrug and assume that online-ordered supermarket fare will arrive from a truck as ever. But the reality of two-week-long waits for a delivery slot will come as another reminder of the simple and, at times like this, terrifying fragility of modern lives predicated on just-in-time and on-demand services.

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This isn’t (just) about brittle urban millennials who won’t cope if Amazon Prime can’t get them their plant-based dinner in the next three hours. In the past week, I’ve heard two friends, middle-aged London professionals, announce that they’re buying cars for the first time. Having relied on shops walking distance away and public transport, both have abruptly decided they need the ability to drive themselves and their families to, well, anywhere else if they needed to. Maybe all that stuff that Marie Kondo persuaded us to get rid of had uses — psychological and practical — after all.

The coronovirus has reminded such people of that fragility, the feeling of security that some of us have traded away for a convenience lifestyle. How else to explain panic-buying toilet paper and dry pasta? Narrowly speaking, such actions can be rational, but a better question to ask is more fundamental: why are they necessary?

Relying on just-in-time delivery along global supply-chains to feed and clothe and support us by buying little and often is a little bit like flying. It’s a huge source of freedom and progress, but also a risk to which we deliberately blind ourselves. For many people, the only way to be comfortable with sitting in a metal box full of highly-flammable fuel 30,000 feet above the earth is not to think about the incredible number of things that have to go exactly right to make it possible — and so about the things that could go wrong.

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This, of course, is speculation, but I think the psychological impact of our empty cupboards at a time of national trauma could just be a counterweight to the widely-observed idea that the virus will renew faith in the state. I think we may well emerge from this horror with a newfound tendency towards household resilience, to the minor but important feeling of self-sufficiency, of security, that comes with a cupboard full of food. Do not be surprised if the coronavirus eventually brings the shopping trolley trundling back into the heart of our national life.

Meanwhile, when (if) we ever get back to talking seriously about Britain’s post-EU political economy, I wonder if British farmers will find it just a little bit easier to see off the “Singapore” Brexiteers who wonder if we couldn’t do without them and just import more of what we eat. Of course we could, but could we ever feel comfortable doing so? I’d bet on shorter, stronger supply chains coming into fashion on the other side of the emergency.

And for Ms Kondo, perhaps a well-stocked house does not always spark joy but it does come in handy at times like these. Just as there are no atheists in a foxhole, there are no minimalists in a time of plague.