AS was widely circulated on Monday, the Goffs teams, both in Ireland and the UK have implemented a work-at-home policy for the time being. As many families are finding, this is a challenging discipline – children are at home, and while my wife may have married me “for richer and for poorer”, it is becoming clear that she had not envisaged doing so “for lunch”.

I am not sure how well I am performing – I even found myself fascinated by a television advertisement for a gadget that sucks air out of plastic sacks packed with clothes, increasing suitcase capacity by extraordinary margins. Not a good sign – that was only on Wednesday and my head was being turned by daytime online shopping. I even started a beard growing competition with a stranded colleague which, unlike most things, is actually going quite well. Indeed there has been more growth in two days on the southern end of my head than on its northern regions for two years.