There’s only one person who’ll be genuinely pleased with the Intelligence and Security Committee’s Russia report, finally revealed on Tuesday, and that’s Vladimir Putin. Russia emerges as an amorphous and formidable enemy — all the more so because the inconclusive and much-redacted report contains next to no substantiated allegations. Instead Russia appears as a phantom, unknowable menace, and this will spawn a thousand conspiracy theories far more corrosive and confusing to our politics than any Moscow-generated Twitter-storm or document leak.

Any day now I shall be frogmarched, or at least very firmly escorted, out of a blood donor centre in London. I know this is going to happen because I made the appointment weeks ago and I intend to keep it. But when I signed up to donate my pint of blood to the public good, I was not required to wear a muzzle during my donation. Now I am. I do not intend to do so. I find the idea of donning one of these face-nappies physically repulsive, and dislike the mouthless, submissive appearance they create in all their wearers.

Just before lockdown began, Matt Hancock and Dr Jenny Harries presented the nation’s daters with a stark dilemma. Non-cohabiting couples, they advised, should either move in together for the duration or stay physically apart. Couples who barely knew each other’s surnames were catapulted into levels of intimacy that would normally have evolved over years and the enforced lovebirds were soon living like old-style pensioners, spending every moment in each other’s company, arguing over hand sanitiser brands and giving one another dodgy haircuts.

Not since the befuddled twilight of George III has a monarch been confined to Windsor Castle for such a duration. Unlike her great-great-great-great grandfather, however, the Queen has been in full command of everything. Now Balmoral beckons. Last year’s Deeside retreat was interrupted by the great prorogation crisis (how swiftly that episode has been relegated from constitutional apocalypse to half-remembered footnote).