The priest said it would be a short service because he wanted to make an important announcement.

After rushing through the Mass so quickly he missed out most of the good bits, he solemnly declared the following: he urgently needed volunteers to say prayers over the bodies.

The builder boyfriend agrees with me, but it is possible that the BB and I have gone mad together

The number of funerals in this small corner of West Cork has now got to the point where one priest cannot handle the arrival of the coffins at the funeral home opposite the church, where, in Irish tradition, the business of praying begins.

He said they also needed volunteers to do the same in the next village. He sounded like he was at his wits’ end. He said that if no one came forward he would take suggestions for people who would be good at it, then approach them himself to talk them into it.

I nudged the builder boyfriend sitting next to me, and he pulled a face.

The next day I asked a friend to get me a certain MP’s phone number and after a while the friend sent me a cryptic message back. ‘He’s gone off reservation.’ I typed the phrase into a search engine, because what does ‘off reservation’ even mean now, given that one is probably not allowed to say it for fear of offending Native Americans?

Dictionary definition: entering hostile territory without orders (in military or political terms) or deviating from the norm.

I would say that’s a good thing. It means this MP is being brave and thinking for himself. It sounds to me like he’s making a lot of noise about excess death figures that no one wants to listen to. But I do.

When you are in a minority widely condemned as mad on a major issue, when it feels like all the evidence is so clear but so ignored, there is always the nagging worry of having lost the plot. The builder boyfriend agrees with me, but it is possible that the BB and I have gone mad together.

There’s a lady I met who runs a coffee shop who spoke to me about it in hushed tones, then contacted me to invite me to a meeting at which mysterious people like me and her were going to gather, when the shop was closed. My hairdresser agrees, whispering about it monosyllabically as she’s doing my highlights, looking from left to right with anxious eyes.

I go to see a private GP who shakes his head when I ask him about it and who has led me to believe he might concur, but he can’t say so out loud or he’ll lose his licence.

When this first started, I felt sure I would soon be out of the minority and into the mainstream. But I am starting to worry that it will always be just me, a doctor who’s about to be struck off, the exiled on YouTube, some people who meet in a coffee shop when the closed sign is on the door, and an MP who’s being described as ‘off reservation’.

I found a therapist in the next village doing cognitive behavioural malarkey but I really don’t want to have someone tinker about with the way I think.

I was hoping for more of a sympathetic listener who will let me offload. I fancy that if I talk about my deepest fears, they might disappear, having just been an illusion. A good shrink might sift through a morass of paranoia and spot my bloomer.

In my twenties I frequented a psychotherapist who helped me immensely by pointing out that it maybe wasn’t a great idea to drink two to three bottles of wine a night. I resisted this suggestion for a lot longer than I should have made my budget stretch to and it was a good year later – at £70 a session once a week, nearly £4,000 – that I checked into a place that cost a further £5,000 (which is a fraction of what it would cost now). I haven’t had a drink since. If you consider what wine costs, the £9,000 original outlay has saved me many tens of thousands of pounds.

Twenty-three years on, my feeling is that was a very good shrink offering excellent value for money.

I don’t think there was then or is now anything hugely wrong with the workings of my brainbox, aside from a propensity to catastrophise, and that has been turbo-charged since lockdown.

The old habit of panicking about the state of the world is upon me. So much so that the other day, I entertained the thought of a cork going pop because the din of all that worrying was so hideous I would have done anything to make it stop.

And once it stopped, I could have trotted safely back inside the reservation.