Are soothing words what you want to hear/ read from your professional advisors right now? I’m inclined to react by suggesting that, if anyone tells you that you shouldn’t panic, the first thing you do is to panic. A bit like “this is your pilot, speaking to you from outside the plane”.

We have had plenty to panic about it if we want to in South Africa for 50 years or more. There were the Sunday lunch parties regularly hosted by Alessandra’s family in the 1970s and 1980s with a group of well-connected guests who repeated that the country had five years before the inevitable revolution. A rolling five years with a revolution which has never (not yet!) taken place.

Bringing you right up to date, COVID-19 is very new to South Africa, we have a very old friend of Alessandra and her daughter in isolation in a less than attractive hospital, having been exposed to the virus last Monday (March 2).

So, what are we doing? We are buying (but not hoarding) supplies of relevant materials. We are briefing and guiding domestic employees as well as family members. We are doing our best to stop doing what we all normally and automatically do, like touching our faces.It’s very hard to change one’s habits.

In short, we are behaving micro, doing the things we can control and influence personally, nothing more, though we still sit on our reservations for a trip to Venice followed by a cruise, Venice to Venice, plus nearly three weeks en famille in Lombardy!

If this trip takes place, much will have to improve. We are not optimistic but we are not panicking.