Get used to people coughing conspiracy theories all over you

day, as the autumn dusk falls, she walks her two little dogs down my street.

Nothing stops her gentle wandering. Not wind, not the gathering gloom, not lockdown regulations.

She remains as serenely unconcerned and comfortably oblivious as police minister Bheki Cele attending a lecture about leadership in a modern democracy.

Her almost supernatural calm has fascinated me for weeks.

She has shared my street with a handful of regulation-busting walkers, but all of them have made some small concession to current events, their apparent nonchalance betrayed by a slightly hurried gait or hushed conversation.

Not her. She wears no mask and hurries nowhere.

Once, an ADT van drove slowly past and she popped a hoodie over her head, but given that she didn’t change course or stop, it’s possible she’d just realised that her ears were cold.

Covid-19 and the restrictions it has placed on our lives seem as distant to her as rumours from another century.

She meanders along as if the virus and the world it has created simply do not exist. Recently, I discovered why. She had paused to talk to a neighbour, but now her dogs were trundling off ahead of her and so she had begun to follow them, while still talking, her voice growing louder and louder as her dogs led her further away.

Which is how I heard what I heard.

The virus, she yelled, had been created in a laboratory in China, which had been paid for by “the French”.

She knew this, she explained, because she avoided the “big news” and only got her information from “the underground online”.

I don’t know what “the underground online” is, but my best guess is that it’s what people who still have Hotmail accounts call Facebook.

I’m also not sure why, given she believes the French are paying viruses, people she ’to s so cook calm. up sinister

Perhaps she thinks that one can develop immunity from French viruses by eating lots of crème brûlée or watching fourhour films in which estranged lovers write letters to each other about how much they resent the existence of consciousness.

I do know, however, that she is not alone on whichever planet she inhabits.

Last week, a Yahoo News/YouGov poll asked American respondents to rate as true, false or not sure the statement that “Bill Gates wants to use a mass vaccination campaign against Covid-19 to implant microchips in people that would be used to track people with a digital ID”.

Among respondents who watch Fox News, 50% insisted it was true. Forty-four percent of Republicans and people who voted for President Donald Trump also gave it the stamp of approval.

And, just to prove there’s still some common ground in US politics, almost 20% of Democrats also insisted this hallucinatory codswallop was true.

Meanwhile, across the pond, the University of Oxford’s Coronavirus Explanations, Attitudes and Narrative Survey has found that almost one in five of the UK citizens it polled agree to some extent with the claim that “Jews have created the virus to collapse the economy for financial gain”.

(An almost identical proportion also agrees to a greater or lesser extent with the claim that “Muslims are spreading the virus as an attack on Western values”, suggesting the British bigots can, at the very least, imagine a world in which Tehran and Tel Aviv can put aside their differences long enough to obliterate Slough.)

For the past eight weeks, my dog-walker and her spiritual kin have been abstract ideas; something belonging in surveys or newspaper columns, or generalised discussions about How Things Are.

But on Monday, as more of us begin to return to the world, they become part of the new human landscape.

And as we gingerly explore this new world, we will have to remember that it is haunted — and touched and coughed on and licked — by a minority of people who have simply decided to ignore certain basic realities, starting with the germ theory of disease.

For the most part, living in a democracy means we have a choice whether to allow someone’s belief system to radically change our lives. But viruses aren’t interested in our choices and the world we are now entering is one in which another person’s fact-resistant world view can be coughed directly into our bodies.

Increasingly, we will be moving through a place in which wilful ignorance and childlike solipsism has been smeared across shared spaces.

We can’t hide forever. We have to return to the world and, like someone learning to use an injured limb, figure out new, slightly awkward ways of doing the things we used to take for granted. We need each other.

But I hope you’ll forgive me if, until I know you better, I need you from a safe distance.

We are entering a world in which wilful ignorance and childlike solipsism will be smeared across shared spaces