Coronavirus: What if this had happened in 2005?

We are living through the most disruptive period in our nation's history since the end of the war.

I just about remember seeing the newsflash about President Kennedy being shot. The fall of the Berlin wall and 9/11 are seared in my memory. But nothing compares to this pandemic in terms of the impact on everyday life.

But as I spend my day holding video-conferencing sessions with colleagues, FaceTiming my son and granddaughter stuck in a flat across London, and updating my various social networks, one thing strikes me: what if this had happened in 2005, just before the smartphone era began?

Many of the digital tools we are using to keep connected, fed and sane either did not exist back then or were available to only a few.

Facebook was one year old, but was still an American college phenomenon, only arriving at UK universities in the autumn of that year.

Neither Instagram or WhatsApp had been thought of. And talk of "social media" would have drawn puzzled looks, even though many people were rediscovering old school friends via Friends Reunited, which was bought by ITV in 2005.

YouTube was born that year, Twitter would come along the following year, and it was not until 2007 that Apple launched the iPhone.