Swine flu made us feel we were under house arrest

At the beginning of July I am usually to be found sipping a cold pilsner between watching films at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival near Prague.

A little later last week I should have been sitting down with John Malkovich to find out why he has given up films and gone back to the theatre. Instead, I was stuck at home in Brighton (sorry, John), forbidden to leave the house and obliged, should anyone come to the door, to don a rectangular yellow mask and shoo them politely away. Welcome to the wonderful world of swine flu.

It all started the weekend before last when my 21-year-old daughter Saskia returned from her final year at Warwick University complaining of a sore throat, a cough, fever and an aching back. Within hours, her boyfriend Matt was asking where we keep the paracetamol. When a call from a former flatmate revealed that she had been diagnosed with swine flu, alarm bells began to ring. We started to feel like characters in a horror film, suspecting that there was an alien in the airing cupboard, but too embarrassed - or too British - to tell anyone.

Fortunately, my wife, Jo, who is not British, took matters in hand and picked up the phone. She started with the special Swine Flu Helpline but, it being a mere six weeks since a pandemic was officially confirmed, the Department of Health hasn't quite got around to setting one up yet. A recorded announcement suggests you request a leaflet through the post - but weren't we all supposed to get one of those months ago? Still, we were not entirely sure that this was the best way of reacting to the arrival of a global pandemic chez Roddick. So we tried NHS Direct.

Like all such initiatives, this turned out to be inaccurately named. Direct it ain't. First you consult the website, which lists symptoms. Like most people reading a list of symptoms, Jo promptly recognised all of them and called the 24-hour helpline. Eventually, she got to talk to a receptionist who asked further questions designed to find out whether she was an alarmist, a troublemaker or calling on behalf of a genuinely sick person.

This hurdle cleared, she got to talk to a nurse, who was also on malingerer-alert, but using more obviously medical terminology. She eventually suggested we call our GP, where the receptionist went through the checklist again. The main advantage of all this was that, by the time she finally got to talk to the GP, Jo had got the information down to a succinct, 30-second narrative. Clearly impressed, the GP was on the doorstep within half an hour. That was when things started getting seriously weird.

Now I should make it clear I am aware that swine flu (or the H1N1 virus, to give it its proper name) is serious. Not only do those things like rubbery Second World War anti-submarine mines that float around the TV screen every time there is a news item about it look nasty: they have, in a small number of cases (usually where there were other illnesses involved), proved fatal. But my daughter has felt more ill when she had ear infections as a child. What is more, the disease may be highly contagious but my wife and I have been in close proximity to it for more than a week without so much as a sniffle.

But the Department of Health-mandated procedure suggests a whole different ballgame. The protective plastic apron and full face-mask worn by the GP when she arrived made us feel like characters in a Quatermass episode.

Over the next couple of days, I learned a number of things. First, we are all over-reacting - even the GP, off the record, admitted as much. Second, almost everyone in the UK to whom I have spoken on the phone seems to know someone with the virus. I calculate the odds against this, if the official 7,000 cases claim is correct, at around 500-1. People abroad, on the other hand, reacted with shock when I mentioned swine flu, as though I had announced that Michael Jackson was not only alive but staying in the spare room.

It might have been more fun if he was: house arrest is a major problem for a film critic, and Karlovy Vary has not been the week's only cancellation. What's more, having no one in the house who is allowed to go out is a lot different to staying in bed being looked after for a couple of days.

When you are trying to make a list for someone outside the immediate family to do the shopping, you realise your supermarket decision-making is based more on recognising the colour of the packet and its rough location on the shelf than on what it says on the tin. It's hard to explain this to a helpful neighbour who has dared to confront our masked selves with a box full of almost-right food.

I wondered whether this was not all part of nature's way of preparing me for being old, when not being able to do my own shopping - along with all the other seventh-age symptoms so helpfully highlighted by Shakespeare - will become the norm. Is it why old people eat so many bananas?

Indoors, the mask was comic; outside, it took on altogether different connotations. Making a run for the postbox on the corner (life may have been suspended, but credit card deadlines were not) I was viewed with suspicion, not to say hostility. I felt like pointing out that, if I was indeed a suicide bomber, protecting those around me from my germs would probably come low on my list of priorities. But then, no one would be able to understand this through the mask.

The mask did, however, have a remarkable deterrent effect on casual callers - and a few others besides. On Day Two the window-cleaner arrived but quickly left again when he saw the masks. This was not all bad. We inherited him 13 years ago from the house's previous owners, since when he has turned up once a fortnight, charging £11, then £12, and now £15 for wiping a damp shammy across the windows. That's £15 saved. Now, if we could only go out and spend it

Scanning the TV schedules for light relief, I decided on That Mitchell and Webb Look and was treated to a sketch about a post-apocalyptic quiz show that made constant ominous references to "The Event" and kept flashing up the catchphrase "Stay Indoors!" My, how I laughed.

We could have watched a DVD, if the DVD player had not celebrated Day One of our "event" by declining to play. Ah, I thought, this time I won't just buy one from Amazon, I'll go down to the shop and get one that does exactly what I want it to do and comes with the number of someone I can talk to when it doesn't. Oh no, wait a minute ... I can't.

In the end, it was the absurdity of the situation that lasted longer than the actual symptoms being experienced by my daughter and her boyfriend, which had pretty much vanished by Day Three, leaving us with two more days of house arrest to endure. Swine flu: the very name is absurd (who knew how many pig jokes were out there?). Grippe porcine, grippa porcina and Schweineinfluenza are not much better.

And what can you expect from something called Tamiflu - it sounds like a song from a Sixties beach-bimbo movie. Still, Saskia and Matt, too young for such films, had been taking it anyway.

There was one consolation, as evidenced by the seriously (and sweetly) concerned emails I got from people I would have met in Karlovy Vary: we have lived through our own little moment of history.

Or at least we had until Thursday night, when the Government suddenly announced it was throwing in the towel (not to mention the mask) - there may be 100,000 new cases a day by mid-August but everyone can just go around infecting one another. No more school closures (which should make a big difference in mid-August). I felt like going out and infecting someone just for the hell of it.

Oh, a footnote: on Day Five, Saskia and Matt celebrated the end of their quarantine by going to the beach. After five minutes in the sea, Matt stepped on a weever fish - a small, bad-tempered creature whose idea of a joke is to burrow into the sand and wait for someone to step on it. His foot, then his leg, swelled up and the pain was intense. Dangerous place to be, Brighton in the summertime.