Rory Sutherland

In the past 30 years, I have driven about 8,000 miles in France in right-hand-drive cars. And I would be lying if I denied that one or two of those miles hadn’t been driven on the left-hand side of the road. This scared the life out of me. One second’s inattention elevated my risk of dying in a gruesome accident to levels previously experienced only by 1950s racing drivers or country and western singers. Yet driving on the other side of the road is surprisingly easy — provided you start out on the other side of the road. The error occurs in the first minute of driving: setting off at dawn on an empty road, or when befuddled after stopping at a petrol station, where normal lane rules don’t apply.

When I first heard Abba’s magnificent 1982 swansong ‘The Day Before You Came’, I’d never come across the Americanised use of the verb ‘make’, meaning ‘reach’. So the line ‘I must have made my desk around a quarter after nine’ baffled me. Given the Swedish obsession with self-assembly furniture, I even wondered whether Björn was using the word conventionally, and Ms Fältskog was in fact kneeling on the floor aligning Tab A with Groove C, while looking for the elusive Allen key with which to attach the castors.

From time to time, every industry must adapt to some inconvenient technological advance. Suddenly, some part of what you offer can be reproduced or distributed in a new form. The temptation is to ignore the issue and hope it goes away. But if you don’t act, eventually some competitor, existing or new, surely will. Reinvention is a painful process. Hollywood’s reaction to the advent of television followed the five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. The same emotions played out in the response of the music industry to the arrival of digital downloads and streaming. Churches will have noticed that online congregations are larger than physical ones In retrospect, some of this looks absurd.

Hours of googling have left me unable to find the essay on domestic horticulture, written by a Victorian aristocrat, which contains the legendary sentence: ‘Any garden, of whatever size, should contain at least three acres of mature woodland.’ And though that seems a high bar to set, in times like this, millions of Brits have suddenly discovered that nothing beats a bit of outdoor space. Indeed, unless you are Dennis Nilsen, there’s never been a worse time to buy a top-floor flat. So to help remote workers restock your vitamin D, here’s some gadgetry which can get you out of the spare bedroom and into the sunshine. Never, ever reveal that self-isolation is enjoyable.

The Tesla Model 3 is an astounding achievement, but one thing baffles me: why do electric cars lack even the most basic tea-making equipment? I can’t be the only Briton to wonder why you would travel around on top of a 75kwh, 360v lithium-ion battery without having the facility to plug in a kettle. Or indeed power an off-the-grid shack for a few days. I have become oddly obsessed with questions like this because of the many lockdown hours I have spent watching bizarre YouTube videos. One remarkable series concerns the tiny house movement, where people seek to simplify and declutter their lives by moving into little wooden huts.

For all the abuse heaped on the Behavioural Insights Team early in the crisis, let’s not forget that the only three immediate solutions proposed by the combined ranks of the scientific establishment were, um, behavioural. People were encouraged to wash their hands with soap for 20 seconds, to stay home where possible and to keep two metres away from those outside their household. And we adopted this advice in our millions, long before any mandate had been issued. It would be wrong, when modelling the spread of this disease, to overlook the effect of voluntary preemptive action. My last visit to London was on 12 March, 11 days before we were made to stay indoors. It was already a ghost town. Some elderly relatives had been self-isolating from the beginning of the month.

One of the few benefits to emerge from this pandemic is that the world’s population has been given a crash course in complexity. If nothing else, many people may have learned why it makes sense to plot infection rates on a logarithmic scale, and a few may even have learned to use the word ‘exponentially’ in its true sense, rather than as a synonym for ‘a lot’. I hope this proves an enduring lesson. Because, in truth, very little in life can be understood properly without first understanding such concepts, since barely anything involving humanity changes in a linear way.

In Mr Alton’s absence, I thought readers might want a column about sport. The problem is that I’m largely indifferent to most sports. But I will berate the All England Club for cancelling the Wimbledon Championship. Fair enough, I can see that tennis might be a problem what with all the loud, virus-spreading grunting, but I think it’s time we reminded them they are the All England Lawn Tennis and Croquet Club. Shockingly, last time I went there on a corporate jag, I could see no evidence of the superior game being played. Yet croquet is a game where social distancing poses no problems.

The brother of a friend in Durban was once given a generous donation by a wealthy aunt. ‘I hate to see you just hanging around indoors all day. Buy an old Land Rover. Go and see the real Africa.’ The brother took the money but bought an enormous television instead. When my friend visited, he found him watching a wildlife documentary in glorious high-definition Technicolor. ‘Why would I want to go and see Africa when I can bring Africa in here?’ he explained. I have a certain sympathy for this stoner approach to life. The ability to travel within your own mind seems to be a great gift — something to be cultivated. Instead we disparage it with terms such as ‘couch potato’. Yet it is really a mark of superior intelligence.

The newspapers are full of stories about how small groups of engineers from Formula 1 teams have been able to design, prototype and manufacture essential health equipment incredibly quickly. So why aren’t organisations allowed to perform such super-human feats of brilliance the rest of the time? Or to put it another way, why is it that companies and governments always call on McKinsey when they could call on McLaren? Why is it that companies and governments always call on McKinsey when they could call on McLaren? One obstacle might be the boredom threshold. If you are used to a high-octane life on the Grand Prix circuit, a three-hour meeting with healthcare regulators might leave you wanting to bite your arm off.

Once we’ve flattened the curve of infection with mass self-isolation, the next debate will concern how to soften the restrictions on movement and work without causing a second wave of the pandemic. Behavioural science, abused as it has been to date, may be useful in formulating the new rules for social behaviour. That’s because it is no good simply to come up with rules which are optimal in epidemiological terms: such rules might well be too complicated for people to follow, and impossible to encode in habits or social norms. Instead you need cautious rules-of-thumb which are both simple and visible. For rules to work, it helps if it is immediately apparent when someone is breaking them.

Compared with every other household chore, progress in bum-wiping has been glacially slow. It’s only in living memory that schools and institutions stopped using something called Izal, a box of medicated toilet wipes similar in texture to greaseproof paper, and thus spectacularly ill-suited to its purpose. It was characteristic of the Britain of my childhood, where things were made gratuitously unpleasant on purpose, since to do anything nice was seen as effeminate. The Muslim world is far ahead of us here. In most Islamic countries a toilet cubicle comes with a bum gun — a kind of handheld spray. Yet in the supposedly enlightened Anglophone world we think dry paper is fine.

Next time there is a highly deserved round of public applause for NHS workers, do add one additional clap for the tele-communications industry for — so far — keeping the show on the road. High-speed broadband, for those lucky enough to have it, has made self-isolation more tolerable, and may have significantly reduced the impact of the disease in Britain. I say this because, for several weeks before it became mandatory to stay indoors, a large number of people did so voluntarily. That includes me. Ever since my grandfather contracted jaundice and so avoided landing at Suvla Bay in Gallipoli, there has been a proud family tradition of calling in sick at the first sign of a sniffle.