MONDAY, MAY 11
‘Shall I cut your hair?’ asked Celia, eyeing my increasingly overgrown lockdown locks.
‘Have you ever done it before?’ I replied nervously.
Piers Morgan put his faith in wife Celia Walden by reluctantly agreeing to let her cut his hair as they self-quarantine at their London home
‘No, but I’ve watched a YouTube tutorial,’ she replied, brandishing the scissors like a mad professor about to conduct an evil laboratory experiment.
Oh God…
For the next 20 minutes, she gouged, slashed and razored my scalp in what I can only equate to living through my own autopsy – punctuating her efforts with cries of ‘OOPS!’, ‘Oh dear’ and a particularly worrying ‘Damn, slipped – sorry!’
But we got through it, though I ended up looking like Tintin on a bad tuft day.
‘I never thought cutting a man’s hair could be so enjoyable!’ Celia exclaimed delightedly afterwards.
This said everything about how mundane our Covid-controlled lives have now all become – and how important it is to celebrate little moments of unexpected joy where possible.
For my eldest son Spencer, 26, such moments are proving harder to find.
‘Sat in the bath at 2pm on a Monday watching an old episode of Geordie Shore,’ he texted. ‘I’ve hit rock bottom.’
FRIDAY, MAY 15
My daughter Elise, eight, brought me her carefully hand-drawn ‘coronavirus bubble’ this morning, and I was dismayed to learn I hadn’t made the cut of the ten people she wanted to be socially cocooned with should the Government authorise it.
‘I see too much of you at the moment,’ she explained, witheringly.
It made me think who would make my own ‘bubble’ and why.
To avoid upsetting family members and village mates in the way I myself had just been so cruelly snubbed, I limited my selection process to well-known names.
1. Susanna Reid. I’ll have to include my Good Morning Britain TV wife, or it will cause too much on-screen marital tension. And anyway, every bubble needs a headmistress to keep order. Susanna is calm, well-organised, and a very strict rule-observer.
2. Amanda Holden. She’d lift my flagging spirits with boundless energy and enthusiasm, a smattering of filthy jokes – accompanied by even filthier cackles – and the odd bonkers coronavirus conspiracy theory.
3. Gary Lineker. We’re allowed to play sport with one non-household member, so I’d go for Jugs just so I could stick him in goal and show him what a real striker is like.
4. Matt Hancock. I’ve got to have a Government Minister to berate, and the Health Secretary’s penchant for smug, eye-rolling exasperation makes him a preferred option.
5. Katherine Jenkins. Just as Vera Lynn rallied morale in the Second World War, so Jenko could rally me with her dulcet tones.
6. James Blunt. But only if he promises NOT to try to rally me with his dulcet tones and sticks to his very funny, self-deprecating, celebrity-mocking schtick.
7. Jeremy Bowen. I’d need a fearless war correspondent to offer perspective over fine red wine, someone who’s survived many war zones – in which he’s been shelled and shot in the head – but never loses his joie de vivre.
8. Dame Joan Collins. We all require a major dose of indomitable spirit right now and nobody personifies that more than the great Dame, who’s still fuming from me cancelling our final dinner just before lockdown because I didn’t want to risk her life. ‘I’ll last a lot longer than you!’ she snapped, probably correctly.
9. Ricky Gervais. I crave a good laugh in this crisis, preferably of the dark, savage, inappropriate and unutterably tasteless variety. Nobody does that better than Mr Gervais.
10. Colonel Tom Moore. We could do keep-fit laps of my garden chatting about cricket (our favourite sport) over pots of Yorkshire Gold (our favourite tea), and it would be comforting to have someone tell me every time things look bleak: ‘Piers, tomorrow will be a good day.’
SATURDAY, MAY 16
During lockdown, I’ve been watching more escapism TV than usual including Celebrity SAS: Who Dares Wins, which pits Special Forces hardmen led by Ant Middleton against egotistical prima donna stars.
But today, one of those hardmen, former SBS warrior Ollie Ollerton, said he doesn’t want me as a contestant on the show (I’ve never asked to be on it…) because I’m apparently not tough enough.
‘Everyone says Piers Morgan [would be a good recruit],’ he sneered to The Sun, ‘but he’d be gone in the first ten minutes.’ Then he dramatically downgraded my survivability timeline: ‘Piers wouldn’t last two seconds… he is not, you know, he just wouldn’t.’
Sorry?
Given many of my family have been in the Armed Forces, including my brother Jeremy who is still serving as a colonel, I take exception to this unsubstantiated smear.
I continued reading Mr Ollerton’s interview and discovered he’s a ‘staunch vegan’, which immediately gives me a physical advantage.
Then I learned he was once attacked by a crazed circus chimpanzee that ripped lumps of flesh out of him ‘like a dog with a rag doll’, instilled ‘pure, blind panic’ and left him with wounds that resembled a ‘badly packed kebab’.
‘It was the most horrendous moment of my life,’ he wailed.
If the kale-munching quinoa-guzzler persists in publicly taunting me like this, he may find that it was in fact the second most horrendous.
MONDAY, MAY 18
It’s now the 20th day of the Government’s boycott of GMB after they took umbrage at being asked tough questions over terrible decisions that I believe cost thousands of lives.
It’s pathetically gutless and a dereliction of ministerial duty to be accountable to the electorate.
It’s also breathtakingly hypocritical.
Aside from the fact that Boris Johnson used to be a journalist who banged on ad nauseam about the vital importance of freedom of speech, the man behind the ban is No 10 Director of Communications Lee Cain, who previously worked for the Daily Mirror, where he used to dress up as a giant yellow chicken and harangue Conservative politicians in the street for avoiding TV debates.
Once a chicken, always a chicken.