A year on from the first coronavirus lockdown, who is still hoarding tomatoes and toilet paper?

With the Andrex puppy nowhere to be seen, Will Gore recalls empty supermarket shelves with a shiver

A year ago it could be difficult to buy either of these everyday items (Getty)

Bog roll. True, there are other things too that spring to mind when I think back to the onset of the first lockdown a year ago. There was the genuine fear of catching coronavirus; the sense of loss at the prospect of not seeing friends and family; and there was the horror at the thought of extended home-schooling. If I’m brutally honest, there was also a little glimmer of exhilaration at the extraordinary nature of global events – a product of years spent in a newsroom, I expect.

Ultimately though, it is the anxiety over the chronic shortage of loo paper that nags away most clearly when I recall those strange early days of the pandemic. If you weren’t anxious about it, then you were probably the source of the problem.

I cannot, I confess, claim total innocence in the panic-buying stakes. I never went mad, but I certainly bought more tins of soup and chickpeas than I would have done in normal times; and it’s probably true that we didn’t need to maintain a perpetual, three-packet stash of red lentils. As for the random tin of peaches I picked up 12 months ago, well, at least it won’t go off any time soon.