Toilet roll has become the new Lamborghini, everybody wants them

‘People are looking at us,’ I say through teeth gritted with the effort of keeping the 64-pack aloft. Holly Baxter and her fiance venture out of their flat in search of the Holy Grail: toilet roll

Roll up, roll up: toilet paper on sale in Manhattan, as panic buying hits New York (Reuters)

We’re on our third week of quarantine in New York, and things are starting to get weird. Central Park has a field hospital in it; an army boat is floating off Manhattan island with 1,000 beds; NYPD cars follow you round the running track at the local park and blast you with a megaphone if you come too close to someone else; and, like the rest of the world, our area has become obsessed with stockpiling toilet paper.

My fiance and I went out today to add to our modest supplies, balaclavas over our faces (mine is bright pink), gloves on our hands and baggy sweatpants – the uniform of post-apocalyptic working-from-home times – on our lower halves. We had gotten down to our last roll of toilet paper and we were ready to fight to replenish it.

As soon as we reached the local grocery store, we split up to search the shelves. I went to the place I’d last found a solitary packet of kitchen roll and, lo and behold, at the end of one shelf was the holy grail. The only problem was that the holy grail came in the shape of a 64-pack. It was almost unfathomably large.