In the decades before World War One, it was war. After that, it was fear of another war. After that, in the fifties and sixties, and for a long time after that, it was nuclear war. Now, it's biological warfare.

But it's needless. After the Second World War all these global nightmares stopped happening. Now we have to suffer through more localised, specialised nightmares.

But even so, right now, this worry about swine flu? It's all crap. We will go through life dully dreading the day we're infected, but it will never come, and when we look back it will be just one more thing that didn't happen.