Dame Judi's finest role breaks the gloom

I see that Coronavirus will close Glastonbury this year. Which is odd because I've never heard anything they have recorded.

It will be a shame to see Glasto and indeed all those summer festivals not go ahead. It always brightens my day to see pictures of young people with rucksacks, carrying the remnants of tents and looking like they have been on an extreme mud challenge in a hippo's zoo pen.

The same can be said of those images from Ladies' Day at Aintree. There they are in all their finery, having been up since 4am attending to the warpaint and sharpening their stilettos, only to end up, legs akimbo, hat askew, in a bush after several too many Proseccos. And only 11am. Ah, the sights of spring and summer.

But fear not, we will soon have Bono playing a song for Italy to help coronavirus victims. Have those poor Italians not suffered enough?

It is not all bad news, though, as Eurovision will not be Boom Bang a Banging in our living rooms this year, and, as an added bonus, it's one less dose of Graham Norton saying, 'United Kingdom, Nil Points'.

The Grand National is not the only big event we will miss this year, with Euro 2020 having morphed into Euro 2021. Unfortunately, it does mean that several Match of the Day-sized voids will be filled with a complete box set of Mrs Brown's Boys and probably the Derry Girls. (It's just a united Ireland way of getting us back for Brexit).

The cancellations have been strangely egalitarian, though. On the day we learned that EastEnders filming was being halted, it was revealed that Princess Beatrice was putting back her May 29 wedding.

Which is just as well because the vision of her dad giving her away would have really topped off a rubbish year. Perhaps he will have second thoughts and step aside for someone more palatable, like Nasty Nick Cotton or Phil Mitchell when it eventually happens.

And given the mood of the country, perhaps suspending filming of Casualty wasn't a bad call, either.

These are strange times indeed. We can of course be confident that our leaders will steer us through these troubled waters (except perhaps the one who has an unhealthy and unfulfilled obsession with bridges) in an unflinchingly entertaining way.

Our frazzled, perspiring leader will doubtless be clinging to small mercies, such as while all this is going on, at least everybody has forgotten about the Russia Report, Jennifer Arcuri and who paid for his Caribbean holiday. Oh and how many McDonald's he'll be visiting on Father's Day morning.

MInd you, I now even have doubts (*irony alert) about the orangey one, who has actually said of the crisis: "People are dying that have never died before".

Never let it be said the man is a genius - come to think of it, I am certain I have never seen the words 'Trump' and 'genius' in the same sentence, or indeed the same hemisphere unless it is from his own lips.

The upside is that both leaders have taken the social distancing call to heart. You could argue that they have gone too far, in fact, and both distanced themselves from reality.

You have to feel especially sorry for Trump's neighbours, Canada and Mexico. Perhaps they should build a wall and get America to pay for it.

Trump is the man who after all, persists in calling it the China virus - just days after insisting the whole thing was a hoax anyway and that he was fed up with 'nasty' questions about it at a daily news conference - convened to discuss the actual virus and the White House's response.

It was somehow no surprise that his total lack of self-awareness was again brutally expressed when he announced new rules on self-isolation at a news briefing where 15 people were shoehorned into the photo of the event.

My only surprise is that he hasn't pushed the line that the virus was man-made in a Chinese lab - something that was dismissed out of hand in a report for the journal Nature Medicine. It was bats. No, really it was. And so is Trump, quite evidently.

Some people just love a good conspiracy theory. Honestly, next they will be telling us Princess Diana's death was a royal plot, JFK was taken out by the FBI and Apollo XI didn't even land on the Moon.

In the meantime, all we can do is to hunker down, wash our hands while singing Sneezy Like a Sunday Morning, Land of Soap and Glory - or, best of all, anything by The Cure - and take a leaf out of Dame Judi Dench's book by venturing out occasionally, while keeping our social distance, in an animal hat with big white ears.

Dame Judi, you National Treasure. A ray of happiness at a time of gloom.