Whilst I am well stocked for toilet paper, and have been for many years, I am troubled by the predicament that may be faced by some of my family and friends and colleagues, so I have been sharing from my stash in the past week.

I decided that, rather than hope that supermarkets replenish their stocks or alternatively to queue at all sorts of odd and counterproductive hours, it might be smart to find an alternative way to get a supply. Hence, on Thursday, I logged onto my Amazon account and for the first time ever (I have no love for Amazon) ordered something other than books, DVDs or CDs. I ordered a 32 roll pack of toilet paper. ETA is between 22 April, and 7 May. I can wait.

One of the possible outcomes from this pandemic and associated Toilet Paper Apocalypse is that people who prefer to shop for groceries in store start shifting in major numbers to online ordering and delivery.

It’s possible, but not certain. Coles and Woolworths, who have been building their online ordering businesses for quite some time, are not able to satisfy demand and I get the impression that people are losing confidence in this service from them. Amazon itself has so far underwhelmed in its grocery delivery business in Australia, but this does present an opportunity for them to get a foot in the door. After all, I would have ordered my toilet paper online from Coles or Woolworths if I had any confidence that it would arrive anytime soon.

More soberly, as of this moment, there have been 271,901 cases globally (there were 258,750 cases four hours ago), and 11304 deaths (an extra 28 since four hours ago). Parts of Italy where I spent several joyous days 6 months ago, such as Milan and the Veneto, have been devastated by the Grim Reaper. 47,021 cases in Italy so far. And we now have 854 in Australia.

This is not the end of the world. However, there will be major economic disruption and we are all worried, not so much for ourselves, but for those we care about.

It’s now about 11 days since I visited the supermarket and saw that it was almost completely out of toilet paper rolls.

Last night, there was no meat, and no bread. And there is very little pasta or pasta sauce left.

I think it is safe to say, as Dorothy did to Toto, that we are not in Kansas anymore.

This is the weirdest thing I have seen in my life, a shortage of so many things (albeit because the supply chains have not been set up to handle such demand). The closest to this that I would compare it to was the Longford gas explosion in 1998, where we were short of our gas supply for many weeks (I was in a flat then, and had electric hot water, so no cold showers for me thankfully).

This scarcity is all to do with public confidence. People are queuing up like they do in Communist countries and in wartime, because they are worried that they might not be able to get more later. It is a self perpetuating cycle, because when you see empty or near empty shelves, you feel the need to stock up more when you can, in case it is not there later, and that then leads to more empty shelves.

And there has been another series of falls on the sharemarket, although my ASX watch list yesterday did indicate major fluctuations in the shares I am monitoring – 10% fluctuations in the share prices across the trading day. This volatility is not normal. If I had decided to try to ride it out, instead of getting out of shares on the second dead cat bounce, I would be $67000 worse off right now.

Obviously, with an elderly mother, I have other things to worry about than share market matters in this pandemic. But the impact and disruption, on an economic scale, is going to be virtually unprecedented in the post 1945 world. The shutdowns, and the money printing by government and central banks to prevent people going to the wall, is likely to have a very serious medium term effect.

Right now, I am 95% of the way through Dorothy Must Die, the first of a series of dystopian novels about Oz, by Danielle Paige. In short, it imagines what if Dorothy and her trio of henchmen had turned to evil and tyrannised Oz, through the eyes of a modern day Kansas girl the tornado has dropped in Oz to take Dorothy down.

An intriguing premise indeed.

The Land of Oz has captured the imaginations of many creative people since L. Frank Baum wrote the first novel. We have had various movie interpretations (the 1970s Australian one, Oz, with bogan bikers instead of witches, is particularly bad, except for the climatic bit where Dorothy, nude except for her magic shoes, kicks the biker in the goolies instead of melting the witch with a bucket of water), musicals, cartoons, and novelisations.

In 2008, Sydney band Sneaky Sound System did a great song, Kansas City, which had a very Wizard of Oz film clip, starring their lead singer Miss Connie as Dorothy. Check it out sometime.

All this does get me thinking. In Australia, we rarely get so inspired by our own country and our cities to write songs or great novels about our home. Kansas is still an inspiration, as an example, even for us. Paul Kelly, with his song Leaps and Bounds, is one of the few people who seems to wax lyrical about Melbourne. Indie band Camp Cope is, with their song Footscray Station, one of the few recording groups or artists to feel inspired by my particular home town.

Whereas Americans seem to be enormously inspired by their cities. How many songs are about New York? Chicago? LA? Or even Tulsa, wherever that is.

When the Australian Stock Exchange closed this afternoon, it was officially down 20% from the record high in February. A 20% decline from a peak is officially regarded as a bear market.

How long will this last? I think the distance in the GFC from peak to bottom was about 16 months – November 2007 til March 2009.

I plan to measure it according to my toilet paper supply. I did an inventory the other day and found that I currently own 85 rolls of toilet paper – the result of steady purchasing and hoarding over the better part of a decade, along with the quaint habit of collecting rolls from hotel rooms, along with the other toiletries. As it is estimated that a person goes through 2 rolls of toilet paper per week, I will be able to last 42 1/2 weeks til my supply of toilet paper runs out. That’s almost 10 months til I will need to buy anymore.

And I am able to improvise. I have paper towels and tissues in abundant supply as well. On top of this, I spend much of my time at work, or at large shopping centres, where the toilet paper is provided for you.

Given that bear markets last on average 14 months, I think that my toilet paper stash will end before the bear market does.

And perhaps that should be when I start investing in the share market again – when my current supply of toilet paper ends, I need to start putting my hard earned cash gradually back into shares (or, in my case, Exchange Traded Funds and Listed Investment Companies).

My share portfolio took a big hit a couple of weeks ago, but nothing compared to what I would have lost if I had not headed for the exit last Tuesday. According to the watch list which I just recreated on my newly reinstalled Bloomberg app on my iPhone, I am now $25,000 better off for having gotten out of the market then, than I would be if I had stayed in today.

Labour Day public holidays are usually slow days for the sharemarket, given that in one guise or another, Victoria, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT are all on holiday today. But money never sleeps, as Gordon Gecko might say, and the fear which caused a sharp fall on Wall Street on Friday has now firmly gripped the Australian Securities Exchange (to give it its proper name).

Usually, when there is a fall, it happens at opening, and that more or less sets the level for the entire day. Today is different. The sharp fall at opening has been compounded as people get more and more alarmed, and subsequently start panic selling. The ASX 200 is now down almost 6.5% since opening.

If I had stayed in the market, I would be unable to bring myself to watch the carnage, but because I sold out and no longer have skin in the game, I am finding today fascinating.

As I have posted previously, I had no understanding of the stock market in 1987, being a mere 18 year old university student who had very little money and no financial nous beyond knowing that term deposits paid more interest than bank book accounts. The Asian crisis in late 1997 had little impact on me either, as I was buying my 600 shares in the first Telstra float, which was only the second shareholding I ever owned, and I still had a small amount outstanding on the mortgage on my first home. Similarly, when the Dotcom crash happened in early 2000, I had little active interest – whilst I had been growing my modest share portfolio (I got 400 shares in Telstra 2, and do you remember the shareholder discount card you got with your minimum 500 Coles Myer shares?), it was not exactly a big deal. And whilst the GFC in 2008 did hurt, how much hurt can it do you when you are mostly focused on paying off the last portion of your loan and your share portfolio is only $80G? Before I headed for the exit last week, my portfolio had grown to four times that!

So, for the first time ever, I am seriously cashed up at the time of a share market crash, and in the fortunate position of having decided to get out of the market before things turned really ugly. Now I will sit, and watch with great fascination, and wait.

How long will the bear market last, and where will it bottom out? One sharemarket e-letter I read has got a doomsayer who claims share prices are as inflated as they were in 1929, and that a crash could wipe 65% of the wealth from the market. Another chap is predicting a major readjustment of the global financial system, which will involve considerable pain for normal people (the Cyprus crisis of several years ago where bank accounts were frozen is cited as a forerunner of what is to come, except on a global scale).

As I have indicated before, I consider that all the paranoia about the Coronavirus stems from the hard wiring we have from the 1600 plus years of eschatological conditioning from the time when Christianity become compulsory in the Roman Empire.

However, I cannot help but notice the effect on my share portfolio. Is someone who remains in the market now and tries to ride it out brave or foolish? I am neither – another part of my hard wiring, as is written in my description, is that I am a Narrow Minded Italian Catholic Conservative Peasant From Footscray. There is nothing in there which makes me a particularly reckless stock trader or financial hotshot.

So, when what I strongly suspected to be a dead cat bounce occurred on Tuesday, I pushed the SELL button on my entire portfolio. [Well, that is not entirely true. About 10 years ago, I bought 2 slabs of Broo beer when they did a share giveaway, and as a result, I still hold 100 shares of Broo, which were worth about 1.2 cents each on Tuesday.]

I could say that I am taking one for the team, for the greater good of Humanity. You see, when I buy usually turns out to be a good time to sell, and vice versa. So, if it turns out that I am wrong, then Coronavirus goes away, and the world economy and markets recover quickly.

If I am right, at least I will not have lost the accumulated savings of the past decade in an awful sharemarket bloodbath.

Things are starting to get a little surreal though. I passed through two supermarkets this evening, and ALL the toilet paper, paper towels, tissues and anything else could be used as a toilet paper substitute was sold out. [As I have indicated in an earlier post, I have kept a six month supply of toilet paper since the days of the Gillard Government.] Now even Bibles seem to be selling out, from what I also observed.

We are conditioned to think eschatologically, even though most of us struggle to understand what that means. Instinctively, like a herd, we are all cautiously heading for the fire exits, so to speak, grabbing sacks of rice, jumbo packs of toilet paper, and a plethora (I hardly ever use that silly word anymore) of other things which might come in handy if we are forced into isolation in our homes for a few weeks.

And that is why I feel very comfortable with having liquidated my share portfolio. I get the feeling that the fear out there is going to get much worse, and that this is going to cause major economic disruption. Exactly one month ago, when I started taking screenshots of the Coronavirus tallies, there were 28,262 infected, 565 dead, and 14 in Australia. As of right now the tally is 98370 cases, 3383 dead, and 63 in Australia, with some schools, shops and offices now closing where the occupants have come into contact with known cases. 2700 people in Queensland have been asked to self-isolate.

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The above photo was taken a couple of hours ago at my local bookshop at Highpoint Shopping Centre. This section is the Spirituality section where you buy the Bibles. As you can see, the shelves here are almost empty.

It appears that the threat of Coronavirus has now caused people to move on from panic buying toilet paper to panic buying Bibles too.

Time to emulate Hunter S. Thompson, grab a bottle of wine and my copy of the KJV, and start reading the Book of Revelation.

As you might guess from some of what I occasionally post on this blog, I am a bit of a Shakespeare fan. And I am both fascinated by and appalled by the theories that the plays were not written by Shakespeare.

Ben Elton, in writing a recently broadcast episode of Upstart Crow (a sitcom about Shakespeare), has dealt with the authorship theories very effectively. He has an episode where Shakespeare’s nemesis Robert Greene plots, along with Sir Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford, to murder Kit Marlowe, as the first step in creating doubt about the authorship. His cunning plan is that future generations are to believe that Marlowe has faked his death, and in fact is hiding out and writing the plays for Shakespeare. He also assigns roles to Bacon and Oxford, so that they too are to become candidates for authorship.

It is a just too funny episode, in a series which gets better with each passing season.

In passing, I will mention that some of the early advocates for the alternative authorship theories include Delia Bacon, who lived out her life in an insane asylum, and a chap unfortunately named Looney.

Just got back from my local Coles, and yes, the Coronavirus panic buying is real. Most tinned food, hand sanitiser, pasta, and toilet paper (except for the brands reputed to be as soft as sandpaper) have sold out. I have not seen anything like it.

I don’t need to panic buy stuff. Ever since the Venezuelan toilet paper crisis a decade ago, during the prime ministership of Julia Gillard, I have kept a stockpile of sufficient toilet paper to last me six months or more. [My reasoning at the time was that if a communist government in Venezuela could cause the country to run out of toilet paper, I could not push my luck too hard on the authenticity of Julia Gillard’s abandonment of Marxist principles.]

All the same, whilst I was mostly there to buy some mineral water, I decided to stock up a bit on tins and pasta, just in case. The idea of holing up for a few weeks at home, binge watching Netflix and eating pasta and tins of beetroot (assuming that Uber Eats and Deliveroo are not operating in that period) does not hold any major dread for me.

The Vienna based (but American) fantasy novelist, Jonathan Carroll, once wrote a wickedly black short story ‘The Jane Fonda Room’, in which damned person gets to choose their own unique version of Hell, and the protagonist of the story chooses The Jane Fonda Room, where he will watch all her films over and over again for Eternity. Here’s the ending:

She looked at him and her face was happy and animated again. “You’re just in time for the beginning of The Chase. Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando. Not a bad cast, eh? Then comes Barbarella, Klute, Coming Home, Nine to Five. What about that? Pretty good for your first time around!”

“And after that?” Paul’s eyes narrowed because it had finally began to dawn on him what was about to happen.

Ms Baker frowned for the first time. “After that? You see all of the other movies she made. However many that is. Isn’t that wonderful? What more could you ask – “

“Again and again?” His fingers were now very cold.

“You -“

“Without stop? All of Jane Fonda’s movies again and again and again without stop?’

Ms Baker signed and looked a little bored. “Yes, Paul, again and again. Again and again and again and again and again and again…” While she spoke she pointed to the door and it opened.

The first thing Paul saw in the middle of that darkness was the familiar face which he, at one time, would have died for.

Quite wickedly funny. Please don’t let me spoiling that five page short story turn you away from Jonathan Carroll’s novels. The Land of Laughs and Outside the Dog Museum are both classics, and I really think it is way too long since I read either of those.

Perhaps this is the sort of idea the people running Guantanamo Bay had when they had all those suspected terrorists there, and regaled them with the music of Britney Spears over and over again. Jonathan Carroll’s Hell is not too different from Sartre’s definition of Hell, when you think about it.

Which is a nice way of segueing into Falco, mid 1980s Vienna based euro-pop singer. Every few days, since the start of this year, I have tried to do some exercise, as I am about 12-13 kilos overweight and my eating and drinking habits do not really lend themselves to easy weight loss. I mostly do sit ups, although I every now and then try some push ups and have now started ‘planking’.

To make the exercise ordeal a little less painful, I open up the Apple Music and put some tunes on. Tonight, to inspire me to try and set a new record number of sit ups in a row (sit ups are easy, you can do as many as you like til you die of boredom), I perversely chose to listen to a collection of Falco’s greatest hits.

This consists essentially of one song, Rock Me Amadeus, played over and over again. By my count, there are ten different versions of this song available which I have heard this evening. There are a few other sounds to break up the monotony – but of them I am only vaguely familiar with Der Kommissar, which has only four different versions available (what on Earth is a ‘Pastel Remix’????). The rest of his body of work is a hitherto undiscovered country to me, and probably shall remain so, as I think I will choose something else for my next workout.

I am not sure that Rock Me Amadeus is the sort of song which one wants to hear over and over and over again. I think I was about 16 when it came out, some 35 years ago, which makes it further back in time from us now, than Rock Around The Clock was from us in 1985. And even then, it was one of those songs you might want to hear occasionally, but not all the time.