One can't help feeling sorry for the burghers of Surrey this week. There they were, minding their own business, driving Tamsin to the gymkhana and fretting over the plummeting quality of tamarinds at Waitrose, when all of a sudden they are transformed into the epidemicentre of the latest manifestation of the Green Death. I wept inwardly for them as my pilot "Chopper" Hamson whisked me down to the surveillance zone in the pool Sea King. Yes, oh teeming fan base, my barrow-wight of a boss Hutton has once again ducked responsibility and packed me straight from the flood belt to the stockbroker belt, to "fly the DRIP flag and look sort of sympathetic" as my brief has it. Frankly, I told him, if I wanted to hang out in an empty cattle market I'd spend a Tuesday night at Stringfellows, but he was not to be moved, insisting it was my duty to ensure our valiant grocers could furnish British barbecues with sufficient dead animal for the hottest (and probably only) weekend this summer. We could hardly land for bimbos in front of Sky TV cameras and wearing expression 163a - "deeply concerned". One horny-handed son of the soil remarked to me that the biggest risk of an epidemic stemmed from the Harvey Nicks wellies of the hacks as they streamed back to London once the nation was bored of Pirbright. I give it another seven or eight hours. The spin doctors are also out in force, of course, and to listen to them you'd think there were secret underground herds of Aberdeen Angus and clandestine flocks of German Merino, all volunteering for slaughter to save the Sausages of Britain. But the truth is that any panic-buying is lodged in the ethanol-soaked frontal lobes of downtable subs in Wapping. Enough already. I need a holiday, and a week or two on Philip Green's yacht in the Aegean beckons. In the meantime, I'm off to get slaughtered with an old cow from Guildford.

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