I am a little concerned that I might be growing into a... well a face mask junkie.

I certainly aspire to accumulate a veritable wardrobe of face coverings. I reason that we are going to be required to wear the bloody things for some time into the future, so... they will surely become the new must-have fashion accessory. My wife, for example, has, in a fairly short period of time, accumulated a wardrobe of different coloured and variously patterned facial camouflage.

At the moment I have just two. One is the bog-standard paper one which everyone seems to have acquired and which contains folds. It is white on one side and duck egg blue on the other. I believe it is the blue side that should be exposed to the public, while the plain white is merely for breathing into. The other mask is, if anything, even simpler. My wife made it and it is in a plain white material with loops to hook it around my rather large ears. It is the one I use nearly all the time; consequently it is also by far the filthier of the two. Not today however, because as I type it is currently fluttering away on the washing line along with a selection of my wife's bespoke maskettes. She observed that, seeing a fairly varied group of face coverings dangling there, they rather resembled a line-full of mouse hammocks... and yes that's exactly what they do look like.

Until fairly recently I had never worn a face mask, now they have become essential items of in-shop apparel. So it is only natural to convert their functional duty to that of artistic fashion statement.

As I believe I mentioned recently, the wearing of these appendages has slipped somewhat in our neck of the woods... grocery stores and greengrocers; prompting me to enquire: If they are so effective and essential, why hasn't government made their wearing compulsory?

In the good old days BC (Before COVID) we used to giggle at all those Japanese tourists, masked and anonymous, snapping away interminably at absolutely everything with their smartphones. I often used to think that their dinner parties back in Osaka must have been turgid in the extreme: "This is a selfie of me outside Mosta Dome. You can tell it's me 'cos I'm wearing those pink pumps I bought on holiday in San Francisco. And here are another 87 shots of me in the same position and in the same place - and wearing the same mask... enjoy."

Some people have come up with brilliantly innovative ideas for face coverings. I saw, online, a range of these things that comprise a hologram of the wearer's face from the tip of their nose to the bottom of their chin, giving the effect of the wearer being maskless... clever.

I have also speculated on just where this trend could go. Are we, for example, going to see whole haute couture fashion shows devoted to just stylish and very, very expensive face masks: "Here is Sharona wearing a subtle little number, by Dolce & Gabbana in battleship grey, fringed with faux ermine and attached to her face with super-glue."

Watch this space...