Middle-class olive oil crisis? Our experts are on hand to help

Thank you for calling the National Phoneline for Middle-Class Problems. Our lines are extremely busy today because of the “olive oil crisis”, which, in terms of caller volume, is up there with the pesto drought of 1997 and Waterstones selling out of David Sedaris (2009).

Please listen to the options carefully. If it’s about the global shortage of olive oil, and being down to your last three bottles, and your world going dark, please press #1. Alternatively, if you are down to your last three bottles, find the world is going dark and also that you are struggling to breathe, then hang up and dial 999.

• How to pick the best olive oil: what the experts look for

However, we should warn you that due to the crisis ambulances are badly backed up and hospital beds are few. As a spokesman for Public Health England has said: “Please try to protect the NHS by managing your symptoms at home and blowing into that brown paper bag from Gail’s.” If it’s a different problem, please hold and listen to these options:

• If you have a dog whose breed name doesn’t end in “doodle” and you can’t understand how this happened, please press #2.

• If you have a small telly and a lot of books but are hankering for a big telly and only a few books, press #3, where our expert counsellors are available 24/7 to talk you down.

• If you think you may have overfed your sourdough starter, please press #4, so we might comfort you with the words “easily done” and “don’t jump off a bridge”, although it may be best you don’t show your face for a bit.

• If you subscribe to The New Yorker and are 7,896 issues behind due to the shocking abundance of words and now the pile by your bedside is towering, press #5. (This is also the option for Prospect, The Economist and Sight and Sound.)

• If you put an apple core in the regular bin instead of the food compost one because you just couldn’t be bothered and now you can’t sleep and are afraid that your dental records will do for you, please press #6.

• If you subscribe to a vegetable box and are beginning to think there is only so much you can do with celeriac, which sits there disgustingly every week like a brain that’s been rolled around in a bog, press #7.

• If you are seeking someone to come round and watch that The Good Life episode where they all get squiffy on Tom’s home-brew, press #8. (Depending on how the evening goes, there may even be the opportunity to crack open that box set of Butterflies.)

• If you can’t be arsed with the theatre and the prices and shlepping into town and dehydrating all day so you don’t have to queue for ever for the ladies’ lavatory and would prefer to stay at home watching Married at First Sight Australia on the telly that you long to be bigger, press #9 and you’ll immediately be put through to our crisis response team. In the meantime, don’t do anything rash or silly, like slurp noisily from a big drink at the cinema. We are on our way!

• If you have a dog whose breed doesn’t end in “doodle” and isn’t called one of those retro, ironically unfashionable names like Dave or Gary or Shirley or Joan, you may want to ask yourself: is this the right hotline for me?

Hand over your car keys, now!

Once my dad got to his late eighties my mother begged us to stop him driving. “He’s not safe any more,” she said. And what did we do about it? Precisely nothing. So what happened?

He came off the road for no reason whatsoever, across a pavement, into a hedge, and while he emerged miraculously unscathed, my mother, who was in the passenger seat, broke every one of her ribs, care of the airbag.

After that my siblings and I ganged up on him, said that was it, no more driving. He was not obliging. He had always been a powerful, dominating force and, understandably, refused to accept such a diminishment. In the end we took his car keys off him. And I mention this because? Maybe it’s time someone took the car keys off us, humankind?

You look around at the world and think: what a mess. And who got us into this mess? Us! So maybe our go at being in the driver’s seat should end, and we should accept our own diminishment.

We were OK at it once, maybe, when rivers ran clear and we weren’t bombing the hell out of each other and mental illness wasn’t everywhere and there was enough olive oil to go around, but now we need, surely, to hand the keys over. But who to? Dogs, perhaps?

Because dogs are good and noble, and it may mean they pick up our poo for a change? But wouldn’t a cat genocide then ensue? Cats, then? But as cats, in my experience, only want to go out, then immediately come back in again, would anything ever actually get done? Fair point.

Still, they probably won’t bring down the economy in 49 days then write a boastful book about it. So there is that.