"A few years ago, I asked a friend what her plans were for the future. ‘To buy a helicopter,’ she replied, more nonchalantly, I thought, than such a reply deserved.

‘Pourquoi?’ I replied, because I turn to French whenever friends start showing signs of encroaching eccentricity. ‘Because,’ she explained, ‘when everything starts going tits up here,’ she gestured expansively around us, ‘it’s going to be no good trying to get across the floodwaters or dusty plains, or through food rioters or millions of virus-ridden corpses – we’re going to need to go up. Get to high ground. And be able to take plenty of ammo along.’ I backed slowly away with a pacifying smile and assurances that I would see her soon while dipping my hand unobtrusively into my bag to delete every one of her contact details from my phone.

I wish I still had them. So I could ask how the purchase plans are going and how much it would cost for a seat on her private chopper*. Because have you seen what’s happening out there? All the nightmare scenarios we’ve seen in movies, or read about in books or were taught in school when global warming was first discovered, are coming true. People are being displaced from their homes by rising sea levels – first only from small low-lying tropical islands, which kind of felt like payback for living in such idyllic seeming places, but now it’s happening in Alaska. That’s part of the US – for crying out loud! The US Army Corps of Engineers estimates that the entire village of Newtok could be underwater by 2017, which is just – if my maths does not deceive me, which it may given the amount of time I spent at school trying to encourage my fellow pupils to switch to CFC-free hairsprays instead of concentrating on basic arithmetic – four years away.

And after SARS, avian flu, ordinary flu (which officially reached epidemic proportions this year in the US), plus the increasing prevalence of antibiotic resistance, there is now a new coronavirus – basically the mother lode of viruses – which has so far killed 18 people on the Arabian peninsula and the World Health Organisation says appears to be transmissible person-to-person. You know, like in all the scary books and horror films and nightmares.

Lucy Mangan: “It’s the end of the world as we know it”