Wouldn't it be nice if...

I have overdone the dried frog pills.

It is not my fault, I rather lost track of the doseage while watching on-line Taskmaster videos.

As a result, I started to have fantasy COVID19 leaders press briefing hallucinations. This, dear reader, isn't as horrific as you might fear. In fact, it is a synaptic tangent that you may wish to travel at some point.

Imagine the scene. Boris enters the 10 Downing street briefing room dressed in a "Who's the Daddy" t-shirt, Eric Morcambe shorts, long pink socks and sandals.

Boris waits while the various attendees on the videoconference sip water and recover from their swooning until he announces that he is going to do something different with the briefing.

Boris is going to leverage the collective wisdom of those attending to review the last four weeks and see if there are things that can be done to grease the wheels in way that will get this horrific journey over with a little bit quicker! Not only that, he is going to do it in the form of an Agile Retrospective!

At this point Matt Hancock enters the room dressed in a French maid outfit. OK, I need to pause writing and have more coffee to expunge that image for a minute. Please feel free to ignore or dress him in your outfit of choice.

Our esteemed Health Secretary then picks up some post-it notes and a dry marker before announcing that he is the scribe for the event.

Boris then throws open the floor to answer four critical questions:

• What worked well for us?
• What did not work well for us?
• What actions can we take to improve our process going forward?

OK, that first question comes as a curved ball to the assembled denizens of the press. After all, giving anybody positive feedback comes hard to hardened hack. That said, there are some things that we should probably say have worked. Social distancing has been followed; food supply chains maintained; ventilators designed, built and supplied; economic contingency plans implemented; critical workers are hanging in there despite the challenges; the British public are volunteering to assist in whatever way they can.

In fact, if I didn't have point to get to at some point before lockdown ends, I could probably produce quite a list of the things that have gone well up to this point.

What has not worked well? Now this is where the British Press come into there own. I can imagine that the list here would be quite large and headed by Testing, Testing and TESTING. Also quite high up there will be procurement of PPE. There would be others, but I have to admit that I would probably zone out and go and make a cup of tea and a sandwich while the press corps blow themselves out.

This is when my dried frog pill hallucinations really kick in. Just as they start on the last section about actions to take to improve, it becomes totally surreal.

The screen in the briefing room fills with my image, complete with a cornflake and tomato sauce sandwich in hand. Boris smiles. Matt Hancock curtseys. Boris asks me, what actions would I like to see to improve process.

Pausing only to wipe tomato sauce from my beard, I grab my chance.

- If there are issues with procurement of garnering specific skills or materials, why isn't there a central website which outlines what you need and giving people a contact point if they are able to plug a particular gap?

- There is quite a cottage industry started up making visors and PPE equipment if my social media feed is to be believed. How do people get the fruits of their labours to the people who need it?

- If there is an issue with washing and steralising re-usable PPE, why are we not opening up the industrial laundries normally used by hotels to provide the NHS with extra capacity?

- When the government is providing loan guarantees and bailout money to bigger companies, why is it not insisting on warrants and share equity that can be used to start a sovereign wealth fund that could, in future, be used to provide a #UKbasicincome?

- Could the common cold unit be used as a template to test volunteers who have had COVID19 to validate if recovery from the virus provides the immunity we all crave? 

I would imagine at around this point, the sight of me with aforementioned sandwich may prove too much for poor Boris and I would be cut off mid flow.

Still, I had my fantasy 5 minutes of glory in my fantasy press briefing. I, rather like Donald Trump, think that it all went very, very well and that the ratings will go through the roof.

The trouble is that the effects of the dried frog pills will wear off where as this lockdown is set to continue.