Toilet roll has become the new Lamborghini, everybody wants them

‘People are looking at us,’ I say through teeth gritted with the effort of keeping the 64-pack aloft. Holly Baxter and her fiance venture out of their flat in search of the Holy Grail: toilet roll

Roll up, roll up: toilet paper on sale in Manhattan, as panic buying hits New York (Reuters)

We’re on our third week of quarantine in New York, and things are starting to get weird. Central Park has a field hospital in it; an army boat is floating off Manhattan island with 1,000 beds; NYPD cars follow you round the running track at the local park and blast you with a megaphone if you come too close to someone else; and, like the rest of the world, our area has become obsessed with stockpiling toilet paper.

My fiance and I went out today to add to our modest supplies, balaclavas over our faces (mine is bright pink), gloves on our hands and baggy sweatpants – the uniform of post-apocalyptic working-from-home times – on our lower halves. We had gotten down to our last roll of toilet paper and we were ready to fight to replenish it.

As soon as we reached the local grocery store, we split up to search the shelves. I went to the place I’d last found a solitary packet of kitchen roll and, lo and behold, at the end of one shelf was the holy grail. The only problem was that the holy grail came in the shape of a 64-pack. It was almost unfathomably large.

I struggled through the aisles back to find Fiance, who was faffing around with some almond milk (an optimist of the highest order, he has chosen to see the coronavirus pandemic as “an opportunity to get in shape” and now makes protein smoothies and does push ups in our studio apartment while I wrestle with sugary cereal and crippling existential anxiety).

“Do you want me to take that?” he asks when he realises it is me behind the gigantic cylindrical white structure barrelling towards him.

“Absolutely not,” I reply, clutching the 64-pack to me with fully extended arms. “This is my prize for the day.”

That’s when I realised the looks we were getting were looks of jealous longing. I should have known: people wanted our loo paper

As we wandered back down the street, the pack of loo roll extended between us, I realised people were giving us funny looks. It’s hard to discern a funny look when almost everyone in public has a fully covered nose and mouth, but eventually it becomes obvious that you’re the victim of a lot of them.

“People are looking at us,” I say through teeth gritted with the effort of keeping the 64-pack aloft (obscene amounts of toilet rolls get pretty heavy after a while, it turns out).

“I feel so gauche,” Fiance replies, looking meaningfully at me over his furry makeshift balaclava. “Like I’m cruising down here in a Lamborghini.” That’s when I realised the looks we were getting were looks of jealous longing. I should have known: people wanted our loo paper. It was the same look I gave the man beside the grocery co-op a few streets along who’d turned up to queue in a full yellow hazmat suit.

The apocalypse does strange things to people, is what I’m trying to say. The sense of pride that we felt as we reached our apartment and dumped the 64-pack proudly onto the floor in front of our mad cat Nelson was comparable to graduation day or how I imagine Neil Armstrong must have felt setting foot on the moon. Except obviously it was far more meaningful.