There is an apocalyptic feel to Britain at the moment. We have seen a young boy, Damilola Taylor, stabbed to death on his way home from school; babies and toddlers tortured by the very people that the rest of us would expect to love and care for them; a rail accident tragically breaking the world record for high speed train crashes with a combined impact of 140 miles an hour.

Terrorists have detonated a bomb outside the BBC to remind us as if a reminder were needed that the Irish situation is abiding evidence of the effects of the irresistible force meeting the immovable object.

A policewoman in Oldham was knocked down and then, allegedly, deliberately run over. In Ipswich, a woman in her nineties has been raped.

An already decimated farm industry, having barely recovered from the destructive long-term effects of BSE, is reeling yet again under the onslaught of an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease.

To many it seems unthinkably grotesque to slaughter thousands of healthy animals in order to stem the spread of this highly contagious disease, whose worst effects are economically devastating rather than fatal.

Etched on our memories will be the images of those rivers of fire and smoke pierced by the forlorn legs of the prematurely slain cattle stretching up through the flames and smoke as a memorial to the sheer pointlessness of their lives.

One can only begin to imagine the frustration and impotence of an industry that has already been battered by more than its fair share of disasters, both naturally and politically generated.

It should be no surprise that many people are questioning the way that we have, as a nation, allowed ourselves to become dependent upon the rest of the world for our food and thrown away our former self sufficiency.

And once again the rest of Europe is looking accusingly across the Channel at an aggrieved country that willy-nilly seems incapable of escaping the fickle finger of fate.

We know that we are a law-abiding nation, that we generally scrupulously follow and enforce the rules that other European nations seem to casually disregard.

Yet it seems that each time the music stops it is only Britain that hasn't got a chair to sit on.

So my children came home from school last Friday to find signs at the end of all the footpaths leading to our home telling us that to prevent the spread of foot-and-mouth, the footpath was closed. Transgressors could be liable to a fine of up to £5,000.

It is, of course, an acknowledged administrative ploy to do something unpalatable on a Friday afternoon and leg it to the safety of the weekend to avoid the subsequent flak.

After an uncertain couple of days, on Monday it took several few phone calls to establish that as public footpaths constitute the only access my home, we could use them.

The intention, apparently, is to keep the countryside free of those who do not need to be there, rather than maroon those who do. But the signs don't say that.

Mind you, at the moment who wants to go out anyway?