I like to think I’ve been ahead of the curve on handwashing. I’ve never felt comfortable touching food to eat, or cook, without freshly clean hands. I’ve often been mocked for this. I’ve even been told that it may have been counterproductive because with all that washing, I might never build up any “natural immunity”.

To be fair, I went through obsessive phases. In the paranoid early days of first fatherhood, I took no risks. When preparing bottled milk, I did so in close to laboratory conditions. Having sterilised the bottles and boiled the water, I then washed my hands. Then I fretted about how to dry those hands. Running around the house waving them about wasn’t practical and would surely risk acquiring germs. A towel was obviously lethal. And kitchen roll had been just sitting there, so couldn’t be clean. In the end, I’d stick the oven on quite hot, steel myself and plunge my hands in to burn the water off.

Out and about, it’s getting harder to find somewhere to wash your hands. There are fewer public toilets all the time. This is bad in all sorts of ways, but especially now. A clean and convenient public convenience is surely a mark of a civilised society. Such a thing is so rare, you don’t forget a good one you’ve visited. Ten years ago, I had the pleasure of finding one such memorable spot in Mumbles, Swansea. And about five years before that, I used an unbelievably fragrant facility in Glasgow at two in the morning. I can smell them both now, in a good way.

They are economically valuable, too. In Portpatrick, Dumfries and Galloway, the council was about to close the public toilets. Local people knew there would be an impact on visitor numbers, so they’ve now taken over running them. And very fine lavatories they are too, let me tell you.

Talking of toilets …

It is a mark of the visceral impulses leading to panic buying that, as I talked on the radio about supermarkets running out of toilet roll, I found myself starting to need to go. However, I remain relaxed on the tissue issue because when I was young, we had only Izal paper in the house. It was rough, resembled greaseproof paper and had a hospital smell about it, but nothing else has ever felt quite right to me. No one else feels this way. Therefore, I assume, as the soft stuff is all snapped up, vast stockpiles of unwanted Izal will be brought out of cold storage and into shops again. I’ll be the only one panic-buying it.

• Adrian Chiles is a writer, broadcaster and Guardian columnist