A thousand souls adrift off the coast of Cornwall, not by tempest or iceberg, but by the invisible hand of a gastrointestinal outbreak. The cruise ship, that floating cathedral of bourgeois excess, has become a vector of viral squalor. UK maritime authorities are now investigating, as if the cause were not already writ large in the cramped corridors, the shared buffets, the mingling of pensioners with norovirus.

We have seen this before, in the cholera ships of Victorian docks and the quarantine islands of the Mediterranean. History does not repeat, but it does rhyme with a vengeance. The passengers, paying thousands for a week of enforced intimacy with fellow humans, are now paying the price of our collective delusion that luxury can sanitise biology.

The authorities will wring their hands, but the lesson is simple: a cruise ship is a Petri dish with a casino. The question is not how this happened, but why we are surprised. Each outbreak is a mirror held to our civilisation, reflecting our refusal to learn from the past.

I, for one, am not shocked. I am merely disappointed that we have forgotten the lessons of the Black Death, the Spanish flu, and every other outbreak that taught us that human beings packed together are a recipe for disaster. The maritime authorities will find the source, issue new guidelines, and the ships will sail again.

And then, next season, another thousand will fall ill. So it goes, in our age of decadent amnesia.