I expect you are drawing up a list of all the things you are looking forward to doing when this weird lockdown thing is over. Me too.

But I am also drawing up another list, featuring everything we won’t have to do, once we emerge from isolation.

Top of the list is having to conduct conversations using video conferencing software, which has effectively turned the video phone into an everyday household essential.

If I am honest, I don’t even like conventional phones, so this is bad news indeed.

I know some people love picking up the receiver and having a chat, but I am not one of those people. In fact, my heart sinks, every time our phone rings, and my first thought is to hand it to my wife to answer, if she is around.

I also have a mobile phone, which I use for quite a lot of things, but making calls is not one of them, so that hardly ever rings. I have deliberately not memorised its number, just in case I am tempted to pass it on to anyone, because the last thing I want anybody to do is call me on it.

And if making and receiving standard phone calls is bad enough, imagine how reluctant I have always been to make or receive one while broadcasting pictures of my ugly mug.

As soon as the lockdown happened, it dawned on me that you really can’t avoid these video phone calls if you want to stay connected to the rest of the family, and recently I have reluctantly been involved in calls over Skype, Google Duo and Zoom.

I admit it has served a purpose and we’ve made it more fun by involving quizzes and even bingo, and we currently see more of those who live outside Swindon than we did when everything was normal.

But that doesn’t mean I want to make a habit of it, and I can’t tell you how much I am looking forward to getting back to meeting people face-to-face again instead, once everything gets back to normal. That assumes that we will return to how it was before, and I have a terrible dread that video phone calls are going to become the new norm, which is bad for lots of reasons.

For a start, if I really have to take a sound-only phone call, at least it doesn’t matter if I haven’t shaved or haven’t dressed, or I just got in from riding my bike through a gale and I look like I was dragged through a hedge.

It’s shocking how video calls have suddenly been accepted, virtually overnight, even though the technology has been coming for decades, and the future was there for all of us to see on Thunderbirds.

If you remember: the most futuristic communication system in that programme involved a line of large portrait paintings of the Tracy brothers that hung on the walls of Tracy Island.

Whenever there was an incoming call, Jeff Tracy knew which son was calling, because the eyes on the portrait would light up, and when they were connected, the painting turned into a video picture.

As I write this, I am sure programmers from Skype, Google, Zoom, Apple, Microsoft and Amazon are racing to take the technology to the next step by producing a version of the Thunderbirds paintings to hang on our walls.

It’s now only a matter of time before my portrait is hanging in the homes of family and friends - and they all wait, in vain, for my eyes to light up.