“We have to learn, slowly slowly, to live with this virus,” Rose tells Retail Week. In the middle of a second lockdown, which he says he is “very unhappy about”, and as the retail industry faces an uncertain Christmas, it is essential that everything is done to restore confidence and pave the way towards life as close to normal as possible.

Otherwise, Rose fears, the risk is that city centres become “concrete ghost towns”. He may chair an online business, but he believes people “will get pretty bored of pressing a button all day” and they should spend no more than two hours a day “staring at a screen”.