But if He looked more closely He would see that my warbling (just the first verse and the stirring chorus) always coincides with me being at the bathroom sink industriously washing my hands.

For, yes, millions of us are now reciting or singing something (it should take us at least 25 seconds, enabling us to time our ablutions, making sure they are thorough enough) as we religiously wash our hands to repel the coronavirus. The UK's National Health Service prescribes that we sing Happy Birthday, twice.

Meanwhile the Internet bristles with a zillion video handwashing how-to-do-it/how-long-to-do-it music suggestions, everything from The Wiggles to Mozart.

Thirty seconds of the overture to Mozart's opera The Marriage of Figaro works brilliantly because the overture has about it the famously-described "conspiratorial bustle" just right for a busy, bustling cleanse of the hands' and the fingernails' every nook and cranny.

Mozart works well. And, too, for me a sudsy warble of Jesus Wants Me For A Sunbeam takes just the right time while also enabling a nostalgic glimpse of my childhood when I learned this classic, and, beaming like a sunbeam, sang it from the heart.

And perhaps, subconsciously, in these times terrifying for us poor creature born to die, there is something sincerely prayerful going on when one pretend-prays (I find The Lord's Prayer takes a handwashingly eerily ideal 30 seconds to recite) or sings a little hymn while washing the hands.

Meanwhile one unforeseen virtue of all this handwashing is a rediscovery (for now we are ogling them several times a day) of our hands, these lifelong companions, these indispensable tools we usually take so much for granted. There's lots of fine, new, COVID-inspired writing about this phenomenon including Sarah Butchin's heartfelt piece These Hands: Washing And Using Our Hands, in the online The Smart Set.

The obsessive Ms Butchin marvels "I'm unsure how many times I washed my hands during those days [the peak of her COVID angst], but I know that I protected them from everything but me. I didn't allow them to touch doorknobs - the bottom of a shirt or dress did that job. They couldn't touch carts at Costco or my friends' backs when they embraced me for a hug. So they stopped hugging me. I didn't want anyone to touch me. I couldn't take the risk.

"There was a time I never thought of my hands ... They were utilitarian and unremarkable. I didn't concern myself with nail polish or rings, too focused on other things to care about adornment. I didn't love (or hate) my hands because I didn't know them the way I know them now."

And for a visual celebration-reminder of the wonder of hands nothing can compare with Albrecht Durer's famous ink and pencil Praying Hands (1508). COVID's suddenly hand-conscious times are giving this masterpiece (drawn on blue paper that Durer made himself) some deserved new limelight, although of course it's much used in popular culture as a tattoo and festoons T-shirts, tote bags and coffee mugs galore.

I didn't know it when I began writing this piece about hands, Durer and hygiene but sure enough there is for sale online a nattily framed, COVID-inspired restaurant-bar-coffee-shop rest room sign. It features Durer's world famous, impossible-to-ignore hands and in golden ye olde letters a message reminding employees to wash their hands before resuming work.

"Just look at our hands, people!" Durer's masterpiece is urging us right now.

"Look what they say about us, how their wear and tear, pores, veins and knobbly bits proclaim who and what we are. Notice how we show as much of our character in our overlooked hands as we do in the faces we are always studying so narcissistically in our mirrors.

"Think how we use these hands to eloquently express ourselves, folding them in anxious prayer, rubbing them together with glee, wringing them in despair.

"Thank you, accursed virus, for opening our eyes to our hands."