Well, well. This from the august pages of Foreign Policy:

While Brexit preppers have stirred headlines in recent months with their preemptive purchases of essential items, the stockpiling of large manufacturers—and the lack thereof—matters most. For goods with short shelf lives, such as medicine and fresh produce, the limitation is quality: Store an apple or an antibiotic for too long and it will go bad. For goods that are large and bulky, such as toilet paper, the problem is quantity. And in the case of the United Kingdom, where the average resident uses an unrivaled 110 rolls of toilet paper per year, the highest figure in Europe, any meaningful measure of forward planning would require more real estate than is currently available.

This is just one of the terrible challenges that the paper industry—and the public—may face in the coming months, said Andrew Large, the director general of the Confederation of Paper Industries, the leading trade association for the U.K.’s paper-based industries.

“It’s very bulky and light in weight for its volume, which means you need an awful lot of warehousing space in order to be able to put down meaningful stocks of the material,” he said. While there has been some stockpiling—several weeks of finished rolls and perhaps months of unfinished pulp, according to Large—the practical limitations to stockpiling leave a great deal of uncertainty. This uncertainty, more than anything, is most worrying for the industry. “The thing that will cause a crisis,” Large said, “is if people do panic and they empty the shelves preemptively, whereas if normal buying patterns are continued, there would have been enough supply in the system for everybody to be fine.

This might be good news for the British tabloids. I mean to say, if there’s no toilet paper we’ll have to resort to Leopold Bloom’s strategy of cutting up newspapers and hanging the pieces on a hook.