broken dpkg status

[Tony van der Hoff <tony@vanderhoff.org>]

Due to a combination of fiddling and finger-trouble I have contrived to 
delete part of my /var partition. Unfortunately, I have never thought to 
back up /var, being transient data... Big mistake!

Anyway, the most pressing problem at the moment is that apt fails, due 
to missing status data:

E: Could not open file /var/lib/dpkg/status - open (2: No such file or 
directory)
E: The package lists or status file could not be parsed or opened.

How do I recover from this?

--
Tony van der Hoff        | mailto:tony@vanderhoff.org
Buckinghamshire, England |