Vaccine envy

I don’t feel particularly vulnerable. I don’t have an underlying health condition. Not as far as I know, anyway.

But I still feel disgruntled whenever I hear of people younger than me who’ve already been called for their vaccination.

 

I look at them closely, checking them over for subtle health flaws. They’re not overweight – in fact most are annoyingly fit. These are the people I go walking with, who end up striding ahead of me uphill while I puff and gasp behind.

 

This feeling of malaise is exactly what happens when queueing is embedded in your DNA. There’s a recognised order of things, and queue-jumping is an anathema to us Brits. And since we’ve all been told that vaccines have so far been strictly limited to the over-65s and the vulnerable we expect that to apply to everyone.

 

However, this week we were told that the over-60s are up next – our own age group, in other words. So Brian and I have been checking our phones from minute to minute for The Call.

 

However, my nose has already been put decidedly out of joint by news of other people’s situations. One of my best friends - who’s six months younger than I am - emailed me at the weekend to say she had managed to book herself a jab by pre-empting the official “call” and exploiting a loophole on the NHS website. My crossness knew no bounds.

 

Then yesterday I was walking with a friend in her early fifties, telling her how keen I was to be called. And she dropped the bombshell that she had already been vaccinated, having worked as a GP in the 1990s. Apparently they hadn’t updated their records and she was still listed as an NHS professional. How is that fair?

 

I realise it’s all a bit playground-like. I can almost hear those far-off echoes of: “I was here first!” from the primary school lunch queue.

 

As it turns out, Brian and I could technically also book ourselves an early jab via the same NHS website loophole my friend used. But it still seems wrong somehow. And in any case if we did, we’d be obliged to schlep to Watford or Northwood to be vaccinated rather than pop down to our local surgery in Rickmansworth. Too much effort, we concluded. 

 

So, that just about sums up our commitment to an early vaccine. Natural selection and innate Britishness says we can’t be bothered to queue-jump, so we’ll just have to wait for our call-up papers, which presumably should arrive any day now.

 

Hang on. Was that the post?