Lockdown Diaries 2020/21

I went to visit Auntie Jean last week for the first time in six months. And like everything else these days it was a stressful and unsatisfactory palaver.   This was my fourth trip to see her since the start of the pandemic. My first took place in August, with Auntie Jean in her room and me on the garden steps outside (for socially-distancing purposes). This meant I was silhouetted against the sun and she couldn’t for the life of her work out who I was, nor why I was shouting in at her through her French windows.    The two subsequent visits were both in the garden proper. I was kitted out in full PPE and Auntie Jean and I sat at opposite ends of a long table. Unsurprisingly my aunt’s sight, hearing and cognitive powers aren’t the best at 103 and she was rather disgruntled at being wheeled outside in the cold and forced to attend some sort of Mad Hatter’s tea party with a masked “stranger”.   Auntie Jean moved into the home five years ago and wasn’t particularly exci...

Going for our jabs was actually a bit like attending a Santa’s Grotto for grown-ups. But the “elves” were all masked, we didn’t get to sit on anyone’s lap and our only gift was The Needle.   We arrived at the pharmacy ridiculously early, determined to make the most of our outing. After a half an hour’s wait in the car we trotted along to the shop where we were greeted by a “vaccine marshal” in a high-viz jacket. “Here for the vaccine?” “Yep”. We waved our NHS letters smugly – we’d been told we would need to bring these along. But the marshal ignored them and asked instead: “Do you have your NHS booking references?” Luckily these were on our phones, but they might not have been. However, this was the only part of the operation that wasn’t supremely slick and efficient.   We were then ushered through to the first room of the “grotto” where our details were checked (name, address, date of birth, allergies). Once we’d been deemed fit for jabbing we were shuffled along in the socia...

Well, today’s the big day. The one we’ve both been waiting for since news of the vaccine first broke in November 2020.   Brian and I are off to get our jabs this afternoon. Brian has spent all week referring to me as the Vaccine Queen while I’ve been calling him Jabby McJabface. I think we’ve finally lost it.   You’d think we were kids heading out on a big school outing, wouldn’t you? Mind you, the vaccination centre is six miles away so that more or less counts as a “big outing” these days. Yep, readers of my previous post: you’re right. We’re having to schlep to Watford or Northwood to be vaccinated after all.   The official NHS letter arrived earlier this week, instructing us to visit the very same “loophole website” that I complained bitterly about only a few days ago. Turns out it was bona fide.   We were then urged to book ourselves in at one of their “centres” which in today’s weird world can be anything from a town hall to an Asda car park. We chose a pharmac...

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.   How...