Oh whoopee. The breakthrough moment has finally arrived.

Oh whoopee. The breakthrough moment has finally arrived. 

Oh sweet joy! It's that wow moment we've all been waiting for. Patience is a virtue and patience has been rewarded but before we get too excited this could be time to err on the side of caution. But ladies and gentlemen you can finally begin to see the sun-dappled uplands, flourishing woodlands, the lark on the branch hopping delicately between one beech tree to another, finches and, quite possibly, robins cooing sweetly and affectionately as a cyclist trudges athletically along poetic country lanes. And then we discover that the world has, quite definitely, turned a corner. A vaccine for Covid 19 is on its way. And it's next week. 

Yes folks. it's true. They're not joking you know. They mean it. This is D-Day. The momentous announcement has been made and they're not making this one up. After months of agonising, at times hellish trauma, soul-baring, clapping on a Thursday evening for almost an indefinite period of time, endless Downing Street briefings from Prime Minister Boris Johnson, much hand wringing and sanitising, cleaning hands ad infinitum, spraying, steaming and questioning the inexplicable, we are finally at the moment when everything changes and changes dramatically. The wait is over. The viral war is almost over. 

That clearing in the deep and tangled forest is now much more visible than it was, let us say, four months ago. Quite how we've got through this viral minefield is anybody's guess but the final obstacles are about to overcome with the arrival of a vaccine that will be comprehensively set in motion within the next couple of months. We always knew, by the law of averages, that something would turn up because Charles Dickens knew what he was talking about and besides how much longer could a crippling disease take hold and create havoc?

So here we are. Pfizer/BioNTech is the name of the vaccine and how some of us would love to go up to this vaccine and give it the biggest hug of all time.  Now this is the kind of good news we could all get used to very quickly. It almost seemed that any hint of a vaccine on the medical market could have been just wishful thinking and simply just a set of test tubes languishing in a science laboratory. It would take years they said and research into any new development would quite probably take another decade to become the genuine article. 

But here in Britain the nation basks in the knowledge that once again it can enjoy the untrammelled freedom it thought had just been restored to them a couple of months ago. And yet we were about to discover that a second lockdown would take us several hundred steps backwards. Suddenly, we were divided up into tiers which suggested to the neutral observer that we were experiencing different degrees of illness and affliction. Oh how complicated had life become for all of us. 

Fear not though. Today feels though good, auspicious, pivotal and seminal. It feels as though we've reached the most intriguing part of a historical novel and then discovered that we had to turn off the light to go to sleep because it was far too late and we'd never get up in the morning. We'd got through the bleak and disastrous chapters of the book with its emphasis on death and darkness before making the glorious discovery that things are about to end very happily ever after. 

So it is that today all those essential shops are back open again and we are all desperately hoping that they won't be required to close again because it could be fatal if things do go against them. Then there are the pubs and restaurants who, in their contrasting ways, are probably getting heartily fed up and sick of all this disruption, flux and inconvenience. Look at all the millions we're missing and the customers must be gasping for a drink or wolfing down a meal with family and friends. It doesn't have to be this way or so it would seem. 

We are now weeks away from Christmas and the party season should be underway by now. The revellers are tuning up their karaoke voices, donning their distinctive hats, demanding that the bar staff fill up huge trays of booze for them and then drinking as much as they can before the end of the year. In theory, the office party season should be revving up and ready to go but owing to most unfortunate circumstances the kissing under the mistletoe next to those old filing cabinets may have to be postponed until a later date. Sadly though this doesn't sound the most realistic or viable of propositions so perhaps we'll just have to resign ourselves to a glass of orange juice in the privacy of our homes.

But the pubs will now be thirsting with anticipation and some of us remain extremely dubious about the appropriateness of something that feels as if it could lead to another outbreak of Covid 19. How to explain the logic of heaving pubs full of people within a confined space? Given the sensitive turning point of where we are at the moment surely the re-opening of pubs has to be shelved until such time as safety and security can be ensured. Still, we must place our unwavering faith in Boris Johnson and his jovial Old Etonians. Let the lagers flow.