Vaccines done and jab complete.

 Vaccines done and jab complete. 

You'd have thought they'd have given us a cup of tea and a biscuit after the trials and tribulations of being vaccinated this morning. But my wife and I were successfully given the Covid 19 vaccine and we survived the experience quite comfortably. So far neither of us have either fainted, gone to bed with raging Yellow Fever or a sudden onset of malaria. We are here on the afternoon after the morning before and any initial fears and reservations we may have had about subjecting ourselves to the jab, were promptly dismissed from our minds. 

In a corner of  Hackney in London Fields, England, a military-style vaccination centre that looked remarkably like that field hospital in that long-ago TV hit comedy MASH, a scene of organised chaos. We took our turns to be administered with the Oxford vaccine, a mere pin-prick in the arm admittedly but mildly disconcerting since most of us thought we'd just get away with that simple flu jab last autumn. This though was something much more serious and critical. We'd braced ourselves for this ultimate protection against a Covid 19 recurrence at the end of this year but let's take one step at a time. 

We must pray that once the nation has been injected with the Covid 19 vaccine the despicable virus will just vanish overnight and never ever come back. The country is well and truly sick and tired of this endless medical crisis so to speak. But today most of my wonderful family have now received the vaccine and all we can do now is to sit and wait patiently. Because there is a nagging suspicion that this may not be the ultimate antidote to our ills and now we'll just have to grit our teeth, be brave and hope for the best.  Be prepared for the boosters to the vaccine. 

As soon as we arrived at this gleaming new vaccination centre in Hackney we somehow knew that red tape and cold bureaucracy would present us with problems, obstacles and hoops that had to be overcome. On entering the building we were told to hand sanitise- for only the 38,000th time. It has to be said that your hands have never been cleaner and as you opened up your palm and were given the bar code treatment you then progressed to a series of questions from the eminent members of the Royal Air Force where your documents, shopping list, bags, shoes and socks were all rigorously checked. 

But seriously this morning's life-defining vaccine couldn't have come at a better time. For almost a year we've been wrestling with and agonising over that elusive vaccine. That's the one. You couldn't be sure but it did seem that you were given four different vaccine options which were all superbly effective although the rumours were rife that some were more potentially problematic if only for a while.

 We were told by our friend from the Royal Air Force that we would still be prone to the shakes, shivers, fevers or just a plain old headache that could be temporarily painful but would soon be relieved by another appearance from Boris Johnson, live at tea time from Downing Street. Still, beggars can't be choosers. It could be far worse. But the gentleman from the RAF was extremely reassuring and as long as we didn't have second thoughts about the vaccine everything would be hunky-dory. 

We found ourselves wandering around this hastily built vaccine surgery and kept looking for Alan Alda and Red Cross vans. All around us were men and women with masks and those, quite rebelliously, without masks. It was hard to say who looked the silliest but this was for a wonderful cause so who were we to complain? Those light blue surgical masks always look as if all they need is a scalpel, an operating theatre and a group of industrious doctors for whom we owe an enormous debt of gratitude and can never be properly recognised enough. They are the ones at the coalface and they are the heroes and heroines at every level of society. 

Still, here we were finally at the end of the procedure, ushered towards a private cubicle where the needle was planted and a whole North London suburb could blow out their cheeks. What an ordeal although that may be an exaggeration since we're all in the same boat. This is one predicament we can all identify with because this has been one, long hard slog. We are not psychologically traumatised but our minds have taken a severe beating. 

The fact is though that we've had our vaccine although there was a cautionary tale. You have to come back in 11 weeks time for a vaccine booster. So this was just a preliminary stab in the arm because there are more to come.  Surely not. And yet the sooner this is over the better for all concerned. Another period of confinement, self-isolation, remoteness and apartness is barely imaginable. This may be the right time for being grateful, increasingly more tolerant and understanding because we could be detained for just a while longer. Tony Hancock may not have seen the funny side of this virus but then again this has been going for far longer than half -an hour. A biscuit would not go amiss. Keep well everybody, stay at home and three cheers for the NHS. They are indeed angels.