Jolly Safe Christmas

 The Vaccines should release a Christmas song. I hope they’re working on it already. 

Boris’ head in a tv screen gave another metaphor rich press conference yesterday. I couldn’t stop wondering whether he had trousers on and so I confess that I didn’t listen properly. I somehow imagined boxer shorts with a Hawaiian print. 

“This man has no trousers on!”

Once he’d got over being excited about the Vaccines coming over the brow of the hill, he had to tell everyone it wasn’t over yet. This caused him some trouble, as he wanted to launch into his Winston Churchill impression: Never in the field of human virus fighting has your Prime Minister asked so much of you, etc.

The gist of it seemed to be that a woman on the Oxford team said that they had to develop a vaccine that could be stored in a normal fridge and so we have developed a ‘world beating’ immunisation that is 70% effective. This is less effective than those announced last week but it will be enough to stop the health service becoming overwhelmed. It is also more effective than this year’s flu vaccine (40-60%). 

The he told us that if we want a jolly Christmas then it will end in tiers: it was the only way to have a jolly safe Christmas. He was particularly proud of this bit of language manipulation and had a little chuckle to himself. They are still working out exactly what the tier system will mean, the criteria for tier placement and what relaxations will be made for Christmas but from the leaked information it seems quite well thought out. Reduce as much social mixing as possible but keep things going that encourage good health. Gyms, physios and hairdressers open, places to drink yourself into a stupor closed. It’s not as much fun but I see the logic. 

I was going to write about two tier local authorities (because how can the whole of Essex go into the lower tier of restrictions when you look at Brentwood rates) but there are just too many tiers, all meaning different things and so I’ve confused myself.

I suspect there are also too many tears. 

Last night, as we were taking the dog for an evening walk, there were two police cars outside a house with their flashing lights on, drawing attention to themselves, also blocking a man from getting his car out and telling him he would have to wait. People were hanging out of their windows to look. My daughter flipped into professional journalist mode, took a photo and fired off a request to the Police for information. One of the people hanging out of a window shouted, “Nosey!”  It made us laugh.

We spent the rest of our walk talking about how it was probably just a domestic, chastising ourselves for saying ‘just ‘ a domestic and worrying that the people in that house might not have a jolly safe Christmas, even with a vaccine or tiers.