All this and more!

 

 

 

 

 

 

My choice of food for the birthday meal in the chosen restaurant was a ‘bocadillo classico’ of chorizo, morcilla (black pudding sausage) and cheese.  And it was tastily spicy, though a little dry, so I added mayonnaise.  The restaurant owner was delighted that I chose something so traditional and everyone else was horrified that I had chosen something so laden with cholesterol!  I have to admit, in spite of the hypocrisy of people questioning my choice while themselves have fatty alternatives, the roll was one of the tastiest that I have had for years.

     The delightfully indulgent theme was continued in the birthday cake that was a chocolate sponge with orange mousse cream, coated in chocolate with the topping of fresh fruit.  Utterly delicious!  The only restraint I showed was in my non-alcoholic beer – and that was purely on medical advice, and not, I hasten to add, in any way my free choice!

     The curfew has now ended, but we did not come back to Castelldefels much later than usual and, as I am now used to going to bed hours earlier than I used to, I was tired when we got home and soon went to bed.

 

There, the foregoing shows that I am capable of writing about something other than Covid and politics, though you will notice that the ‘curfew’ did manage to make an appearance.

 

Part of the fall-out from Toni’s birthday concerns his presents.  I bought him a pair of wireless ear buds to listen to the radio on his phone when he goes for his daily walk but you will be astonished to hear, they have not paired easily with the phone.

     I have yet to get a pair of wireless ear buds that have paired in the ‘automatic’ way that they should.  Much the same goes for smart watches seamlessly pairing with smartphones – ‘tis a consummation devoutly to be wished, rather than anything remotely related to reality.  However, perseverance and a few fugitive tears usually manage to get the necessary results.

     As Toni is of the “why do I need the instructions?” generation, he is usually more intuitively sensitive to the petulant demands of electronic equipment than I, but at present he is claiming major mechanical failure to explain his almost complete lack of success in getting the ear buds to work.  I say ‘almost’ because he has got the ear buds to work, but not both at the same time.  The buds have not spoken or paired with each other – and I have nothing to suggest to resolve the situation.  Eventually, Toni will work out some sort of resolution, but at the moment he is frustrated and generally dismissive of the whole affair.  But it will nag at his technical reputation and he will get them working.  Probably.

The weather recently has not been wonderful; indeed the weather has not been sunnily acceptable for months.  I endured a lacklustre April on the assurance (an explicit assurance by Toni) that the misery of dull days would give way to a brilliantly sun-lit May.  And that has signally not happened.

 

And has still not happened and this is now some days later.  Although it is not raining, it has been trying hard to do so and generally unsettling the sunshine that should be pouring down on us.  But I have faith that the good sunny days are but days away.

 

I hate, have hated, and will always hate the wearing of glasses.  They put pressure in all the wrong facial places and steam up and slip and are generally hateful.  Since I was eighteen I have worn contact lenses, and, as I started wearing them in the hard-plastic era then those of my generation will know that the discomfort of glasses is as nothing to a speck of dust getting behind a lens.

     As I do a lot of reading and typing, it is generally better for me to wear neither glasses nor contact lenses for the best reading experience.  Typing is a little more difficult, but on the computer it is easy to increase the size of the type to accommodate my poor sight and then reduce it to normal size when printing.

     However, from time to time I get fed up with lenses and revert to glasses in spite of my antipathy, and for the last number of months I have worn my glasses.

     I had to visit the optician because of the ill fit of the glasses – to be absolutely fair, this was probably because I have left them on my leg (!) while reading and it is inevitable that some pressure damage will result from complete lack of care.

     Although my optician does such running repairs for nothing, he was obviously missing my injection of cash that the wearing of daily contact lenses brought him from me on a regular basis.  In a discussion about why I wasn’t wearing my lenses, I pointed out that I need varifocal lenses in my glasses to cope with my long and short sightedness.  He was not fazed and said that a new type of varifocal lens was available if I would care to try it.  Never one to reject the spending of money (free trial is never really ‘free’, even I know that) I agreed to give them a go.

     Now, I did go through a period when my optician in Cardiff tried to change my lenses to something more suited to my variable sight. 

     One of the failed experiments was to make each of my eyes do a different job: the left was for reading and the right was for distance.  Or possibly the other way around.  Whatever.  I was told that my brain would sort out the conflicting information and would ‘choose’ the appropriate eye for the task.  It didn’t.

     I also had a bi-focal lens to try too.  That failed entirely as I couldn’t see well at distances and reading was a total disaster.

     So, my agreement to try the lenses has failure built into the experience.  To make matters much, much worse, the lenses were monthly wear rather than the daily wear that I had become used to.

     I have to admit that I never, truly, looked after my lenses properly, so a daily lens that you could insert in the morning and throw away at night seemed ideal for me, and they were soft and easy on the eye too.

     It has only been a few days with the new lenses and I have to admit that I am impressed.  So far.  I have not seen a lens through its life yet, so judgement must be reserved, but they are comfortable and although my sight is not perfect, it does allow me to read, type and see with some clarity.

     People with poor eyesight are prepared to put up with a lot.  You only have to look at the outer surface of a confirmed glasses wearer and note the number of smears, splodges and specks of dirt to be impressed by how many obstructions to clear sight we are able to take in our stride.

     The privations of contact lens wearers are usually epic.  A contact lens wearer will have harrowing stories of pain, loss and miracle that will make non-contact lens wearers doubt their probity, but all those stories are true!  We wear our tales as badges of endurance under tiny bits of plastic!

     It is far too soon to accept these new lenses as anything other than a promising experiment, but it is only when you have experienced the gradual increasing loss of sight through the years, that you will be able to understand the amount of blind (ha!) faith that lens wearers put in each innovation to make their sight sharper.

     My optician assures me that I am now wearing the very latest technology and that the improvements of the lenses from similar ones of only a year ago are remarkable.  Who am I to say?  But I hope he’s right and I further hope that the continuing streams of money that I pay will be justified in clear sight.

 

One side effect of not wearing glasses means that I can wear other glasses.  This is to do with my bike riding.

     Unprotected eyes, even at my gentle speeds, means that all sorts of detritus come smashing onto the eyeball.  Wearing glasses acts as a shield for the various irritations, especially tiny insects, that generally interfere with smooth riding.  So bike glasses were needed.  Which I have.  Somewhere.

      The Royal Hunt of the Eye Protectors eventually unearthed (not literally) some goggles that I had bought on Kickstarter.  The USB of these was they had a Bluetooth connection to my mobile phone and used bone conduction behind the ear to allow sound to come through, but still allowing ambient sounds to flow into unobstructed ears.  As far as my understanding of the traffic rules is concerned, in-ear buds are banned when you are cycling, but bone conduction variants are possibly allowed.  Certainly.  I think.

     I have used them once and listened to a fairly hard-hitting interview on the Today Programme (Radio 4) with a British Conservative minister trying to justify the absurd illogicality of the Covid rules regarding a worrying outbreak of the Indian Variant of Covid and allowing a crowd into a football stadium.  An embarrassing melange of words from the hapless minister did not hide the paucity of thought behind the non-policy of criminally culpable Conservatives.  So the glasses worked.  Frighteningly well.

     The battery life on the glasses is allegedly 6 hours, and other reviews have said that they hold their charge well.

     The only down side was the necessity of changing the visor from a muddy brown to a professional looking blue.  It was not a task that we (it took two of us) will repeat: the visor that is there now stays there.  For ever.  And I am inclined to write a scathing comment on the YouTube film of one reviewer who said, “Changing the lens is easy” and then DID NOT DEMONSTRATE how to do it, merely giving a vague indication of “pinching here and the lens will pop out” – lies and deceit!  However it is done and it adds a touch of professionalism to my altogether sit-up-and-beg style of stolid cycling.

 

Talking of which, where is my new bike?

     I had been warned that its delivery would take about 32 working days (an oddly specific number) but the bike seems to be stubbornly stuck in Poland after having been sent by train (is that likely?) from Hong Kong.  It is now getting to the stage of contacting my contact in the company and asking plaintive questions.

     Oddly enough, the reason for purchasing the new bike has become less moot.  I was having difficulty in dismounting from the vehicle and decided that I needed a ‘walk through’ version to accommodate my lessening agility.  However, I have developed ways of getting on and off the bike that suit my needs.  Furtherly however, I think that the new bike will be short-term-future-proofed.  Or that is what I am telling myself to justify the expense.  As the money has already been paid, it is just a matter of wanting to get my hands on what is mine already.

     I will try the web site again and perhaps things (including my bike) will have moved on.

    I live in hope!

  

 

The slippery eel waddles away!

 

Try as I might, I find myself unable to resist trawling the Guardian for news about the charlatan who is masquerading as the First Lord of the Treasury in the United (ha!) Kingdom.

     As I have made abundantly clear to anyone who will listen to me, I am prepared to pay ready money to anybody who takes the clown to court and presses charges of Corporate Manslaughter against him and his motley crew of degenerate inadequates who make up the Cabinet.

As an integral part of the evidence against the idiot, it would be good to have the crushing conclusions of an independent commission of some sort to bring into court.       The dolt has said that the process of looking into the National Disaster of Covid Unpreparedness will start during this session of Parliament.  And the gibbering loon has further been on the radio and through the usual morass of gibberish he has intimated that the process will actually start in the Spring of next year.  The World At One on BBC Radio 4 managed to find an expert who said that, given the wide-ranging nature of the inquiry it would be unlikely that the final report would be issued for a couple of years.  So, the final report will likely be published, if the corrupt money hoover actually is forced to do so, in 2024/5!  And, of course, as the commission or inquiry or whatever takes its course, the shock-haired charlatan will regard the whole question as ‘parked’ and when the report is finally issued, the nepotistic ethics vacuum will regard the whole question as “past history” – just as he has successfully managed to evade responsibility for the actions of previous Conservative governments over the last decade of which he has been part.

     I am horrified to think that he might actually get away with it – just as he has all the other misdemeanours that have littered his so-called career, both political and personal.

     The results of the council elections show that as long as you keep a straight, or in his case an “engagingly” twinkly eyed face, the electorate will swallow any old rubbish and will, in their droves act like virus voting for vaccine – a truly bad analogy as there the ‘bad’ will be destroyed by their own ignorance . . . oh, wait a minute, the so-called Red Wall voting because they believe the proven liar’s assurances; because they believe that Conservatives actually care for anything north of Watford – perhaps the analogy holds!

     Although I think that politics in England (I stress ‘England’) are rapidly approaching a Through the Looking Glass unreality as logic is divorced from proven actuality, there is always the good old US of A, to show that things could be even worse.  Republicans in Red States are behaving like unsupervised spoilt children wreaking havoc on other children’s sandcastles, except real people are being hurt by the Republicans denial of truth, and the baleful influence of the Floridian Oz is making the Republican Party simply not serious enough to take on the mantle of government.

     Any self-respecting Conservative will (or should) find it impossible to continue supporting a party motivated by a demonstrable lie.  The purging of the party to ensure that all elected party officials are True Believers in the coup inspiring and voter denying Trump means that the choice that Conservative have to make is clear.  If they do not make it, then they will be tainted by association and should be called out and condemned.

     The acceptance and adoption of “illegality” by the British Conservatives in their attempts to preserve power is not something that should comfort democrats (with a small ‘d’) in Britain.  Just as I passionately believe (based on past proof) that the NHS is NOT SAFE in Conservative hands, so I equally passionately believe that the present bunch of unprincipled Conservatives have not and will not be bound by common decency and they will use all the power of their positions to twist, distort and subvert norms and institutions to keep the party in power.

     I think that we are at a pivotal point in the history of the UK: the structure of the country is fracturing and we have a government that essentially couldn’t care less about anywhere other than England.  The small-minded nationalism and the very large lies which fostered the disaster of Brexit are going to be used to justified to change and wreck what we thought might have been solid.  The next few years are going to be a very rough ride!

 

Meanwhile, off to Terrassa for another birthday in the festive orgy of commemoration that is the first part of May!

Where there's a will, there's an injury!

 

 

 

As domestic accidents go, being impaled by an electric toothbrush seems to combine triviality with impossibility.  And yet it drew blood!

     How, you might well ask, did I manage to stab myself with what is a fairly blunt instrument, with the bristles being the sharpest element in the construction? 

     The answer lies in my refusal to pay the inflated prices for the replacement brushes sold by the big-name maker of the toothbrush.  The cheaper alternative that I bought on line did not attach to the vibrating metal spike (the retaining, moving, part of the brush) as securely as it should have done and so it came loose, fell away from the spike and the residual hand pressure brought the spike into my face and into the right hand nasolabial fold - and that is the first time that I have ever written those last two words knowing what they mean.

     Luckily (if that is the word) the colour of the blood merely darkened the shadow of the nasolabial fold (2^nd use) and made me look a tad more mysterious.  I like to think.

     Shaving the next day did not reopen old wounds and so, apart from giving one line on my face a more emphatic outline, no real harm has been done.  And, anyway, I dabbed a bit of TCP on the wound to do its stuff and one can’t really be expected to do very much more in terms of medical care.

 

The month of May is a sort of Family Nexus, where everyone appears to have a birthday or name day and each one of which has to be celebrated.  When I was teaching in Barcelona, this period reminded me of the start of the Autumn Term in the UK which coincided with the start of the WNO Opera Season with a consequent attendance at various performances of WNO in my triple guise of Clarrie’s Friend, Friends of the WNO ‘helper’, and Opera aficionado with an almost fatal deficiency in time allocated for school.  The start of term is the worst possible time to have a multi-tasking crisis, but it did mean that after the start of the season I was able to relax into the frenetic horror of new timetables and making ‘grouping’ work, with something approaching failed-Zen tranquillity.  It is truly amazing how much you can be powered by hysteria!

     Anyway, we have had two birthdays so far: the first in a well-aired living room with mask wearing; the second in a 50% occupancy restaurant with mask wearing and ostentatious hand washing with alcohol, and the third is about to take place tomorrow in the outside terrace of a restaurant in Terrassa.

     The last of those celebrations will not be dovetailed into the time before the curfew as that particular restriction has now been stopped, so in theory we could actually get back to Castelldefels after 10 pm rather than making sure that we did get back before 10 pm with a Toni High Speed Drive of Death, during which I kept most mousey quiet!  But we did get back before 10 pm.  And we did survive.

     The loosening of restrictions is a prickly subject.

     The End of Curfew was officially at midnight last Saturday – so you had the really odd situation that, on Saturday night at 10pm you were expected to be in your home obeying curfew, but two hours later you could, quite legally, go out again to enjoy exercising your “freedom”.

     It is significant that the right wing have framed the Covid restrictions as attacks on “freedoms” and the Zombie of Madrid actually had the temerity and barefaced audacity to run under a banner of “Freedom”.  And, in spite of the astonishing hypocrisy and mendacity – she won!

     But, having painted the relaxing of restrictions as regaining freedom, it was hardly surprising that the younger population of Madrid saw a justified opportunity for celebration, and dully swarmed into the centre of the city and partied as though it was New Year’s Eve.  They did not of course socially distance and many of them were not wearing masks, and a medical expert who witnessed these scenes of mass celebration in Madrid, Barcelona, Sevilla, and other major (and not so major) cities remarked, “We will have to look at the Covid figures in a fortnight” when the new cases of Covid that could result from the ignoring of the on-going pandemic might show themselves.

     At present Madrid has a high rate of occupancy of ICU beds; it has a reasonably high rate of infection – it is a bloody good place NOT to visit, though Parisians have flocked there because as they said, “We can do things and go to restaurants and clubs here that we would not be able to do in France!”  So, Madrid has been accepting visitors from a place with an even higher infection rate in order to boost tourism – but, as always, collateral human damage has never been a disincentive to commercial gain and political advantage for the right.

     Although we are constantly told that the vaccination rate in the country (Spain and Catalonia) is increasing, and the President of Spain was on television yesterday keeping to his assurance that 70% of the population would have had a first jab by the end of the summer, the fact remains that a small proportion of the population has actually been vaccinated and a very small percentage of the population has had the second jab.  I suppose that I am one of the lucky ones, given a late-surgery jab that just happened to be a single dose vaccination.

     The fact remains that we are not prepared for an influx of tourists.  We do not have the virus “under control” and we are in the fourth wave of the pandemic.  The emergence of a new “difficult” variant of the virus would be disastrous as most people are (in spite of evidence to the contrary) looking towards old normality and assuming that the virus is all but beaten.  This is a very dangerous attitude.  And we will pay for it.

 

Although with my single dose vaccination, I should be gaining daily immunity, I am taking no chances.  I still wear my mask at all times that I am out of the house and I continue to wash my hands with Uriah Heep regularity, but with real alcohol soap rather than false sanctimoniousness!  I am very wary when in groups and keep my distance.  I take to heart, “No one is safe, until everyone is safe” and hope that others are as fervent in that belief as I am.

     Not that safety is entirely risk free.

     Today we went out to lunch as we usually do on a Tuesday and, although we deemed it still just a fraction too inclement to eat on the terrace, we were happy enough to eat inside in a reduced capacity restaurant.  Toni is punctilious about hand washing with the ubiquitous 70% alcohol hand wash which is good, but the alcohol soap while disinfecting the hands also gives them a certain slipperiness which was disadvantageous when attempting to move a cup of Coke.  The glass certainly moved, but the contents of the cup moved even quicker and flowed along the tabletop from Toni and into my lap, my meal and my legs.

     Our waiter was one of the old school Spanish waiters (though Indian) and was effortlessly efficient in clearing the table and mopping up.  My meal was taken away, and I was given an extra portion of Catalan tomato and garlic bread to keep me happy while my meal was re-plated.

     The one good thing to come of this is that I will have to wash my shorts.  The shorts are new, and red - so the Coke did not stain, or not visibly at least.  They are also too big, and that brings me to our late PM Mrs May.  During her sad Brexit-fuelled decline, as the more rabid parts of her party turned on her in an orgy of self-delusion and lies, she was described by John Crace in the Guardian (and if it were not he, then it is something he certainly could have said) as having the same authority as the “Do not tumble dry” instruction on a garment.

     If clothes cannot be tumble-dried then they should be thrown out.  I therefore buy T shirts and shorts deliberately large on the expectation of shrinkage when they ARE tumble-dried.  So, if my super plan is correct, the Coke defiling will ensure that the clean shorts are a snugger fit.

     Never let it be said that I cannot find something positive in the most trivially negative irritations!

No more excuses - you've got to blame the people!

 

My full-time teaching career started with my going for interview in Kettering, a town in Northamptonshire of which I had not previously heard.  (As I was an aspiring English teacher, I do hope you appreciated my not ending the last sentence with a preposition.)  Anyway, I got the job in what was then Kettering Boys’ Grammar School, but which had become Kettering Boys’ School by the time I took up my post.  I spent a year and a bit there learning my craft and finding out that full-time teaching was a truly demanding job.

     I had long moved back to Cardiff when the Northampton that I knew went, I’m tempted to say pear-shaped, but that image is not grotesque enough for what actually happened to the political landscape.

     This link will take you to a lucid explanation of the appalling mismanagement of the council resulting in its bankruptcy: https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-northamptonshire-56488909

     In the recent elections, the electorate of the two new political entities that were formed from the rubble of what had been destroyed by the past administrations, saw fit to vote majorities to the Conservatives – the party which caused all the trouble in the first place.  The electorate have AGAIN voted for people who callously and viciously made their lives much, much worse through criminal mismanagement of public funds.

     Why?

   That plaintive question has been echoing through my mind as I have considered the decisions the electorate have made not only in Britain but also here in Spain.

     We have recently had elections for the council in Madrid and the electorate here have voted (in a record turnout) for a council which will be made up of PP and Vox.  The first of those, PP, is the most corrupt political party in Western Europe – and that is not my prejudice speaking, just type in  “PP in Spain corruption” and you will find a shockingly wide breadth of coverage of what is almost comical illegal behaviour.

     If you want to be more specific then you could search for “PP Corruption in Madrid” and you might come across something like, https://elpais.com/ccaa/2018/09/30/madrid/1538326069_865164.html

Where, even if you don’t understand Spanish, it doesn’t take much to make out what the headline “La década viciosa de Madrid” might mean, and you will be able to see some of the unsavoury characters who have defiled the city over the last ten years.

     And people voted for them!  Again!

     In a 71% turnout, 44.7% voted for PP!  The other party that the corrupt and corrupting PP will govern with is Vox.  Vox is usually described as a “far right” party, but it is simpler and more realistic to consider them as Franco supporting fascists.  Their pronouncements and policies are repugnant.  They are rabble rousing scum.  And they have pledged to support PP “to keep the left out”.  If you add the 9.1% of the electorate who voted for Vox  to the 44.7% who voted for PP, you have a clear majority of the voters choosing right wingers and fascists to form their government of choice!

     By way of comparison, in the Catalan parliament out of 41 representatives, only 2 members of PP were elected! 

     Catalonia truly is another country!

    

     Meanwhile in Britain, the third-rate incompetents, bullies and liars who comprise the ‘government’ of Johnson, the liar-in-chief, are gifted with gains.  Hartlepool, which has been a Labour voting constituency since its inception votes Conservative.  Admittedly, it was an area which overwhelmingly voted for Brexit and presumably, the voters have seen or heard nothing negative enough with the lies of Johnson, and the criminal mishandling of the Covid response, or the Brexit train-crash of financial and social disaster to make them doubt the positivity of voting for a shameless narcissist and his corrupt crew!

     If Johnson had been watching European politics (as if!) then he would probably be considering a snap General Election.  The Zombie leader of the PPs in Madrid has shown just how much an electorate can ignore when they are asked to put their cross next to a party which is corrupt, selfish, criminal, menial, duplicitous, mendacious, uncaring, and all the other insulting adjectives that come to mind in describing your typical Conservative, no matter whether it be in Spain on in the UK.

     God help us all!

 

Tomorrow is Toni’s birthday.  The Family will be arriving in instalments and we should have a good celebration.  Perhaps then I will be in a more mellow mood and my writing might reflect that.

     We’ll see!

 

 

    

Get that arm ready!

 

 

 

Yet another case of not what you know but who you know. 

     This is in relation to getting the jab against Covid-19.  I am now in one of the groups that has been “called” to make an appointment to bet the jab, however when I got onto the appropriate page on the web, I discovered that all the “massive” vaccination centres were way outside my town.  I also know that my local CAP is a vaccination centre, but that didn’t figure in the list that I was able to access.

    On asking a swimming friend if he had been vaccinated and evincing some surprise when he answered in the affirmative, I was encouraged to ignore the web site that I had been directed towards and go instead to a telephone number for the Generalitat and “let them sort it all out”.

     As this was the first working day since his advice I, with Toni’s help, have done as he suggested and I have been assured that I will be contacted “today” with details of the centre that I can access.  I have faith that they will do as they say.  I can be touchingly innocent sometimes!  But we will see.

 

The weather, which has been particularly bloody for over a month, is generally better today, with the sun doing its best to convince doubters that the month is actually May and not November.

     I mark the start of Real Summer with my first immersion in the communal pool.  Although the young Viral Assassins of next door have thrown themselves into the glacial waters on a number of occasions, I do not think that authentic humans will follow them for some time – bearing in mind that there has to be hot weather for a week or so to allow the body of water in our pool to heat up a little and lose its more heart failure inducing qualities. 

     I am still uncertain about our foray to Terrassa the day after tomorrow for the first Family Occasion for over a year – the first time that the two of us will have been outside our area and visiting other people.

     This is a foretaste of the freedom (or should that be “freedom”) that will develop over the next few months.  I do share a desire to get back to normality, but

 

 

-       -   Dramatic break   -

 

Just had a telephone call and now have an appointment for 3pm on Saturday to have my first injection.  It is not here in Castelldefels, but in a Massive Vaccination Centre in Cornellà, which is one of the places that I passed through day after day when I was teaching in Barcelona.  It is now a case of finding out exactly where the centre is and being prepared to Make A Day Of It, to celebrate the start of my protection against Covid!

 

-       -   Dramatic break   -

 

No sooner had we had lunch than there was a phone call from my local CAP asking if I wanted to have the jab and could I make it to the CAP within 30 minutes.  Hysterically saying, “YES!” to everything, I got on my bike and sped off.

     Although I had thoughtfully brought my collapsible shooting stick with me, I had no time to use it as I was ushered, immediately I arrived in the CAP, into a deserted injection room and, barely had I got one arm out of my coat and my T-shirt rolled up, than a doctor appeared and I had the shot post haste.

     To my utter delight (apart from having the shot) it turned out that the vaccine that I had been given was the Johnson & Johnson Jenssen Jab – a single dose vaccine!  I’m done!

 

 

     Putting all the circumstances together: time; deserted rooms; instant reception; speed of delivery – it seems fairly clear that the telephone call I had was one that was part of a procedure to try and ensure that all available doses were used.  I suspect that my “instant” vaccination was using up an end-of-surgery dose: either it went into my arm or the bin. 

     But I don’t care.  I have, at long last, been vaccinated and I can now start counting the days to optimum protection – which is about a month. 

     And I don’t have the inconvenience of finding time for a second jab! 

     Hooray!