Oxford vaccine puts UK 'ahead of game' in pandemic says expert
When we drew a red line through every fixture, dream and plan in our diaries we learned, with a sickening thud, that the illusion that all things will remain equal is precisely that. Bang went grandchildren’s birthday parties, weekend breaks, breakfasts with pals and that annual cherished visit to the Chelsea Flower Show. In their place, a vast vacuum of fear and nothingness.
When I recall my cheery insouciance writing this column last year, I am appalled at my own audacity. I wrote with confidence bordering on complacency. I comfortably confided my determination to see more live theatre, walk out of miserable films, visit every one of Britain’s most beautiful beaches, invite batches of chums over to gossip around the kitchen table and dip into a fragrant vat of spag bol. I even, I ruefully recall, extolled the virtues of scaling back, whizzing about less, leaving time and space for peace and reflection.
Little did I know we would all be drowning in the monotony of our own company, frightened witless and unable to sleep, scared of other people’s breath and our own shadows – and hemmed in by horizons so narrow that some of us could barely glimpse the sky.
Here, for what it’s worth, is not what I intend for 2021 but what I hope and pray for my family as well as yours.
At the top of my list is a smooth and efficient roll-out of the vaccine that will be our salvation. Let the vials be frostily frozen. Let the cheap and easy Oxford version be speedily approved. Let the scales fall from the eyes of those anti-vaxxers who would jeopardise our health. Let us be double-jabbed safely and speedily, and let us then live happily ever after.
May we never forget who the key workers are and how crucial their contribution is to our survival. Naturally, we salute NHS workers and all emergency service personnel. Now we must add to our nightly prayers the teachers coughed on by classes of 30 children, the cleaners swabbing surfaces free of infection, the sewage workers, delivery drivers, supermarket warehouse and shelf stackers, funeral directors, haulage overhaul crews, highway maintenance guys and a host of other folk we may have ignored in the past but to whom will now be forever grateful.
Let us have the opportunity to repair relationships cruelly fractured by social distance. We blessed Zoom, then cursed it. We thought we’d love to “catch up” with chums on the phone, then realised because we’d done nothing and been nowhere we had few words to say to them.
Miserably we watched our most intimate connections fall apart.
I want us now to be able to take each other’s presence for granted, to huddle and snuggle, hug and bicker. Trying to nurture closeness with my grandchildren on a windy and rain-sodden Hampstead Heath across the abyss of social distance has been a heck of a stretch. Lord grant us the ingenuity to rebuild shattered affections.
Please satisfy our longing for song, dance, comedy, ballet, opera, football, netball, athletics, festivals and the shining bounty with which sport and the arts adorned our lives. We may have thought we wouldn’t miss them, yet a gaping hole has been left in our souls. Let us flock to stadiums, theatres, cinemas, circuses and tiny over-the-pub venues, and wallow in other people’s prodigious and mesmerising talent.
Frankly, let us just flock together once again. We are birds of a feather. We need proximity to one another. We have had it with our own company. We are thoroughly over ourselves and we crave other people. I don’t care where and I don’t care what I wear. I don’t care about the colour of the curtains. I want to jostle and bustle.
Give us back our sense of humour. Banish the bitter gallows-style jokes we’ve been forced to crack and let us chuckle in an old-fashioned, full-throttled and good-natured way.
Imbue us with the wit and wisdom to retain the good stuff from 2020. There have been chinks and glimmers of glory. Banana bread can be scrumptious.
We loved our tomato plants, found that cycling is a damned good idea and that tidying out our tights drawers pays rich dividends when we’re in a rush in the mornings. Even working from home had its moments.
We may have loathed every second of our voyages of self-discovery and deeply regret the mural we were inspired to paint on the spare bedroom wall, but we’ll never again let the cupboard under the stairs house 18 tins of dried up paint – or will we?
All most of us really yearn for is an infinite chunk of same old, same old. We don’t ask for thrills or dizzy heights, red carpets, world cruises or adulation from besotted crowds.
We’d like to be ourselves again, flawed, boring and pedestrian though we may be. We fancy mooching about shops, poking about at car boot sales, strolling along the beach with our trousers rolled up and bidding farewell to the rotten “new normal” and welcoming back the utterly mundane yet infinitely precious “old normal”.
Imagine the bliss of merely fearing ordinary death from the usual multitude of sources, without the horrible hooks of the vile coronavirus.
I send you, gentle reader, my usual abundance of love and gratitude. If you are bereaved and lost I pray you will find solace and spiritual sustenance. I wish you health, happiness and above all peace of mind in 2021.
Kisses and a happy new year.
"smooth" - Google News
December 29, 2020 at 03:40PM
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A smooth and efficient roll-out of the vaccine will be our salvation says VANESSA FELTZ - Daily Express
"smooth" - Google News
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