Another prick

 The last time I wrote about covid was shortly after I'd had the first of two vaccine injections back in April. Subsequently, on 30th June, I had a second one. That was that, I was led to believe, no more covid worries, herd immunity, get on with your life and all that gumph. Well here we are in December and I'm waiting for a booster. It's booked for 7th January and I'm not feeling great about it.

When they were first talked about, it was my understanding that booster vaccines were for the elderly and the vulnerable but the government are now pushing a huge roll out to everybody. There've even been glimmers of discussion around mandatory vaccination which has already begun in other countries and which fills me with horror. The horror does not come from the vaccination itself, after all I've had two willingly and I'm signed up for a third, but from the possibility of the state mandating what I put in my own body. It infuriates me that the law tells me what I'm not allowed to put in my body but to be considering a situation where people are being forced to have a vaccination, sometimes against their will, is abhorrent to me.

The booster 'push' has been expedited because of a relatively new variant of the virus which started in southern Africa, called Omicron. This variant is potentially transmitted more easily that others, including the Delta variant, and that appears to be the driving force. Not being a virologist I thought I'd read a bit about this new variant to understand why there's so much fuss about it, so I Googled it and went to the World Health Organization's website. 

This is what I read: Transmissibility: It is not yet clear whether Omicron is more transmissible (e.g., more easily spread from person to person) compared to other variants, including Delta. The number of people testing positive has risen in areas of South Africa affected by this variant, but epidemiologic studies are underway to understand if it is because of Omicron or other factors.

Followed by: Severity of disease: It is not yet clear whether infection with Omicron causes more severe disease compared to infections with other variants, including Delta.  Preliminary data suggests that there are increasing rates of hospitalization in South Africa, but this may be due to increasing overall numbers of people becoming infected, rather than a result of specific infection with Omicron.  There is currently no information to suggest that symptoms associated with Omicron are different from those from other variants.

And then: Effectiveness of vaccines: WHO is working with technical partners to understand the potential impact of this variant on our existing countermeasures, including vaccines. Vaccines remain critical to reducing severe disease and death, including against the dominant circulating variant, Delta. Current vaccines remain effective against severe disease and death.

Current vaccines remain effective against severe disease and death. 

So why, I ask myself, are we being told by the government that we should work from home again, and use a vaccine passport when going to a club, under what they are calling Plan B? And why are they drawing up Plan C to track people going to pubs and such? It makes no sense to me. Especially as it's unknown how severe this variant is. 

I've been vaccinated, practically everybody I know has been, and those that haven't have chosen that risk. Deaths of people with coronavirus — and I make a point of saying they are deaths of people with coronavirus, not from it — are down by 90% from the peak last winter (almost a year ago) and hospitalisation from the virus is rare amongst vaccinated people. So why the restrictions on liberties? And how many more times is this going to happen? 

The vaccination was the key to our freedoms and yet, despite the immense success of the programme, our freedoms are still being limited. Frustratingly they're being limited by a government that is repeatedly proving itself to be untrustworthy and lacking in integrity as bit by bit revelations of rule breaking and mid-lockdown parties leak out.

I had the job of cancelling our work Christmas party last week and it was a sorry affair because as I was doing that, thousands of others were doing the same thing around the country. I could almost hear the hospitality industry groaning in despair. These new restrictions and the fear that's being instilled in people will put companies out of business and people out of work, and yet I read time and again that the new variant is mild or, at worst, an unknown quantity. There are a lot of 'just in case' actions being taken and I don't like it. It smacks of politics. The government can't be seen to be the people that let folk die of covid (understandable) yet the longer term affects of missed diagnoses, delayed treatments by a health service prioritising covid boosters over many other appointments, or the surge in deaths from alcohol for example will, I suspect, be far further reaching.

* * *

Since I started writing this blog a couple of days ago the PM has announced a major push in booster vaccines. One million jabs a day to get everyone fixed by the new year. Now we see on the news people queuing for hours on end (two, three, four hours at a time), the NHS working at full tilt to accommodate it and lateral flow tests, which people are offered free of charge, have run out. This coincides with the first studies, coming out of South Africa, which conclude the risk of hospitalisation with the Omicron variant is significantly lower than with the Wuhan strain or the Delta strain.

It feels to me like the government has overreacted and caused panic; I've decided not to bring my booster vaccination date forward.

Of course, these could be the last words of an idiot. I might catch the new variant and be the second person to die of it. The country might crumble under the economic and social strains brought about by Omicron and this could quite simply be the beginning of the end. Let's hope not, eh?

Then there's the media commotion. These two articles are both on the home page of the Telegraph today. So what are we to believe — serious peril or no worse than flu? It also feels like there's a lot of contradiction which is confusing. No wonder the panic.  

 

It's all just so miserable, after nearly two years of this it feels like the end is continually being kicked down the road and that people have settled with this new state of affairs. Maybe that's why I'm finding it so difficult to accept the new restrictions and why it feels like another lockdown by stealth. I appear to be in the minority.

The Day We Got Married

After meeting each other over twenty-five years ago, Chris and I tied the knot on 24th July 2021. He’d asked me back in September 2019 when we were in Sitges, near Barcelona. We were there for Charles and Paul’s wedding and we’d rented a beautiful apartment in the centre of town with Kaz, LP, Sarah, and Steve. We were very drunk when he asked, having just got back from the party. He got carried away and asked me there, in front of everyone, instead of the following day over brunch as he’d planned. Obviously I agreed.

Because of the pandemic, we had to cancel our original plans for 2020 and the wedding was nearly two years after the proposal. We married at Manchester Register Office just off Albert Square at one o’clock in the afternoon in a scaled back service with far fewer guests than anticipated.

We're getting there

Chris had arranged for his parents and his auntie and uncle to come to our house that morning so they could leave their car and get a taxi into town together. About an hour before they were due, I said goodbye to Chris, jumped in a cab with our overnight bags and headed for Portland Street. I met Alison and Nicola at their hotel, dumped the bags, checked Nick’s dress for see-through-ability (it was fine), and we set off across town.

They asked me how I felt and whilst there was a slight nervousness, accompanied by a dry mouth, I was in pretty fine fettle. I talked a lot — a habit I have when I get over excited — but so did they, and we chattered away as we made our way to Albert Square.

We’d arranged to meet our small wedding party in a bar beforehand, mostly to make sure everyone arrived on time, so that’s where we went. Our first choice of rendezvous was the Albert Square Chop House, but sadly it had succumbed to the pressures of forced closure in the wake of covid. Instead, we chose The Slug & Lettuce. Having had an unfortunate run in with a real life slug in a piece of lettuce I was eating at their Clerkenwell venue some twenty years earlier, I was cautious. I needn’t have been; it was just a couple of drinks and it was great.

Alan was the first person there, waiting as I walked in with Alison and Nicola. My cousin Sarah soon joined us, then John and Peter, Charles and Paul, Kaz and LP, and eventually Wendy, who had managed to go to the wrong bar — there being more than one Slug & Lettuce in town.

A couple of pints of lager settled what nervousness remained pretty quickly, and I found myself already enjoying being in the company of some of our closest friends. My only remaining concern was that Chris and his folks would be late. I’ve seen what they’re all like (Chris included) and knew that this was not outside the realm of possibility. I needn’t have worried as shortly afterwards they all piled into the pub (through a fire escape door) unusually ahead of schedule.

Masks and metaphors

Ten to one came and we gathered everyone together. A quick walk around the corner and a photograph of the group outside the register office, and we were ready to go. Heron House has a set of rooms called the Pankhurst Suite, which is where marriages take place. There’s a waiting room to the left, the ceremony room to the right and sandwiched between them, a narrow anteroom where the couple enters at one end and exits into the ceremony room at the other. Like a metaphor for closing the door on an old life and entering a new one — only with stackable chairs, a narrow shelf to put your accoutrements on while you checked yourself in a mirror, and ceiling tiles.

We left the gang in the waiting room as Chris and I went through some last points with a member of the team. Resplendent in a black polyester trouser suit and somewhat muffled by her face mask, she ran through a bunch of standard questions such as our parent’s names and our dates of birth, before checking things like who the witnesses to the marriage were going to be and if we were having music. I assumed this was a matter of belts and braces for them, as we’d already submitted the information in an online planner beforehand, so I played along.

It was at this point I seemed to take the lead in the conversation, which is fine but slightly unusual. Chris was quiet and unsure of his words. He was nervous. Chris never gets nervous — I’ve seen him stand on a stage in Heaton Park and introduce pop bands to an audience in the tens of thousands without breaking a sweat. This was significant.

I called Charles in to set up the speaker, as he was in charge of the music, then with everything arranged and agreed, we slipped off to the anteroom, where we met the senior registrar who was to conduct the ceremony. Like a well-greased piece of machinery, the masked assistant moved our guests from the waiting room to the ceremony room. They settled themselves as we shuffled down to the back door of the metaphor room, where we were to enter into our new life.

With everyone seated, the senior registrar motioned to her assistant from the front of the ceremony room. “Ready?” she asked. Chris and I looked at each other and nodded just as the first piece of music started.

In sickness and in health

We walked to the front of the room, through our collection of friends and family, to the opening bars of Love Need and Want You. The music abruptly stopped, halfway through Patti LaBelle’s first line, as we arrived at our chairs for the ceremony and the room fell silent.

These still being the times of covid-19 precautions, the registrar welcomed everybody from behind a perspex screen and asked everybody to take a seat. Naturally, I sat down with everyone else and had to be reminded that this was my bit and I should remain on my feet.

I forget the exact order of ceremony, but the registrar took time to remind everyone of the importance of marriage and talked about its meaning, before asking if anybody knew why we shouldn’t marry. This was Alan’s cue to make sputtering noises and mumbled remarks, which got a laugh from the room and broke the tension.

Kaz was invited to the front to deliver her reading — though notably she wasn’t given space in the covid booth. The registrar kept that for herself. She spoke softly, through nerves I suspect, but Chris and I could hear everything. She read from Louis de Bernières’ Captain Correlli’s Mandolin, a passage beginning Love is a temporary madness, about the longevity and depth of a relationship which was apt given how many years we’ve been together.

We made our vows to each other with one small interruption as Chris’s dad said, in a relatively loud voice, “Can I take my hat off now?” his condition overriding the conventions of quietness at a crucial moment and offering gentle relief from the solemnity.

Finally, we exchanged rings — Paul was our ring bearer — accompanied by the traditional promises to love, honour and… I forget what else.

Chris remained nervous throughout the ceremony, whereas I was having a whale of a time! We signed the register, followed by our witnesses, Alison and Chris’s mum, Maureen, to the sound of Sade singing No Ordinary Love, a song Chris and I remember from our first date back in 1996 and which Alison roundly refers to as sex music.

The registrar and Masky scuttled off to prepare the certificate and accompanying paperwork, so we took the opportunity to have a few photographs. LP was our photographer for the day, a wedding gift from him to us. We didn’t want anything formal, so we have a few shots of the group together and a couple with Chris’s parents. You can tell we’d not planned this as we all either look like a corralled rabble or as if we’re about to face a firing squad against the wall.



Eventually the registrar returned, gave us our wedding certificate, and we all left to the sounds of Natalie Cole singing This Will Be — the uplifting exit music we’d wanted. Charles, still wielding the speaker and therefore the power, followed with a quick blast of I’m Coming Out by Diana Ross as we spilled into the street.

Party time

From Albert Square it was a walk across town to Velvet on Canal Street. I went ahead with Alison and Nicola so we could go to their hotel and collect our bags. Unfortunately, this caused some confusion because we didn’t realise anyone was following us. One of our guests got utterly lost and wandered off towards Piccadilly Station after we’d ducked into the hotel unnoticed. Lucky for him, he didn’t find himself on a train to Hazel Grove, or wandering unwittingly towards Ardwick Green.

I eventually made it to Velvet with Alison and Nicola and the bags which a member of the Velvet team whisked away and stashed in our bedroom. Chris’s auntie was on the phone guiding her husband back from his wanderings and within minutes he arrived, wide eyed and refreshed from a quick detour around town. The group was one again.

We had reserved a long table outside and laid on a few jugs of Pimms as a livener before lunch. It quickly became apparent that we'd miscalculated and this would not be enough for our thirsty gang. Finding myself without a drink at all, I ordered another jug. Maureen then ordered a couple more, and Paul asked for another three. Finally, with enough to go round, the party settled down to lively chatter.

We went into the restaurant just before three o’clock and enjoyed a three course meal. The table was set out beautifully with our little boxes of sweets, chocolates, and party poppers. We’d also given everyone an envelope containing a lottery ticket — Chris won three quid. I suspect that was the biggest haul.

We started with sharing platters of goat cheese and fig crostinis, bread and hummus, olives, tomatoes, cold meats and other goodies, which went down a storm. Next up, the main course, was a choice of chicken and prosciutto, mushroom risotto or steak frites.

We’d asked Charles to make a toast before the pudding came out. He took his place and spoke about us, our relationship, our families and so on before asking everyone to raise a glass. Paul was incredibly generous and arranged a magnum of Veuve Clicquot champagne for the toast which we sipped out of coupes, feeling fancy.

Pudding was lemon tart — by far the runaway favourite — chocolate cheesecake, which I had, or sticky toffee pudding. Finally stuffed and suitably well oiled, we left the restaurant and headed back out to the street, where we spent the rest of the evening.

Small but perfectly formed

Given the ever changing restrictions on gatherings this year, we’d kept everything purposefully low key. Our original plan for sixty or seventy people at a big bash had to change. Our wedding party was small and the last minute invitation to those who live in Manchester to join us after lunch went along the lines of: ‘If you’re in town, and you can make it, come and have a beer with us, think of it as a drop-in centre.’ There are lots of people we would have loved to be there, but we’ll just have to celebrate with them when we see them next.

Bit by bit, friends appeared to celebrate with us and before we knew it, our numbers had more than doubled. There were colleagues of mine, old and new friends, people we’ve got to know over years of dancing and nightclubs, and generally a lovely rabble of folk. One of my abiding memories of the entire day was the warmth of being surrounded by friends.

Sarah had been incredibly generous and booked us into a room at Velvet Hotel. As the whole wedding was in the bar and restaurant below, the manager, Rich, had kindly upgraded us to a balcony room overlooking the street. The room was sumptuous, and the bed had petals scattered in the shape of a heart across it. The bathroom was smart in white marble and the balcony looked straight down onto our group of friends below.

Most people stayed with us well into the evening but eventually we were left with a few hardcore guests and someone suggested we try New York New York for a dance. Kaz, LP, and Sarah went ahead, and we gathered a group of about ten and trekked over. Eventually inside, we stayed for one drink and a quick dance but decided it was too busy and just too NYNY for us that night and most of us left.

We said goodbye to Alison and Nicola, who went back to their hotel, and to Nigel and Rachel, who went home. We left Kaz, LP and Sarah on the dancefloor and packed Liam off to the lesbian bar with a girl who was a friend of Rich’s and who had stayed with us after he and Louis had gone home. I understand there were shenanigans there, but you’ll have to ask me about that when you see me. Better still, ask Liam.

Eventually, on our own, Chris and I went back to Velvet, into the bar and spent an hour dancing before retiring to our bedroom for the night, exhausted and happy. It was a long day that we’ll remember forever.

Marriage

I’d never expected to get married. It wasn’t something we’d ever discussed, but I’m glad we did. The party was ace, and it was a firm reminder of the importance of the people we have around us that make up our lives. I don’t know if I feel any different right now. After all, we’ve been together forever, and that was never going to change. What I will say is that I think it’s an important commitment to make to one another and marriage is certainly more than ‘just a piece of paper.’ It’s a declaration, a stake in the ground. This is ours and it’s important enough to mark it with a ceremony and to make sure other people know about it.

My fridge

The salad drawer of my fridge is much like that farm in the countryside where parents tell their kids an elderly and much loved family pet is going to spend the last days of their lives. 

A place where vegetables and salad leaves are supposed to enjoy their twilight years before becoming part of a beautiful and nutritious dinner, appreciated for its freshness and tastiness by me and Chris. 

The reality, however, is far more sinister. Much of what enters my fridge, after Tesco has delivered the groceries on a Thursday night, is immediately forgotten about. Hidden in the recesses of the refrigerator it shrivels up and dies, often leaving a puddle of putrid gunk behind in which the other vegetables marinate until they too meet their undignified fate.

Have you ever seen fungus growing on mushrooms? I have — it’s like something out of Inception. The plethora of shrivelled up radishes that seem to permanently populate the bottom of the cabinet, seemingly manifest from nowhere simply to expire at the bottom of my fridge like hard red eyeballs. I recently found a long forgotten cucumber which had liquefied inside its cellophane sheath and was dripping out of a hole in the end. It was grim.

Ultimately, these rotting cadavers are flung mercilessly into the green recycling bin which sits outside our kitchen door. It’s here they start a new life, for inside the green bin the rotting food begins a new life-cycle and it’s like something out of a sci-fi film. What begins as a squashy courgette or a blackened cauliflower eventually re-emerges as a living being. 

The rotting groceries, accompanied by garden waste and cheered on by swarms of marauding flies, metamorphosised into colonies of sentient beings. Mobile beasts which seem to be conscious but have no discernible head, body or anus for that matter. At this point, if the bin men haven’t collected the recycling yet, they start their ascent up the inside of the wheelie bin in their first move towards freedom, whereupon they intend to enact their revenge upon mankind (me).

Thankfully, the bin men come every fortnight so we’ve not quite reached that stage yet but I tell you, it’ll happen one day. And woe betide anyone in the vicinity as a Cronenbergesque creature emerges from the darkness and slobbers its fridge juices down their unsuspecting face.

Sharp Scratch

            No blog spanning the Covid-19 crisis would be worth its salt without a mention of my vaccination. At this stage I have had one of two injections. I am 45 years old and that first vaccination was on 28th April 2021.

I booked both appointments online on 16th April and had a choice of places I could go to. I’d tried to secure appointments before that but could only get the first one and the system wouldn’t allow you to just have one, so I had to give up and try again a week later. This time the choice of clinics (for want of a better word) was different and there was more choice.

The place I picked was Whalley Range Tennis and Cricket Club in South Manchester. It’s about a twenty-minute walk from home and I chose it because I didn’t know there was a tennis club in Whalley Range and I was being nosey.

As usual, I set off early and marched there with the help of Google maps. Also, as usual, I arrived early. I thought I’d just hang around outside, take some pictures, and wander aimlessly, but as I approached the gates to the club’s grounds a masked woman approached me and asked if I had an appointment.

            “Yes, but I’m fifteen minutes early,” I explained.

            “Dun’t matter,” she replied. “Come on in. The more the merrier!” From the way her eyebrows lifted and the cock of her head, I assume she was smiling. But you never know these days, do you?

I fished a blue paper mask out of my pocket, stashed my headphones away, and entered the building. 

            “Just stand on the red dot,” she called after me as I went through the doors.

Another (possibly) smiling woman sat at a computer. She greeted me. 

“Good morning,” she said enthusiastically.

“Hello,” I replied, conscious of how far away from her I was standing.

“What name is it?” 

“Richard Douglas,” I called over.

“Date of birth?” I didn’t like the idea of yelling all my personals across a room. You never know which horrors are going to steal your identity while they’re having a Covid jab.

“It’s alright, you can come closer,” she offered.

I noticed they had rebranded the whole place as a vaccination centre, and not just by putting a few posters up. The walls were not the walls of the club but new walls that had been shipped in to create a clinic. They had brought the desk in, there were cubicles with curtains and retractable barriers to guide you in the right direction which had no place in the Whalley Range Tennis and Cricket Club.

Information proffered, the woman pointed towards the barriers which formed a snaking line of only a few feet towards a couple of shallow steps. 

“Follow the line,” she said, “and stand on the red dot.”

I did as she asked me. It occurred to me that this must be what sheep must go through when they’re getting ready to be dipped. 

A third masked woman approached me and asked me a question. I forget what it was now because I was distracted. It might have been if this was my first or second vaccine, it could as easily have been had I eaten this morning or what my star sign was. By this stage, though, I was fixated on the booths. There were five of them with curtains, and behind each a clinician and somebody receiving their inoculation. I wanted to hear what they were saying, and I wondered if I was allowed to take photographs. I decided that I probably wasn’t, so I then began wondering how I could take pictures without anybody noticing.

The third masked woman asked me to go down the two shallow steps which faced the booths and stand in a separate section the size of a cardboard box which separated each of us from the others and helped them keep track of the sheep dipping order. 

“Stand on the red dot, please,” she said.

            This was my chance. The tiny little area I stood in was shielded sufficiently for me to snap a photograph. With hindsight I can’t say it was a complete success, but I’ll now never forget the shade of beige of those curtains. Just as I got the pic, masked woman three walked towards me again and I pocketed my phone. 

“You’re next,” she said. I was sure she’d caught me and I detected an almost imperceptible squint in her eyes. If I had to, I’d put money on her judgementally curling her top lip at me from behind the mask.

“Next please,” came a voice and masked woman three looked at me, nodded towards a curtain and said, “Please.”  

Inside the booth was a tall black man. He put his hands together as if praying and bowed a tiny bow to me.

“Hiya,” I said, too enthusiastically.

“How are you?” he asked.

“I’m great thanks, how are you?”

“Very good,” he replied smoothly. I couldn’t quite put my finger on his accent, African with a bit of French, which doesn’t narrow it down very much at all. 

“Which arm would you like it in?” he asked.

“Does it matter?” I replied then immediately thought I should just choose left because I’m right handed and I’d heard the stories about dead arms..

“Are you right-handed or left-handed?” He’d beaten me to it.

“Right,” I confirmed. “Shall we go with left then?”

“Very good,” he replied. I didn’t see his eyes roll, but I could sense it.

I don’t have a problem with needles, in principle, although the ones my dentist uses I’m sure are as thick as drinking straws and not only go into my gum but through my jaw bone before poking their way out of the back of my head. Dentist needles notwithstanding, I was fine, still, I don’t particularly like watching them go in so I pulled my tee shirt sleeve up above my shoulder, offered him my arm and turned away.

“Sharp scratch,” he said. “There, that’s it.” 

I didn’t even feel it, never mind a sharp scratch. Had he even injected me, or was I to be some kind of experiment? The one person they didn’t vaccinate as a test to see if Covid is merely psychosomatic. 

“Oh, is that it?” I said. “Thank you.” I put my jacket back on, the clinician put his sharps away, turned to me and once more bowed, his hands pressed together at the palms.

I drew the curtain back and flinched as I saw masked woman three standing in front of me again looking up at my face. “This way,” she instructed. “Follow the red dots,” before abandoning me to go back to her sheep dip duties.

I wandered through a waiting room towards the doors at the back of the club, where yet another masked woman accosted me.

“Did you drive here?” she asked. I guessed she wasn’t offering to bring my car round.

“No,” I replied, “I walked. Very quickly as it happens, I was fifteen minutes early.”

This woman definitely squinted at me before saying, “If you drove you need to wait fifteen minutes before you leave.”

“Right,” I said cautiously. “But I walked.”

“Five minutes then,” she said. “You can wait in here or go out there.”

It being a lovely morning, weather-wise, I thought I’d wait outside. I exited into a covered marquee with lots of chairs and a few tables. A handful of people were sitting there, all at a minimum of two metres apart, one of them, an enormous man, hunched over, staring at the ground and puffing away on a cigarette. I decided that I’d go to the actual outdoors instead of what had become a temporary smoking shelter, so I grabbed a seat on a park bench and reached in my pocket for my phone.

My surreptitiously snapped picture of the booths disappointed me, and I chastised myself for not asking the bowing clinician if I could take a photograph with him. I forgave myself when I realised he had better things to do than pose for a selfie with me. 

I switched on Duolingo — if I was being forced to wait for five minutes I might as well be productive and carry on my Spanish lessons. I got as far as typing in ‘Mi gato es muy bonito’ when masked woman four came over.

“First or second?” she asked. “Jab,” she clarified.

“First,” I replied. “Why do we have to wait here afterwards?”

“In case you have side effects.”

“Oh, like fainting?”

“Yeah, or a blood clot or anaphylactic shock.”

“Goodness.”

“We’ve not had any,” she reassured me.

“That’s lucky,” I said, and we fell into silence.

She drifted away and collared another exiter. “Did you drive here?” I heard her ask.

The giant smoker hauled himself up and lumbered past on his way out. And with that I thought it must’ve been five minutes for me by now, so I left too. I bid goodbye to masked woman one at the gates and began my walk home. I got to the main road and, while waiting to cross, my mind started whirring. What if I left too early and I have a blood clot incident? After all, I'd just had the Astrazeneca vaccine, and they were changing the advice for the under forties, which was only five years past for me. I’m young at heart and I tell people I’m twenty seven all the time. Maybe this is the universe’s way of fixing my poor attitude towards age. I’d be the oldest person in the UK to have a blood clot from a vaccine and what’s worse, I was going to die in the suburbs of Whalley Range! Why couldn’t I die in Chorlton instead? Or, if we’re going to choose places to die, why can’t it be in Tuscany?

I crossed the road and carried on walking, convincing myself that I was suddenly light-headed and this was an anaphylactic shock on its way. Was I short of breath? Am I going to fall over? Can I at least make it back to my own neighbourhood before I keel over?

Eventually I made it home and satisfied that I had neither an allergic reaction nor a blood clot, I began waiting for the side effects. When Chris had his first Covid injection, he felt like he’d come down with the virus all over again. He sweated, he shivered, his body burned up, and he even went to bed early. He had three days of it. I wondered how long my reaction would last and just how dramatic it was going to be. 

After two days, I stopped waiting. The only thing I felt post vaccine was a small and invisible bruise on my arm where the needle had gone in — it wasn’t a scam after all. The feeling was akin to someone poking me, with medium intensity, once or maybe twice, with their index finger on my arm. I was both relieved and disappointed. I wanted a story to tell.

Chris had his second vaccination on Sunday and again suffered some side effects — though less severe this time, he just felt drained and wanted to sleep a lot this time. He attended his appointment at the Etihad Campus’s Tennis Club in Bradford, East Manchester. That’s where his first had been before all the smaller venues popped up, so he returned there for his second. 

We went there, en route home after a lovely Sunday lunch at my cousin’s house in Marple. He’d planned on dropping me at home, then going out again, and I suggested he should just go directly there. There would always be something to do if he couldn’t get in straight away, I reasoned. We arrived an hour early but buoyed on by my experience of walking straight in when I was a quarter of an hour early to my appointment, he thought he’d chance his arm. He didn’t even tell them he was early when he checked in, and they processed him immediately. 

Apparently it’s a far bigger set up there than the one I went to but that’s to be expected as it was one of the earlier centres and I think they used it for mass vaccinations a few months ago. Our friend Charles had described it as being like a science fiction movie — of course the first thing that sprang to my mind when he said that was E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, and I had images of stumpy green goblins scuttling about with pot plants and glowing fingers.  

I waited in the car for Chris and thought I’d get a good session in on Duolingo. Yo necesito una falda verde, I typed in wondering when I’d ever need to know how to say such a phrase. No matter; I continued. La universidad tiene dos bibliotecas. Not ten minutes after Chris had left the car did I see him again, striding through the car park towards me with a leaflet in his hand. He opened the door and got in the driving seat.

“Hang on a minute,” I said. “What about the fifteen minutes?”

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“For the blood clots and the anaphylactic shock.”

“What?”

“In Whalley Range they tell you to wait. Five minutes for walkers and fifteen minutes for drivers. What if you crash on the way home and we die?”

“They don’t do that here.”

“But, what if?”

“It’ll be fine,” he said. “Turn this shit off.” He flicked the switch on the radio, silencing my beautifully crafted Spotify playlist in favour of a bunch of local radio adverts.

So it seems they do it differently in different places and I wasted five minutes of my life sitting in the sun at the back of the Whalley Range Tennis and Cricket Club. Neither of us has died yet, nor have we mutated. We have, however, started beaming 5G waves from our heads and I understand Bill Gates has full visibility of my movements now.

If you’d like to listen to my Spotify playlist called, I’m here live; I’m not a cat, you can do so here.

Pure Cremation

A few weeks ago, on a Sunday morning, my dad phoned me.

“I’ve seen this thing on the telly,” he opened with — no greeting or small talk, straight to the point. “It’s called pure cremation.”

“Oh, right,” I replied.

“What they do is, when you die, they collect you from your home, burn your body, then send the ashes to your loved ones. No fuss, no service, no nonsense. What do you think?”

I didn’t really know what I thought. I’d been out the night before, getting drunk in a friend’s garden, and had a shocker of a hangover. There was no thinking happening that morning.

“Erm,” I stalled, “well, I suppose I’d need to mull it over a bit.”

“I want you to talk to your brothers and find out what they think.”

“Okay,” I agreed, cautiously. “How are you, anyway?”

He ignored the question, “I want to get it all sorted and paid for and this is the cheapest way of doing it.”

“Right,” I paused. “What do you think about it?”

“I don’t care, I’ll be dead,” he replied bluntly. “Like your grandpa used to say, ‘for all I care, you can dump me on the side of the road.’”

“I see,” another pause. “So what’s new? Aside from pure cremation?”

“Nothing,” he said matter-of-factly, “nothing at all. I’ve done nothing, I’ve been nowhere, I’ve seen nobody.”

“You’ve seen nobody? What about your carers?”

“Well, them I suppose.”

“And has Philip not been round.”

“Yes, he brought me a sandwich.”

“Excellent,” the conversation was stalling already. “Well, I’ll talk to Robert and Matthew then.”

“I know what they’ll say.”

“Oh? What do you think?”

“Rob ’ll say it’s my choice and I can do what I want, and Matt ’ll say he’s against it and I should be buried with your mum. But it’s okay, you can scatter my ashes on her grave and we’ll still be together.”

“I see.” I find ‘I see’ is a good all rounder when you need a response. It’s non-committal, non-confrontational, and it ends a conversation with little fuss. I didn’t see, but I agreed to talk to my brothers and get back. I told him I needed a few days — I rarely speak to my brothers, most of our communication is done by text message and I didn’t think this was an appropriate subject for WhatsApp. Also, I didn’t know how long this hangover was going to last. It was pretty sinister. 

My dad has changed in recent years. I suspect much of the change is to do with his physical health, which has without doubt affected his mental health. He does very little for himself nowadays. Carers tend to him four times a day, there’s a morning visit (too early as far as dad is concerned) when they wake him up and help him to the bathroom before propping him up in bed and leaving. At noon they come back and hoist him out of bed with a contraption that looks like a huge pogo stick, wheel him to the sitting room, and leave him in his chair in front of the television. Someone comes back later to make his dinner and there’s a last visit at about eight o’clock when he is hoisted from his chair and delivered back to bed, again too early in his opinion. He can’t walk on his own, so he spends his life in bed and in his chair. If he needs the loo he has to wait till a carer arrives and in the interim has a couple of bottles on a table next to his chair which he can pee into.

He’s stopped reading and his only vice - whisky - is rationed to two a day, which I understand is watered down after going down a very slippery slope with the booze a few years back. He never leaves the house. From most people’s point of view, it’s a miserable existence so I can appreciate why his mind has wandered to cremation.

Dad was always a thoughtful type. He used to spend a lot of time talking and asking questions; he was genuinely interested in what people had to say. There’s less of that now, and I can’t help but think about a visit I made to him a couple of years ago when he was in hospital, a two and a bit hour journey each way from Manchester to Lytham, when after 45 minutes of awkward chat he said, “You don’t have to stay. You can go if you want.” 

People keep saying he’s given up. I’m not exactly sure what they mean by that, but suspect they think he’s ready to die. As I’ve pointed out to them and him, he’s only 71 years old, he could have twenty years in him yet. Another twenty years of sitting in a chair watching crap TV and peeing in a bottle. 

He doesn’t seem particularly interested in self care, maybe that’s what they mean. Last time I saw him I took him a new jumper as part of a birthday present because the one I’d seen him in the time before was holey and falling off him. I unwrapped it for him. He looked at it and said, “A jumper? Stick it over there with the other four.” Cheers, dad. I then asked him what was going on with his glasses — they only had one arm, which was Sellotaped to the frame, and the bridge was also taped. 

“These are my telly glasses,” he said, oblivious to the fact they were falling apart and precariously balanced on his nose and one ear. 

“Which optician are you with? I’ll find out what the prescription is and we can get you some new ones.” He told me but said he’d not had a test for years, so I said I’d arrange for someone to come to the house and test his eyes. He seemed to think it was a lot of fuss over nothing, but agreed all the same.

He has been eligible for a Covid-19 vaccine for yonks now, but when invited by his doctor to get it he told them he couldn’t get out of the house. They said they’d get the district nurse to deliver it, but months later when I asked, he still hadn’t had the jab and seemed disinterested in following up. He did finally get it, only a week before I had mine.

Several professionals — nurses, doctors, consultants — have said there’s nothing medically wrong with him and he could walk again if only he’d try. He says otherwise. 

Despite what anyone says, there are obviously some things wrong with his body. He broke his hip a few years ago after falling off an office chair and put his back out badly whilst recuperating. He takes warfarin to thin his blood after an earlier deep vein thrombosis which resulted in a pulmonary embolism. He has some arthritis which prevents him from picking things up and he struggles with his phone, and he mentioned a trapped nerve too. 

I’m sure there is an element of fear at play here. He’s fallen several times and been alone on the floor for hours, waiting for help. He has an emergency call necklace now, nevertheless, the last time it happened he fractured his arm. With the potential of that happening, I imagine I would be worried about trying to get out of bed too.

I’m not sure what I can do. To be honest, I’m not sure if there's anything I should do. He’s compos mentis, and he’s resisted any suggestion that he move to sheltered accommodation, preferring (if that’s the right word) to receive help from carers at home. I’d gone to great lengths to find a brilliant place, close to where he lives now, that I thought would be ideal for him to move to. It was a self-contained flat in a building where there were a team of carers on hand round the clock and communal areas — a canteen and a lounge room — where he could meet other people if he so chose. I never imagined him choosing to spend time with a bunch of strangers, but it was all academic anyway when he said, “I’m not moving to Fleetwood, it’s a dump!” I considered highlighting the fact that he wouldn’t be going outside anyway, so it didn’t matter all that much, but thought better of it.

He doesn’t ask for much — apart from the occasional thoughts on funerals — and I don’t think he wants much. When it comes to his birthday or Christmas, he’s quite clear when I ask what if he wants anything in particular as a present: “Whisky. Nothing else. Just whisky. Bells.” I suppose I should have listened to him when I bought him the jumper, which he dismissed.

We’re not especially close, but we talk every now and again on the phone, and I think that suits both of us. People have told me time and again that I should talk to him more often, but I reckon we’ve found our level, an equilibrium of sorts. All I do is make sure he knows that if he needs anything from me he can ask, and every now and again he does, usually on a Sunday morning while I’m grappling with another hangover.

A glistening pint of cold, fizzy lager

    Quick update on my last post: as I mentioned, I’d received a letter from the dermatologist to tell me the biopsy had revealed moderately abnormal cells, I needed further surgery on my ear and that I would hear from Wythenshawe hospital. Six weeks later and I’ve still not heard from them. I gave them a week before I followed up. I started at the scene of the crime—Withington hospital’s dermatology department—but they didn’t answer their phone. 

    I called several times on the number they had given me before dialling another, which eventually got me through to the nurses’ station. The woman I spoke to checked my records and confirmed that I was on a waiting list and I should call Wythenshawe directly for more information. She gave me two numbers, which I dutifully tried every day for a few more days. There was no answer but there was an answering machine so I left a couple of messages. Still nothing.

 
    On Wythenshawe hospital’s website, I found their Patient Advice and Liaison Service—PALS for short—who promise to ‘help make your voice heard and liaise with the relevant staff to sort out any problems quickly.’ I called the number but there was no reply so I emailed them. I’ve still not heard from them. Not very pally, if you ask me.

    At a loss how I was supposed to talk to anyone at Wythenshawe Hospital, and not knowing who I should speak to anyway because the original letter hadn’t contained that information, I thought I’d try Withington again.

    I didn’t mess about this time; I went straight to the nurses’ station number as they were the only people I’d got through to in all this time, and I laid it on. The woman I spoke to was lovely and helpful and professional. When I said to her with a slight shrillness to my voice, ‘I just need to know if I have skin cancer or if I’m going to have my ear removed’ she told me she couldn’t comment on the content of the letter but she’d ask the doctor that wrote it—the first person I’d seen at the dermatology department way back when in the middle of February—to call me.

    Ten minutes later, and the doctor was on the phone. She explained that I do not have skin cancer; the further surgery was to be undertaken by the plastic surgery team at Wythenshawe; and that it was an advised precaution given the moderately abnormal cells and the possibility of them becoming more abnormal in time. She went on to say that I do not need to worry and that I should wait for a call from Wythenshawe.

    After weeks of moderately abnormal worrying, I finally felt reassured. That being said, I’ve still not heard from Wythenshawe, I still don’t know how much of my ear they want and I can only assume the PALS team have fallen out and disbanded.

    In wider national news, the covid rates in the UK are dwindling as the vaccine does its job. Almost half of the UK’s population has had at least one vaccine shot—my first is due next Wednesday—and the country is gradually opening up again. Of course we’ve been here before, and things can change, but last time the country started to get back to normal we had no vaccine and the only thing to assist us was the Government’s ‘eat out to help out’ promotion.

    So as it stands we may go to a pub, or restaurant, but we must sit outside. That ruling is in place till 17th May and has led to a flurry of bookings across April and May—I’ve currently got a birthday dinner next Friday, drinks the following Thursday, lunch then drinks on the Saturday, dinner on 21st May with friends, again on 26th for our anniversary and one last reservation on 1st June because in the olden days we used to enjoy going out for a pizza on a Tuesday night. This might appear to the untrained eye as overkill, but believe me, some of these reservations are rarer than hen’s teeth.

    When the pubs first opened again, I was keen to get out there and sip a glistening pint of cold, fizzy lager, poured by someone else, and served to me in a glass—simply because I’d not done that since October. I went into work on the Thursday of that first week knowing that a couple of colleagues would be there and after we’d finished for the day we hit the Northern Quarter on the hunt for a table. Twenty minutes later, I was utterly dejected as we realised it was going to take an eon to find a seat. I had a right face on me. When somebody suggested we buy some cans and drink them on the roof terrace at work I had to apologise for my miserable attitude and mumbled the words, ‘Well, yeah, obviously it’s about the company.’ I don’t think I convinced them, especially when I said, ‘You know if I were on my own I could’ve got in that last pub.’ I eventually got my glistening pint a few days later, and I have made up for it since by necking the stuff like it’s going out of fashion.

    As part of the process of returning to normal, there is a new arm to the track and trace scheme whereby people who have no symptoms test themselves at home and report back to the NHS. As a good citizen I ordered my kit of seven tests which should last about a month. They arrived on Monday but I had an important appointment on Wednesday so I pushed it to one side—I couldn’t risk missing it if it turned out that I was positive. Apparently that’s not the right way to look at it, but it was a very important appointment.

    I didn’t find time to do it on Thursday (glistening pints of cold, fizzy lager) then, on Friday, I got myself all revved up for it before realising I wasn’t supposed to eat before the test and I’d just wolfed down a massive piece of quiche with some new potatoes and salad. I pushed it aside again and settled down with a slab of carrot cake.

 

    Eventually, this morning, I got round to taking the test. It’s the standard thing you see on the TV of folk having swabs jammed up their noses and into the back of the throat. You then take said swab and mix it in a formula and drop it into a little plastic strip before giving it half an hour to reveal the answer. I imagine that’s what a pregnancy test is like, just with fewer tonsils and more piss. Thankfully, the test was negative because I’m due at a garden party this evening and I didn’t want to cancel.

    Finally, I feel I should mention the biggest news of the last month: the death of Prince Philip, the Duke Of Edinburgh, at 99 years old. It’s one of those strange situations where something affects people despite them having no direct link to the event or in this case, the person. There was the usual mix of sentiment on social media with some horrors being completely merciless, as if the money and privilege afforded to members of the royal family negates any need for sympathy or their need to mourn. I mean, why should someone be upset about losing a family member when they have a driver and a nice house?

    Thankfully, though most people saw past the ceremony and the bluster of the misanthropes, and recognised the event for what it was: a woman who had lost her companion of over seventy years, human, diminished in stature, and hurting, and having to do it in the spotlight of public scrutiny.

    His funeral was at St George’s Chapel, Windsor, and as current Covid rules dictate, the congregation was made up of just thirty people. The service was solemn and pared back and the Queen cut a lonely figure, standing unaccompanied to the right of her husband’s coffin.

 
    News reports say that she will continue to live at Windsor now and only return to London for work. Others have suggested she might pass the crown on to Charles, though I don’t see that happening. There will always be mixed opinions about the royal family, and whilst the death of Prince Philip was a big deal, you can guarantee the international reaction will pale into insignificance when the Queen dies.