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.