Thoughts of a carer

Barely a day goes by without a government minister exhorting us all to ‘have a booster’; at times, they almost resort to threats - ‘Get a jab so you can enjoy Christmas’, or something similar. Sorry, Boris and co., I won’t, at least not for a long time. + + + I’m no anti-vaxxer. I’ve had the flu jab annually for the last decade, including one this year. I even had the AstraZeneca vaccine in March and May this year, for  a number of reasons, including: I was keen to see the end of the ‘pandemic’, and had naively understood that Matt Hancock had said the plan was to vaccinate as many of the over-50s as possible, then we’d all get our freedom back; maybe he did say that, and, like much of everything else this government has done, he later did a u-turn; I was worried that there would be some things I might want to do that I wouldn’t be able to if I was unvaccinated - i.e. I didn’t trust the authorities not to introduce vaccine passports;  I fell into the trap of thinking that the jabs woul

  I was reading The Daily Sceptic recently and came across the following comment, from a reader who styles themself ‘Karenovirus’: The other day I was watching Michael Palin's travelogue Pole to Pole; in episode 3 he is in Leningrad trying to buy some vodka. Someone explains that first he must obtain a ‘kiewpon’ from the Casa Kiosk (I had witnessed similar in restaurants in Kiev and Odessa a decade previously). Fortunately for Michael a passerby sells him a coupon (in the way that someone might illegally pass you a parking permit with some time left on) and nobody else batted an eyelid. This might seem like a minor transgression but it actually struck at the heart of the Soviet system in which full employment was achieved by having three people to do one person's job. Reading it, I realised that life in the UK is now almost as absurd as it was under the Soviet system. Parts of our national infrastructure are supported by teams of people that, well, seem to need to pass you to