Peter Rhodes on getting jabbed, the Russian vaccine and feeling over the moon and up a tree

How enterprising of the EU to see if Russia can provide vaccine to get them out of their Covid crisis. The great thing about the Russian vaccine is that it's so versatile. You can have an injection or they can squirt it into your underpants or smear it on your front door.

A landmark has been reached. After weeks of concentrated jabbing, the most ancient, feeble, frail, cantankerous, awkward, Werther-sucking part of our population has now had its first Covid-19 vaccination. Me? I appear to be part of it. I got my jab on Saturday, thanks.

I'm not going to describe the vaccination process because it is utterly undramatic and about as interesting as joining a queue in Tesco. But there is an almost spiritual element which no amount of TV needle-in-arm coverage can capture.

The tremulous (unjabbed) enter one door at the sports hall. The relieved (jabbed) leave at another door with a spring in their step, like freshly-shorn sheep skipping into a lush meadow in the sunlit uplands. Rejoice, for this may be the first step back towards normal life, parties, holidays and pub meals without plastic screens. (Note the word “may”).

By the luck of the draw, I was given the AstraZeneca vaccine, the one made from a chimpanzee-derived organism in Oxford. I am writing this column from the top of a tree, eating mangoes and throwing my dung at passers-by. No side-effects yet.

Here's a strange thing. Mrs Rhodes was born one year after me yet was only two hours behind me in the injection queue. Must be a conspiracy, innit? Of course, as far as the conspiracy-theorists are concerned, I have sold my soul by accepting the vaccine, with its secret tracker microchips, and Bill Gates now knows exactly where I am at all times. But then I'm pretty sure he always did.

Meanwhile, here's a conspiracy theory I just made up. The Government wants to scrap or seriously amend the Human Rights Act. So it could really use a glaring example of how this Act, the legacy of Blairism, can grossly damage the human rights of the innocent majority. You could create such an example by using hotels for quarantine and then watching as the civil-rights lawyers demolish case after case and get their clients out, as I suggested in yesterday's column. If the Great British Public sees the Human Rights Act enabling virus-carriers to move freely, putting the rest of us at risk, the days of the Act will be numbered. Okay, it's only a theory.

Having been through the vaccination programme, I can't think of a single mass-distribution event which has brought the nation together so much, with the possible exception of the Coronation Mug, distributed to millions of schoolchildren back in 1953. My older brother, being of the qualifying age, got one, I did not. I never talk about it.