Vaccine excitement has been squashed by fear and fatigue

Has anyone else noticed how we used to talk about the “new normal’, but don’t any more, because it’s just the “normal normal”? And that’s just not normal. But then I, for one, would struggle now to define normal, just as I have to think really hard about what day it is, in this Tier 3 no-man’s-land so reminiscent of Twixtmas, but without the goodwill to all men or Bendicks Bittermints.

I ought to have felt elated at the dramatic news of a Covid-19 vaccine breakthrough. But, truth be told, I felt… I’m not entirely sure what I felt, but not elated. Cautiously optimistic? Optimistically sceptical? Sceptically cautious?

My world has shrunk – and my normal with it – to the point where I took note of this hugely important development, but then parked it, because Tuesday was my husband’s milestone-en-route-to-gravestone 60th birthday.

There should have been a Scottish hooley. A nice dinner with friends. Or even a card. But in my neck of the woods, Hallmark greetings don’t qualify as essential shopping.

“Now there’s a vaccine, will we be able to have normal parties again and walk about shops without masks?” asked the 12-year-old, whose own birthday was also a casualty of lockdown.

“Or go to a club and dance in a heaving mass of strangers’ bodies?” added her 18-year-old sister. I flinched like a Victorian spinster, as she knew I would.

The very suggestion seemed so outlandish and inappropriate – despite the fact that, once upon a time, some of my best nights were spent in a heaving mass of strangers’ bodies – I was taken aback.

“Hush, child, do not speak of such things,” I murmured. “Those were the old ways. You must forget all about them. Such talk will land us all in trouble.”

What I actually said was something po-faced along the lines that manufacturing, storing and distributing this Pfizer vaccine, created in the US along with German company Biontech, or the Astrazeneca equivalent being developed in Oxford, is not a straightforward process.

I did not add that, given this Government’s glaring incompetence thus far, I have little faith in its ability to rise to the challenge.

According to the BBC, the UK should receive 10 million doses by the end of the year, with a further 30 million doses already ordered. Am I alone in wanting to check somebody somewhere has had the nous to make sure we have the facilities to keep it at the requisite –70C…? Speaking on Radio 4’s Today programme earlier this week, Health Secretary Matt Hancock spoke of the “mammoth logistical operation” involved. Oh dear.

Whose job is it to order the dry ice? Can we have a name, please? A way of tracking the order, à la Ubereats? Just so we know that someone somewhere is accountable for something.

Headlines announcing that 5,000 people a day will be immunised with the Covid vaccine aren’t so impressive when you consider, at that rate, it would take around 36 years to inoculate us all.

Besides, do we have any proof this lot won’t make a complete balls-up yet again? I would very much like – with all my heart – to be proven wrong.

But my head tells me otherwise. We have had to endure so many cock-ups and so much cackhandedness over everything from PPE to shielding, test and trace to quarantine, that a great deal of public trust has trickled away.

Policies come. Policies go. Sometimes within hours. Go to work. Stay at home. Furlough has ended. Furlough has restarted. It took footballer Marcus Rashford to shame No 10 into not one but two U-turns over the extension of free school meals during the Christmas holidays.

Meanwhile, lives are being lost and our elderly pining away in solitary confinement. The optics do not look good or bode well.

The country is exhausted and disillusioned. For the past nine months, fear and fatigue have ground us down, the stricken have stayed at home when they should have called 999, and non-emergency surgeries were cancelled as beds were reserved for critically ill Covid patients.

New figures from NHS England show that the number of people waiting 12 months for hospital care to start has increased a hundredfold, up from 1,305 in September 2019 to 139,545 this September.

“Normal in November” is to discover that our Dickensian university urchins will be allowed to come home for Christmas after all, God bless them, everyone.

But they must only use public transport during a six-day evacuation window, so as not to spread plague and pestilence. Hey, that sounds pretty normal, doesn’t it?

We have come to accept draconian constraints on our freedom, our young people regarded as real or potential pariahs. In what version of normal could any of us have possibly imagined it?

By and large, we have obeyed the guidelines willingly and with good grace. But this deja vu lockdown is sorely testing us all. Can we have some assurance that, when December 2 dawns, we will be released from captivity?

A vaccine is to be welcomed. Will it restore the old normal sooner or later? I hope it will be sooner. I fear it will be later.

Waiting for a vaccine is no more feasible than repeated lockdowns. We need to learn how to live with coronavirus – as normally as possibly.

I have little faith in this Government’s ability to rise to the challenge