A real shot at a merry Christmas

HOORAY! That’s it. We can have ourselves a merry little Christmas after all. Not perfect, huddling around the turkey with no more than two other households, facing travel chaos if we try to visit friends far from home, not to mention looking out for border patrols if you’re coming from a Tier 2 or 3 region and hoping to get into Cornwall ( grrr).

No, it won’t be the most fabulous Yuletide on record but we can, now, thank God and know it’s our last trapped inside this terrifying Covid spider’s web.

As the big red lorries rolled out from the Pfizer plant in Belgium carrying precious vials of vaccine into the Eurotunnel I cheered, thinking there should be a beaming Santa painted on the side, like the Coca- Cola vans.

I know there are doubters, but come on. We are now at the beginning of the end of an apocalypse which has killed one and a half million of us worldwide and turned the everyday life of the human race into a horrifying sci- fi film.

I’m usually allergic to Matt Hancock, but this week I actually forgave his funny little smile when he announced the vaccine had been rapidly approved by our regulation agency. It made him look about 14, but in a good way.

Yes there will be logistical problems and delays because the Pfizer vaccine is so delicate to transport.

But the far less fragile Oxford AstraZeneca and the American Moderna inoculations are waiting in the wings. If we’re not all vaccinated by the spring we will be by summer. And what a wonderful summer that will be.

When all this is over, there will be hard questions about how well our Government has handled coronavirus, and the answers may be devastating.

But for now, let’s sing along with the Carpenters. Make the yuletide gay; from now on our troubles will be miles away.

Go on. Have yourself a merry little Christmas now...

SO SAD that The Undoing is over. Brilliant, even though many will have guessed who did it ( and many of us probably knew from the first episode).

No matter, Hugh Grant’s acting was superlative. He deserves a Bafta. He actually quite terrified me at the end. As did Nicole Kidman’s face. What on earth has she done to it? It never moves, apart from an occasional twitch of the mouth. I kept thinking of a Thunderbird puppet. Or a spectre in that green hooded coat. Maybe Hollywood women have no choice but to go to the dark side. Shame.