May: Anti-Bodies

 

May-time is grey-time with lots of rain revitalising the garden that the women folk have been busy planting, and the talk on everyone's lips in these parts is mass inoculation. To vaccinate or not to vaccinate, that is the question. For the moment, we still have the luxury of choice – and we're busy exercising ours in this household: an admission liable to get this blog pulled in the current climate of hysteria. Some of the more scientific experts who contribute to the Alternatif Bien Etre newsletter to which we subscribe have already had some of their articles and findings taken down as heresy. Others have been burnt at the stake.

There seems to be a little more choice being exercised here than across the Channel. The other night, there was a programme on Channel 4 ludicrously entitled something like 'Jabbed! Britain's Great Vaccination Triumph'. The whole population, it seems from abroad, is so desperate to get back to the old normal of shopping and travel that mass indoctrination is stoking this triumphant mass inoculation. My sisters, for example, use guilt as their weapon: You must get vaccinated or we'll never conquer this virus. But will their jabs fight off the next variants to arrive and are they indeed unwittingly promoting them?

The recent Hartlepool bi-election underlined just how compliant the great British public has become, prepared to overlook the recent accusations of sleaze that seems to accompany every modern-day administration, whether red or blue, in order to fall in line with the ruling class. Boris the Buffoon, the architect of this great vaccination triumph, reassuringly appears to know what he's talking about because he says it with the conviction of someone who has been reared to believe that he comes from a superior class, born to lead. The Lord Aberdeen or Salisbury of his time. I read something in a financial article recently that suggested that he may yet prove to be the greatest EVER British prime minister. That seems to be a tad hyperbolic, but maybe they know something that I don't. Maybe the clownish exterior is a clever guise fashioned by a remarkably shrewd and ambitious brain. Max Hastings, his former editor at the Daily Telegraph, would beg to disagree.

Boris and his type have been at it for centuries. Recently, I've been immersed in a momentous tome called Pax Britannica, a snapshot of the British Empire at the time of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, written by Jan Morris – James Morris in the Sixties when it was written, the first high-profile sex-change, as we referred to it then, rather than trans-whatever. I forgot where I picked it up, maybe one of Romsey's charity shops or the English-language section of the local recuperation emporium, but it's been languishing on the shelves with menace for quite some time, waiting for someone with the courage to pick it up and delve inside. It's a beautifully written compelling tale told by a Welsh historian, full of pomp and circumstance. It's a remarkable tale of how a tiny island nation came to govern a quarter of the world's land mass by having the gall and sense of superiority to poke its nose into other countries' business – to protect its trade routes and to bring civilisation and its own religious values to heathens everywhere. Somehow, a legion of bumbling buffoons and stuffy bureaucrats managed to govern an empire that stretched from Ireland to New Zealand via the Indian sub-continent and a huge chunk of Africa. Staggering. Little wonder really that Old Etonians continue to govern a populace still given to believe in parts of the kingdom, like Hartlepool, that Britain is still Great.

Great because of or in spite of our betters? I picked up a couple of nuggets that seem to encapsulate the intellect of the ruling classes. A Queen's regulation of the day decreed that 'field officers entering captive balloons are not required to wear spurs.' Perhaps Victoria was advised here by the Duke of Cambridge, who once remarked to an eminent British general, 'Brains! I don't believe in brains. You haven't any, I know, sir!'

Meanwhile on the continent, the vaccination programme is half-baked. In the tradition of the French Revolution, the populace tends to be rather more sceptical about its leaders' pronouncements. I feel less sheepish here than I might 'back home' in admitting that we choose, while we can, not to submit to the needle. Ordinary people like Giselle, the Vegetable Lady, and Michelle, the Snail Woman, are scandalised by the notion of a vaccination passport, which might prevent them from travelling, eating out in a restaurant or attending a public spectacle. It is, they protest, an erosion of our civil liberties, the most fundamental of which being our right to choose. I resisted the temptation to quote, but there's an Afrobeat outfit from the Auvergne of all places. In the opening track of a CD they released about five years ago, they sing 'We are living in a collective madness...' Such prescience!

Of course, I had no right of choice as a child. I was inoculated against just about everything – TB, polio, diphtheria, scarlet fever, tetanus, the works – because my parents and my school said I must be: mainly by needle, occasionally by an impregnated sugar lump and generally at the doctor's surgery. As far as I know, I suffered no mishaps other than a faint impression on my upper left arm of the vicious multi-needle stamp of the BCG vaccination, which occurred – If I remember correctly – in a church hall on the Creagah Road, Belfast. But who knows? And because we don't know, I'm reluctant to roll up my sleeve. I realise that vaccination probably did more than anything to stamp out a terrible disease like polio, but Salk & Co. spent years in its development and I'm not convinced that Big Pharma has been equally diligent in the rush to bring their new products to market. Besides, I know a little more than I did as a child about the role of sanitation, nutrition, antibodies and the immune system in helping to ward off illness and disease. I've followed the precepts of the Good Wife for the last 30 years or so. We managed to bring up our child without vaccinations and, touch wood, she's barely had a day's illness in her young life.

So I'm sceptical for now in the best tradition of my mother, God rest her departed soul, who was once sceptical about the claims of the manufacturers of Thalidomide when she was suffering from morning sickness while carrying around a young boy-child in her womb. I refused an opportunity to run a training course in Senegal a decade or so ago, because I didn't want to be vaccinated against yellow fever and other such tropical diseases. For the moment, I'd rather take my chance with the virus itself. If I live to regret the decision, then at least it's a decision I chose to make.

In any case, right now my worries are more focused in the short-term on keeping our hornet traps replenished and emptied before the act of removing the top becomes life-threatening, and on our new underground cistern, which has still to fill despite all the recent rain we've had. It's been a time-consuming and expensive venture, part of the master plan for self-sufficiency, and its apparent failure only underlines that I wasn't born to project-manage, let alone lead. I'll leave that to ambitious types like Macron and Boris, the blonde-haired buffoon (or Machiavellian mastermind), glowing at this moment in time with Britain's great vaccination triumph. Now where did I file that NMB Afrobeat Experience album...?