Danskcolin: Saturday April 15th 2023

For Lois and me, today is the day of our COVID booster jab at our doctor's surgery, our first jab in our new home town of Malvern - we had planned to have a shower and a nap in bed this afternoon as we usually do on Saturdays, but we decide to skip the shower bit today, as a precaution. Who knows how we'll feel after the jab? We can always shower another time - we're only going to be consorting with each other, so the shower can wait.

Equality of filth: that's what we like to call it haha!

our doctor's surgery and its associated pharmacy

11:15 We drive over to our doctor's surgery on Pickersleigh Road. As expected, the car-park is full of old people's cars cautiously manoeuvring in and out of parking spots. [Don't you mean other old people? - Ed]

When we go inside the building we take our places at the end of an apparently long queue of old people going round the corner out of sight, which is a bit discouraging, but luckily we find that jab-ees are being "processed" quickly, so not as bad in practice as it looked initially.

we take our places at the end of a long queue of

old people that's briskly snaking its way round a corner

It's a vaccine we've never heard of before - Sanofi. It contains an "adjuvant", i.e. a chemical designed to improve the immune response to the virus. This particular vaccine is apparently being offered only to older people - and the adjuvant concerned is used in the flu vaccine routinely given to over-65-year-olds. So that's all right!

11:45 So that's it - we've been given the stuff, so now we feel pleasantly immune. It's been a surprisingly quick service, if not as exciting as the booster vaccine sessions in our former home-town of Cheltenham, which take place in the County Fire Station. There you can look at their shiny new fire engines, but never mind, that's not important in the great scheme of things right now, is it!

flashback to earlier COVID vaccination sessions at

the Gloucestershire County Fire Station, Cheltenham

13:30 We go home, have our pre-prepared packed lunches, and then hurry up to to bed. We've got 3 hours before the local Morrisons supermarket make their delivery to us - we booked the 4:30 to 5:30 pm slot for the delivery, and this gives us loads of time, which is nice.

How do we feel? I'm not feeling anything untoward yet, although Lois feels a bit tired. However, all in all, not too bad so far, but who knows what may kick in tomorrow or during the week. We're keeping our fingers crossed, though - we've never had any of the more serious aftereffects in any of the jabs we've had so far, so hopefully that will continue. But we'll see!

a typical Morrisons supermarket delivery

19:45 We watch the first part of a Channel 4 two-part documentary about King Charles.

This turns out to be mostly a rehash of things Lois and I remember well, although there are also some things we didn't know.

It's still amazing to see how ahead-of-his-time Charles was with his thinking and campaigning on environmental issues, at a time when people thought he was some kind of crank to be so obsessed with things that in those days nobody much thought were important at all. But give him credit - he persevered anyway. And it's one more indication of what a mismatch his marriage to Di was, that when he criticised her for using hair spray because of its effect on the ozone layer, she stubbornly refused to change her beauty preparations - after all, which is more important: the planet or how my hair looks haha!

And Lois comments how in those days, if the tabloid press intercepted private phone-calls between the Royals, this wasn't yet seen as anything underhand - the concept of "invasion of privacy" didn't seem to be that powerful a concern in those days, maybe because mobile phones were still new on the scene. When the "tampongate" or "Camillagate" scandal broke in the early 1990's, private phone calls between the royals, in this case between Charles and Camilla, seem to have been regarded as "fair game" or legitimate targets for the press.

What a crazy world we lived in, in those far-off days!!!!!

20:30 We go to bed on part of BBC2's "Carole King" night.

Lois and I didn't realise how very many big hit songs were written by Carole, and in many cases in partnership with her first husband Gerry Goffin, going way way back into the late 1950's. My goodness what a talent !!!!

Who knew that the Beatles played "Take Good Care of My Baby" during their audition at Decca Records, where they were famously turned down on the grounds that "the era of guitar groups is over"?

And it's nice tonight to hear "Goin' Back" again, the version by Nils Lofgren, which he performed in 1975 on the Old Grey Whistle Test. This is the song that I associate most strongly with my dear late sister Kathy, who passed her copy of Dusty Springfield's 1966 version to me on one of the occasions when she moved flats in Bristol in the late 1960's.

It all seems a very long time ago now. [I can't argue with that! - Ed]