For me, the vaccination was a gloomy submission to a new world of excessive safety and regulation. I’d tried to fight against it but I lost.
The New Jerusalem, in which we allow the state to boss us around even more, in the name of our own good, is now coming into being.
And so we are just going to be under surveillance a lot more, recorded a lot more and bossed about a lot more. I’m reminded of the great Edwardian satirist Saki’s bitter 1913 novel When William Came about an imaginary German invasion of Britain.
Its hero returns to a transformed homeland from a long expedition to Tsarist Siberia (during which a fierce marsh fever has laid him low and left him in a coma for weeks).
When he finally reaches his London home, his wife apologises that she has to fill in a long police form to report his presence, explaining that it is ‘a stupid form to be filled up when any one arrives, to say where they come from, and their business and nationality and religion, and all that sort of thing. We’re rather more bureaucratic than we used to be, you know’.
Well, and so are we, and it will now get worse, because we have been through a revolution, in which we gave up real freedom for the illusion of safety. For me, almost all I need to know about it is that Mr Blair likes it so much.
Growing up, this is what people said it was like living in the Soviet Union was like.
A liberal dream.