Getting my jab

Not that I expected a marching band or anything but I did expect a bit more of an event. A queue of people waiting for the vaccination would have made it more memorable, serried ranks of desks each one attended by a little group of medical personnel all in purple gloves would have been good. But none of it.

Yesterday I got a phone call on the landline. It was the local health centre and they gave me a time for an appointment today. I left home fifteen minutes before the set time. "I'm here for the jab," I said and I think the person on the door already knew my name rather than reading my name from the health card she asked to see. No temperature check or anything.

I was taken to a chair in the corridor, where people normally wait to see the doctors, and told to wait. I was given a couple of stapled bits of the sort of photocopy where the second copy was made from a copy and the third copy from the second copy and so on for forty generations. Stencil quality. The first sheet told me all the possible side effects. One of those was cefalea. I sniggered. It's the technical term for a range of headaches. Spanish "authorities" have never agreed with Hemingway that there are older and simpler and better words and always choose to use an obscure word to show how much cleverer they are than you. There was a date and time for the second dose too just three weeks away. The second sheet told me that I was getting the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine. The paperwork also told me the internet links to get copies of the full prospectus sheet for the vaccine and a certificate of vaccination.

I waited a while. A young woman wearing a white coat and pushing a trolley asked me if I was allergic to anything - I gave my usual answer of bills and taxes - she checked if I was taking some drug, which I wasn't, and pushed a needle in to the top of my arm. The same sort of injection that I've had hundreds if not thousands of times before. She pushed a bit of damp gauze against my "wound" and said to wait for fifteen minutes. I did. Then I left. At the door I made a vague effort to check f it were OK to leave but nobody was the least interested in me and I needed to go to Alfredo's to arrange a haircut while I was in town.

And still no band.