If this is to be a better week, a week of happy good news and better times ahead, it really started yesterday with the former head of the national vaccine service telling the press that in his view we would have this thing licked, in the country, by August.
That seems majorly optimistic to me, but the trend is certainly moving in the right direction.
I had my first injection yesterday morning and I was hugely impressed with the operation down at the Hydro, where a dedicated group of people have things running like a Swiss watch.
I honestly cannot praise those folks highly enough, or those who set it all up down there.
I’ve always been a curious kind of lefty, in that I believe that free markets are the answer to some of our biggest problems, and the vaccine effort has proved it. As regular readers will know, I called this thing early because I’d been writing a (still unfinished) novel about bioweapons and their use, and had done a lot of the research before this hit.
When people asked me last year where the light at the end of the tunnel was I told them it was money.
The global economy had taken such a huge hit that there would be no end of resources flung at this thing and that Big Pharma, for so long one of the big bogeymen of the left, would have to step up and show us all what they were good for … and they did.
Their successes in getting out vaccines in record-breaking time are what we’re all hanging our hats on now, and I’m going to tell you why I reckon they’ll deliver for us.
At the start of this thing, my uncle Kenny got sick and we lost him.
He wasn’t exactly robustly healthy and he was in hospital for an unrelated illness when he caught the bug, but he was younger than my dad is and had survived a serious accident years before … yet he didn’t make it.
A year down the line, my auntie caught the bug.
She was in her 80’s, with dementia and a couple of those gnarly underlying conditions. The difference is, she had been vaccinated … and she’s hale and hearty today and doing just fine considering. The vaccine did that.
Last week, I went out for lunch with a good friend and it turned into a bit of an all-day drinking session in various Glasgow beer-gardens. Little by little it feels as if something like normality is being restored, and little by little we’re starting to see it in the sport.
In England there’s talk of fans at the play-offs.
We’re actively planning for having limited numbers at the Euros.
There will be no greater sign that life has regained something like the old equilibrium than seeing fans in football stadiums … and if we get that then full houses aren’t far away.
For many of my friends that’s the moment they said they’d start feeling that our long nightmare was finally being put behind us. I couldn’t agree more, although I won’t properly feel we’re there until I’m up on stage in a packed karaoke bar again!
There is no question that we’ve all missed pack stadiums.
Even watching football on TV feels oddly flat when there are no crowds at games and all the canned effects do nothing whatsoever to make the surreal quality of it any better.
On top of that, there is no question that our team has missed the supporters, although one wonders quite how some of our highly paid footballers would have been so effective at hiding throughout this campaign if fans were in the grounds.
As I said earlier, this can be the week the club starts to right itself again … but our little corner of the world has already started to.
Yes, as a species we are a long way from home, with this thing continuing to burn across much of the planet, and we’re going to have to reckon with that before long … but God, it will feel good to see things restored one bit at a time here at home.
That is a selfish thought, but it’s also a perfectly human one.