Having more money than sense, I bought one of those blink cameras in the Amazon sale.
It records short video clips every time a motion sensor is triggered and sends them to your mobile phone.
I havenāt been this absorbed in watching absolutely nothing of any interest happening since the first series of Big Brother.
10.24pm: Pup goes to the door, looks outside, turns around, goes back to bed.
10.37pm: Pup goes to the door, wags tail, turns around, goes back to bed.
11.17pm: Help! Thereās a tramp staring at something on its mobile phone in my living room oh itās me.
11.29pm: Pup goes to the door, turns round, goes back to bed.
3.10am: MOTH.
This is what I do for entertainment now. Honestly, getting old is brilliant.
Show me a nightclub queue or a packed pub on a Friday night – Covid super-spreader or not – and Iāll run a mile.
And given that Iāve already handed over the last remaining shreds of my privacy to Jeff Bezos, Iād be a hypocrite if I started getting paranoid about the surveillance state now.
So having a vaccine passport is obviously not going to bother me.
But since vaccine passports are the thing everyone is talking about this week here’s my tuppence worth.
Bring them on.
Seriously. Why would you not?
Vaccine passport case isn’t clear cut
We heard from a couple of people with more skin in the game this week.
Clare Johnston has two teenage boys who have spent much of the last 18 months cooped up in their rooms in front of mobile phone screens.
She’s itching for them to get out and do some of the hell-raising the rest of us got to enjoy at that age.
And if a vaccine passport is their ticket to ride, she’s all for it.
Tony Cochrane runs a string of nightclubs, including Club Tropicana and Aura in Dundee.
He’s in favour of vaccination and would gladly work with the government to persuade more clubbers to get the jab.
But it’s the pace of the vaccine passport scheme that troubles him.
Half his staff won’t be double jabbed by the end of this month when they’re due to start, never mind the young people desperate to come in.
It won’t apply to smaller venues, or ones that aren’t categorised as clubs. So people will still be able to drink and dance and snog in large numbers elsewhere.
And who’s to say it’s going to work anyway?
We’re all in uncharted territory here
That’s the really annoying thing with Covid, isn’t it?
The experts and politicians are making this up as they go along too.
We haven’t had to respond to a pandemic like this before.
In time, some policies will probably be found to have been useless. Or mistakes.
I’m glad I’m not the one having to stand at a podium and look like I know what I’m doing.
But data shows that when we restrict the movement of people and vaccinate against Covid the impacts can be seen weeks and months later.
When we locked down previously infections fell.
And when we started vaccinating people, deaths and hospitalisations went down.
Nobody wants to return to restrictions again.
Well I wouldn’t mind. But we’ve already established I’m happy to sit at home and look at grainy, black and white footage of moths.
But Covid numbers are rising – rapidly – and I’m willing to listen to the people with a whole load more knowledge than me who say we need a vaccine passport scheme now.
Nobody is saying it’s perfect.
The name is off-putting for a start. It’s not a vaccine passport. It’s a QR code on your mobile phone containing information about your vaccination status which is already available elsewhere.
But that would make a rubbish headline.
And Tony Cochrane is right. The pace of the introduction is problematic.
The system is going to need honing. It might have to be extended.
Vaccine passport might be our best bet
But Covid is tearing through the population at a tremendous rate. There were 6,700 new cases and 10 new deaths yesterday.
I know people who have the virus now. People I know have been pinged and are isolating. People I know have died.
It’s never felt closer and that’s close enough.
We’re into September. Flu season is looming and the NHS is knackered.
Anyone in Scotland aged 16 or over is now eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine. Book your appointment at https://t.co/CGgw5BFp7n or attend any of the drop-in locations listed hereā” https://t.co/h44kqDVWF8 pic.twitter.com/cuP1lADpJc
— NHS National Services Scotland (@NHSNSS) September 2, 2021
A vaccine passport feels like less of an imposition than some of the things we’ve been asked to do already. And some of the things we might yet be asked to do to help bring this virus under control.
There are people who can’t be vaccinated, for good reason. And it may be that their freedoms have to be restricted for now. And that’s regrettable. But it’s probably safer for them, as well as the rest of us.
And there are people who don’t want to be vaccinated, for whatever reason. Which is regrettable but their choice.
If being ineligible for a vaccine passport mean they are less likely to be among big crowds where there’s a greater risk of them infecting other people, well tough frankly.
And if anyone wants to put on a big event that is tempting enough to lure me away from the 178 new notifications on my blink app, I will happily wave my vaccine passport to get in.
But just not now okay? This moth isn’t going to watch itself.
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