I had the second but not the third. I drew a line. It has to be drawn somewhere. Where you draw yours is up to you but I had to make up my own mind. When the idea that an unprecedented measure is held out to you as being temporary for a specific purpose in an unparalleled emergency, but it slyly slips into something that looks permanent, you have to decide how much you will take, for who knows where it will end?

Austria and now Germany, with the EU to follow, gives us a clue. You wonder if they teach 20c history in schools anymore or is it simply collective amnesia? Diversity and inclusion will now have to be redefined.  The unvaxed are the great unclean, who must be shunned and separated from the rest and those who refuse will face the full force of the law, be fined for each passing month until they are ruined. This is no conspiracy theory. This is what the leaders of these nations are actually saying – “vaccinated, recovered or dead”.

But up here, we are not like them. We have our own bungling clownish ways of doing things: arguing about parties, who can kiss who, checking that our granny has certification before including her in the invite, ordering every visitor to our home to take a test beforehand, testing and testing before we go anywhere and all the usual idiocies of terrifying our children with masks and fear of strangers. Its beyond embarrassing, but it is also evil (and I have chosen that word carefully). It is the slimiest stasi-like trick in the book. Get the people to enforce your will. Get them to call out and shame the dissidents. Frame the narrative in black and white terms: good and bad, caring and selfish, compassionate and venal and you have enrolled half or more of the population who can work across communities and families to coerce and enforce it. There is no need to appeal to fact or reason, logic has gone AWOL. There is no need to argue about whether the vaccines can stop the spread. There isn’t one. We know they don’t.

“It’s your civic duty” they will say, but it’s not mine. I can take the names. Stick and stones will break my bones and words can hurt but I don’t need to let them.  They have crossed the river and launched a civil war. You would think they knew what they were doing but, I guess, if you have forgotten what happened 80+ years back you are unlikely to remember 49BC.