Plague Update #48

 Vaccines, vaccines!  Come and get your vaccines here!  We've got so many vaccines we're literally throwing them away!  Yep the promised doses of vaccine have arrived and the government roared into action, waylaying helpless citizens in the street and injecting with vaccine up to their eyeballs.  Along the way valuable lessons have been learned such as apparently there are no ill effects if the hamfisted quack you handed the needle to accidentally gives the recipient quadruple the dose they were intended to receive.  The hapless pensioners thus blessed have been observed closely but so far have completely failed to grow an extra head or keel over in the street.  Other useful takeaways are that apparently a beer cooler is not quite chilly enough to safely store the vaccine.  The result of this discovery is that a certain number of doses travelled from the waterfront to the garbage bin without getting the chance to swim around a human bloodstream.

Despite these minor hiccoughs the roll out has been a great success.  Apparently.  I haven't received a vaccination.  I don't know whether this means the government considers me low risk or just thoroughly expendable.  In the meantime I'm relying on staying away from the herd immunity and not standing under 5G towers.

But enough of this tedious vaccine blather.  Something far more important rises like a mythical monster from a Scottish loch.  Corporate soccer is back!  One of the less well known casualties of the virus was the abrupt cessation of my weekly journey from the office to a nearby patch of grass where for between ten and twenty five minutes I made pitiable attempts to prove that I am still young, fit and capable of playing soccer.  For context I am over half a century old, smoke and have a level of fitness normally only found in corpses and not fresh corpses at that.  Oh, and I was never capable of playing soccer.

For the last twelve months I have been unable to wheeze and stumble around a minature football field while my opponents debate whether to tackle me or give me CPR.  This lack of match play has had obvious effects.  I am putting on weight.  Well actually I'm not much but such weight as I possess has redistributed itself in not particularly aesthetic ways.  As I gaze at the spread of my belly and also note the lack of change on the scales I can't help wondering where the weight I have put on around my middle has actually come from.  I'm afraid that quite soon my head will simply cave in or I'll wake up to find I'm missing a leg.

Fielding a team in these COVID times has proved to be challenging and it remains to be seen whether enough people turn up to form a quorum.  For context there are several hundred staff members in our Sydney office but six people on a football team is sometimes beyond us.  This was the case even before the world plague drove all to our respective holes in the ground from which a select few are now (hopefully) emerging, blinking like wombats in daylight, to play soccer.  Assuming I survive the process I'll tell you how we went.