Postal voting papers came through my door like greased lightning, but no sign of my overdue second Covid vaccination.
My appointment letter should have arrived by now, but the political circus was drowning me in a sea of election guff in the post instead. It does make you wonder about their priorities as we limp out of a pandemic amid a deafening referendum roar.
After reaching the 12 week deadline, my wife and I had still not received an official invitation for a second Oxford/AstraZeneca jab.
“Roll your sleeves up!” Shouts the Scottish Government’s vaccination advert. I just wish they would pull their socks up.
Slightly stressed, I called the vaccine hotline. My advisor was bemused.
“I don’t understand it, you are in limbo,” he said.
“The system won’t authorise a second jab for you for some reason.”
It was a mystery. So I kept staring forlornly at our postman with his back bent under the weight of election propaganda. Luckily our recycling bin is only a few feet from the postbox, so I can pop the election stuff in there unopened.
I was so excited to vote by post I almost forgot to mark my ballot paper
It’s great voting in advance by post: I don’t have to read all that. There are much better ways of keeping your finger on the pulse: The P&J’s Election Hub, for example.
Postal voting is straightforward even if you are a bit startled by all the gubbins which spills from the envelope.
If people cannot be trusted to address an envelope properly, how can they decide great matters of state?
The regional ballot paper is so long (with 18 parties on the list) that it resembles a basic toolkit for making your own paper fortune game. You know the kind of thing – fold a sheet of paper into multiple triangles of words and numbers.
I could tell that those in charge of postal voting were worried some of us would simply mail the ballot papers back to ourselves. They make a point of telling us that the returning officer’s address must be showing through a little window on the envelopes they provide – and most definitely not our own, which are printed on another side.
If people cannot be trusted to address an envelope properly, how can they decide great matters of state?
Having said that, I was so keen to practice fitting Envelope A into Envelope B, as per instructions, that I forgot to put my cross on either ballot paper. Luckily I caught it in time.
A weird election indeed
It is a weird election indeed, with the SNP controlling and dictating the political game as a make-or-break event leading to an inevitable referendum. Pro-union parties look beaten before polling day, but try to talk about anything else while side-stepping the SNP’s “psychodrama” over a possible IndyRef2.
Instead of uniting and pooling resources in this referendum dress rehearsal, they look out of step – as though they turned up to play a rugby match with hockey sticks.
All the talk is of a “supermajority” of pro-referendum MSPs, even although our d’Hondt vote counting system was supposed to guarantee consensual coalition governments in Scotland.
The nationalist cause has been stuck at around 47% vote share for a decade. It’s a figure which wins elections and MSP majorities – but not referendums.
Unless this underlying share of the vote soars dramatically this week for the pro-referendum camp, anything around that number is not a credible basis for another tilt at a breakaway.
How many are waiting for delayed second jabs?
l was stuck on 50%, too, as I looked for the other half of my double vaccine.
We had our first jab slightly earlier than planned in February when enterprising nurses at our Aberdeen GP practice gave us leftover doses rather than waste them.
We informed staff at Scotland’s Covid vaccine headquarters, and asked that an official first appointment already scheduled for a couple of weeks later was cancelled. But we suspect the computer issuing appointments reasoned that, as our first appointment was cancelled, we did not need a second.
We slipped through the net, but how many others are frozen in time and forgotten because the system cannot cope with a simple change of plan? Luckily, our brilliant GP nurses got wind of this shambles and used their initiative again.
They added us to a Covid vaccine clinic for vulnerable over-80s because they anticipated leftover vaccine – and I am pleased to say we have now had our second jabs via this backdoor route.
Meanwhile, I am still waiting days later to hear from the Scottish national vaccination centre about the blunder, after it was “elevated to a higher level” for further inquiries.
I thought about raising these flaws in the pandemic recovery plan with Nicola Sturgeon, but I think she is probably too busy concentrating on bigger politics right now.
David Knight is the long-serving former deputy editor of the Press and Journal