Salut!

Antivaxers and super-épandeurs: a message for you from a double-jabbed Covid survivor

On both sides of the Channel, people are protesting in relatively small numbers and with varying levels of fury about the need to be vaccinated against coronavirus and/or health passes to prove it’s as safe as possible for them to be welcomed in various public places. Disgusting comparisons are drawn in France between health passes and the persecution and slaughter of Jews by occupying Nazis. In the UK, the sort of people who think Trump won and Brexit is wonderful depict vaccination as a murky plot or dismiss it as unnecessary or unsafe.  

My sister, Sandra Falconer, offers a different view, one to challenge the British antivaxers and French defenders of the right to infect. Sandra is double-jabbed but still caught COVID-19. It was unpleasant but, and of this she is certain, a lot less so than if she had not been vaccinated. She has composed these wonderful words about her experience, and the emotions they inspired, and I am proud to reproduce them,  from the Joy Club, on the day our dad, and our brother Phil's dad, would have been 112 (he died decades before Covid was thought of) ...

 

 

Close Encounters

Beaten down by the symptoms of the dreaded pestilence, I at last surrendered to the inevitable. I consented to hospitalisation because my GP in her wisdom, led me to believe that it would be tests, tablets and a revolving turnstile, home before bedtime.

Even so, as I was helped into the ambulance, I felt like a rabbit caught between headlights. After 18 months of this pandemic, we harbour images of sick people with blue lips and tubes protruding painfully. It wasn’t like that at all, and it could have been so much worse had I not been vaccinated, but there was to be no rapid return to the Falconer fold.

Satire, ridicule and an excess of indignation.Emmanuel Macron should beware double standards

This is my latest opinion piece for The National, which kindly permits me to reproduce my work here. President Emmanuel Macron is on his vacances studieuses just down the road from me.

The Fort de Brégançon is indeed splendid - I've been there and seen for myself - though not every French president fell for its charms. De Gaulle, for example, loathed it, the small bed he was given and the mosquitoes. From the limited bits I saw indoors, the splendour is mainly in its stunning location. Mr Macron must disagree since he has made a habit of spending his summer hols there ... and usually has plenty to think about.

The president, meanwhile, has taken offence at an artist's depiction of him as Hitler. When you think of al those elaborate YouTube spoofs on the same theme, the phrase that springs to mind is sense of humour breakdown ...

 

 

On his working holiday at the Fort de Bregancon, the splendid Mediterranean retreat of French heads of state, Emmanuel Macron may be focusing some thought on a winning strategy for next year’s presidential elections.

But a revival of intense debate about the extent and limits of a key pillar of the French republican ideal – freedom – also deserves his attention.

Mr Macron, fighting to keep Covid-19 under control amid rising infection rates, especially in coastal areas popular with tourists, has thrust himself to the heart of the discussion.

At play are the competing demands of individual liberty and collective responsibility, leading to more than a suspicion of double standards on how far the freedom of expression should reasonably go.