Feeling just that extra bit stiff and sore this morning — my joints and muscles don’t really want to move around very much. We had our fourth Covid jab yesterday afternoon, the Moderna bi-valent one. I reckon our immune response to the immunological challenge is mobilising, from the lymph nodes draining the injection site, where re-circulating memory cells are stimulated by the re-appearance of the antigen they’re primed to recognise, and then spreading around the body, eliciting all kinds of lymphokines and immune sequelae as if there was a real pathogen to attack and immobilise. Go, lovely lymphocytes go! Do your stuff!

So as achy and tetchy as I feel, I have this Adult Perspective, of course, that things will get better soon. We were reminded early yesterday evening of the absolutist perspective of early adolescence, where everything feels tumultuous, final and finished. Where often hope is replaced by despair as we grow into ourselves. Becoming adults gives us such a broader perspective, and then perhaps, as we enter the years of decrepitude (as we joke between ourselves about ageing challenges), we may lose that perspective again and become querulous, absolutist, post-mature adolescents again. And we might feel, fatalistically, that things are never going to be better.

If we can retrieve our adult capacity to look with sanguinity into the near future, and realise that in a day or so normal joint and muscle capacity will return, then we can replace that sense of despair with a presentiment of hope. And that’s enough of a joyful perspective for me to be getting on with, today.