Who's the Daddy: Waking up all washed out...

There is that, of course, but it turns out dogs mainly think just three things. “When are we going for a walk?”, “Where’s my dinner?” and “Can I have some of your dinner?” They are incredibly straightforward animals.

The boss had her AZ Covid jab last week and her major side effect, like so many others, was like having coronavirus again for 24 hours but worse.

A few hours after the vaccination in her left arm she came home from work feeling “funny”, managed a few mouthfuls of dinner and then crawled into bed.

Things got properly serious a little bit later. A raging temperature, blinding headache, full body ache and shivering so hard that it hurt. If we lived in normal times and we all hadn’t already had Covid for Christmas I’d have called for an ambulance, things were that bad.

The boss is a tough and resilient woman, after all, she’s put up with yours truly for the past 26 years, but this looked serious. It was more of a worry than when she had a dose of flu in 1996 and took Night Nurse, the most powerful hallucinogen known to man, and in her delusional state was convinced a mouse was crawling across the ceiling to get her. Funny now, but as horrific as Mark Renton’s withdrawal scene in Trainspotting back then.

It’s always darkest before the dawn and around 5am her symptoms started to ease and by dinner time she was almost back to normal, apart from feeling washed out and exhausted. The day after that she was more or less right as rain and back in work.

But just to rub salt into the wound, when I got my Pfizer jab I got an “I’ve Had My Covid Vaccination” sticker from the medic who stuck a needle in my arm. The boss didn’t get one. Apart from the debilitating side effects and scaring the living daylights out of herself and everyone else in the house, that’s what hurt the most.