Goody, humans. How you doing? How you feeling? How you're faring? I'm chipper this week,

at least as chipper as you could be expected to be whilst in lockdown. I'm chipper for a few

reasons. One, we are smashing it at vaccinations. Australia is vaccinating at a higher rate than the UK and the US ever did,

significantly higher in terms of the proportion of the population each day who are getting

vaccinated. So, Aussie, Ozzy, Ozzie, oy, oy, go us.

And secondly, I feel sort of the same way that I did in March of 2020. In a strange way,

a certain peace came over me as the pandemic truly erupted in the sense that I was early on

the pandemic train. I knew what was coming

before most of my peers and certainly significantly before everybody else did, not because

I'm a soothsayer or a prognosticator extraordinaire, but simply because I was a little

bit tuned in with data

wonky people and journals and epidemiologists. And it was clear to me several weeks ahead of

everybody else that this Wuhan thing was not something to be messed with. This was going to

change the whole world. And while I knew that, and most people were treating it still as a bit of a

joke, it was frustrating, infuriating, terrifying, isolating, anxiety-inducing. And then when the

whole world began to fall apart in March, and we entered a lockdown, and everybody was shitting themselves at the supermarket, and people were disinfecting every apple before they put it into their mouths, and we didn't know what the hell was going on.

A certain sense of calm descended on me, and I felt like, okay, this is it. I knew the

train was coming. The train is here. Now at least we're all on the train together. We're going

somewhere. I know not where, but at least, at least we're on. We're on board. No one's, you know,

there's no, there's, I'm not the crazy person standing on the train platform screaming at the heavens anymore, like the train came. And now we just have to ride it

together. And there was a certain piece in that. And similarly, at the moment, the fact that

New South Wales's coronavirus outbreak is completely unendable and is we are not going to be able to get back to

...