Good morning. Three minutes after 10 is the time and you're listening to James O'Brien on LBC. I did warn

you last week that at some point this week, the rest of the world would probably wake up to the fact

that COVID was back, brackets, hopefully not brackets, with a vengeance, but it's definitely back.

And we'll get stuck into that early doors this morning. Speaking of predictions, I'm somewhat

surprised, see, New Zealand has already overtaken us on the percentage of the population that

have had one dose of the vaccine. I thought that would be towards the end of this week, but we

haven't yet hit the 50,000 a day. Yesterday was 49,000. So lots of reasons to return reluctantly, but I want you to

trust me. We will, as ever, be able to have the conversation in a human fashion. You know,

it might not be glad tidings, but it's important information, really, and indeed opinion. So,

you know, that's why I am paid for my part in these conversations

and you generally are not. It's up to me to make sure that we manage to conduct ourselves with a

degree of levity and lightheartedness without in any way trivialising or forgetting the seriousness

of the situation. I don't think that rule applies in the planned final hour today.

I don't think there'll be much danger.

Well, you don't know, actually.

Possibly there will be some unexpected seriousness.

But I am minded at the moment, unless you can persuade me otherwise,

to dedicate it to that lovely lady Doris,

who rang in a couple of weeks ago to complain about my

lazy use of the phrase your Auntie Doris's Facebook page to describe the sort of places where you get

your anti-vaccine propaganda from and your Donald Trump won the election nonsense and she quite rightly

pointed out this was profoundly unfair on people called Doris. And today we

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