Colm O'Regan: Even after the announcement of a vaccine, things are still meh

Yes! We celebrated. Or rather we used the announcement of a vaccine as an excuse to get filthy pizza.

Pizza with the right amount (a lot) of oil drizzled on it. And the garlic mayonnaise that is only possible to get in takeaways.

The garlic mayonnaise that you can’t buy in the shops. It’s like chip shop vinegar or opening a burger.

I don’t want to know what’s in it. If I really wanted to know what I was eating, I wouldn’t be eating this.

Filthy pizza and undefinable garlic mayonnaise; it’s what Pfizer would have wanted.

Apart from filling up my arteries in celebration, I’m not getting too carried away by the vaccine news.

It wasn’t a big sample. If you’re going to give a vaccine to billions you’ll need it to work on tens of thousands. But it is better than the vaccine giving the 90% a load of warts or a second nose, the start of the long road back.

After the euphoria died down, maybe it was the depressive effects of heating up leftover pizza for breakfast, but there was a feeling of ‘Meh’.

Not about the vaccine. Just about life. I like the word meh. It looks like a new word. A classic example of The Youth not being able to articulate themselves like Keats so they just make a noise.

In fact, it is older than you think. Double-in-fact, it is older than people who thought it was older than they thought, thought it was. In the modern era, They say it first appeared on a Melrose Place online message board in 1992. But before that it was in a Yiddish dictionary a hundred years ago. It meant ‘be that as it may’, ‘so-so’.

So I feel there’s enough history there for me to say: even after the announcement of a vaccine, things are still meh and have been for a while. Technically meh is an insult, a conversation stopper.

Your opinion, this restaurant, that band you like is meh. Unremarkable, boring, uninspiring. But I like to use it to describe the indescribable. Where statistically things are ok in your life but still you feel …well meh. Like you’ve never really gotten out of your pyjamas.

Cleverer people than me have described this meh phase of a crisis as Disillusionment. It comes after the All In This Together Period.

You can have outsized reactions to triggers. A sniff of a hope of vaccine makes you delighted. But the handle of a spatula overbalancing and sending an arc of beans all over your only clean jeans makes you think the universe has nothing better to do than shaft you.

Even the vaccine has a meh side-effect. A fear of normality. I feel like my socialising skills have atrophied. Like when you stop your 15th attempt to get fit and within a week, your core muscles have the tautness of a Christmas jumper.

I watch friends send social media updates from less lockdown-y countries. They are out having a pint or going to a Thing. I watch them like a dog watching telly- a combination of bewilderment and nervousness. What are you doing? A crowd?? How does that work.

The first rule of meh is that it’s hard to feel you can talk about meh. It seems whiny when so many others are going through far worse.

But it’s good to at least recognise it. For me, the good news is that meh seems to respond well to meh-dication.

A walk, a talk, more than one proper sleep per fortnight. And not procrastinating. So once I’ve finished this filthy pizza, I’ll get right on it.