My pro-vaxxer friends have been a lot nicer to me since they started testing positive for Covid.

I’m calling my vaccinated friends ‘pro-vaxxer’, by the way, just so they can see how it feels to have a quirky-sounding label applied to them based on their personal choices about how to withstand a pandemic.

Meanwhile, I’m most certainly not going to call myself an anti-vaxxer because I’ve had dozens of vaccines, just not this one.

I don’t need a label that’s become a term of abuse and was used by an MP while condemning people who don’t want the vaccine as the sorts of scoundrels who might launch a physical attack on him. It was rather as though this chap was boiling up to proposing an amendment to the anti-terror laws to include anti-vaccine campaigners as proscribed organisations, as though random collections of citizens who don’t want new technology injected into them within a year of it being made are somehow as dangerous as Isis or the IRA.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m the norm. I’m the rational one. I’m the one taking a logical position.

I’m the one who’s decided to wait and see what the research says about how much protection this new vaccine gives you.

All those who continue to want the full mRNA experience, three jabs and counting, with no information forthcoming about how many more might be needed, and how long or short a time each one covers you for, they are the ones who need labelling. Jabs. Even the word is annoying me.

Wasn’t John Prescott called two jabs after punching a voter? Imagine how frustrating it will be in a few years’ time, when you’ve had so many jabs you can’t even remember how many but your vaccine passport is coming up as out of date every time you try to go somewhere, and even though you’ve got 17 jabs recorded on it you suspect you missed a few somewhere along the line.

Meanwhile, I’m looking into the research and wondering whether the odds of this and that make vaccination worthwhile now that I’ve had Covid and recovered well, which would suggest I have the antibodies.

I wasn’t getting any credit for this rational position until recently, but then my vaccinated friends started testing positive.

At first they held the line, insisting vehemently that no matter how ill they were, they were beyond grateful for the vaccine because without it, clearly, they would have died.

Strange. You don’t have your travel vaccinations, then go to Africa, catch yellow fever and declare from your bed, as you sweat it out, that the yellow fever jab saved your life. You say: ‘What the hell is going on? That vaccine for yellow fever was a load of rubbish! It hasn’t worked! The blasted walk-in vaccination centre stitched me up like a kipper!’

Lately, however, some of my vaccinated friends are questioning whether they ought really to have caught Covid.

And when they tell me they’re a bit miffed, they speak to me in a different way from the way they were speaking to me before, when they had taken a high-handed tone, as though I were a naughty child.

The builder boyfriend is having the same experience. He went sailing with an old friend the other day and got the impression, during a slap-up lobster lunch on the Isle of Wight, that his friend was very much in the pro-vax camp. His wife being a GP, it wasn’t surprising that he banged the drum for the vaccine and said how much they were enjoying life now they were protected and could get about.

A day later, he received an apologetic call from his friend to say that he and his wife had gone down with it — so sorry, and all that, because we know the vaccinated can pass it on. He didn’t attempt to make an excuse. He was downright cross.

Not everyone is, though. A friend rang to ask me to cover for him at a weekly community group we jointly run because he had a terrible cold. He was having to go for a PCR test, but of course, he added, it could not possibly be Covid because he was ‘fully vaccinated’.

They always say those two words with emphasis, as though they’re a convector heater that’s been health and safety checked and slapped with a compliance sticker.

I said he should take care and let me know, because if it was Covid I would cover for him again next week. He said that would not be necessary and he repeated, rather tetchily, that he could not possibly have Covid because he was fully vaccinated.

I agreed that I would see him next week. I respect the right of pro-vaxxers to believe what they want.