Sarah Perry is trying to be good: she trained as a vaccinator, sought to help. But being good is hard, and there is a lot of anger about. 

This is not to say that we should simply abdicate – toss away the mask, fill our homes with plastic – only to warn against resting easy in our own virtue, assuming malignancy and folly on the part of others. Recently, it has seemed to me that nothing said or done is personal: it is all abstract, representational, showing the colours of a fixed character and tribe. So a man, once wrong, is wrong for ever. He cannot apologise and alter, since that would be nothing but hypocrisy, and he must remain always beyond redemption. This assumption of bad faith has poisoned the public discourse, and caused such deep entrenchment of opposed positions that nobody can hope to see the land. A trench is a comfortable place when the battle’s on, bolstered about by those assuring us of our virtue, and agreeing the unseen enemy is incomprehensibly wicked – certainly I prefer it myself. To take a wider view – to sit, as they say, up on a high horse – is troubling, because here we see the territory, and not the map. From such a vantage we may find our own motives are ignoble, or our position not as wise as we thought, and are available to be shot at from all points. This is a position demanding a kind of subtlety that risks endearing you to nobody – yes, you may say, it is deplorable to protect the economy above lives, but then again a severe and lasting depression may be counted not in pounds and pence, but in vertiginous rises in homelessness, drug dependence, sickness and suicide. Certainly, this is not the flu, but there may come a time when it is something like it; yes, we have to learn to live with it, and there is no life without the risk of death, but living with it may consist of universal basic income, and affordable housing, and so on. Who’d risk expulsion from the trench with these slow negotiations? I blame no one for preferring the sandbags.