The most magical time of the year – flu jab day, my chosen Christmas. I love it. I love the efficiency of popping into the chemist at lunchtime, as if for a meal deal or tampon, and leaving with the knowledge that I’m safe from four strains of flu, as well as a meal deal and a tampon. I love the wait on the hard chairs, the cheery conversation with a stranger whose neck has completely gone and who’s had it up to here with her boss. Last year I had a good chat with a man waiting for his methadone – he said it tasted horrid.

I love to sit among those boxes of potential cures for whatever ails, whether head or feet or the hazy no-man’s land in between. I hear the lowered voices of people asking the chemist for bum cream, and prevent myself from shouting, in all my flu jab love: “We are all people my friend! Underneath our jacket, cardigan, T-shirt and pants, we are all people, and we all have a bum! Don’t be shy, you are home amongst your own kind.” At this time of year it is a constant struggle not to become one of the people that shouts affectionately at strangers.

And then my name is called, and I love the intimacy of being in a room the size of a toilet with a pharmacist whose leaflet library is unsurpassed and whose breath tells an epic poem about the tuna sandwich she had at 12. I love the way the flu jab allows me to mutter: “I’m a brave little soldier” as I roll up my sleeve. I don’t hear that enough.

I do not love the pain – and this year it hurt, less like the little prick intended and more like the mean bite of a small dog. But I do love the relief when I am pressing a ball of cotton wool to my arm and marvelling at the magic of vaccinations. I browse my complimentary literature, and learn that up to 17,000 people in the EU die annually from flu, but I needn’t be one of them.

I love proselytising noisily as if a missionary returned from war

Last year’s flu was brutal, meaning the vaccine was less effective than hoped. But if more people get vaccinated, fewer people will get sick, so fewer viruses will be spread, and so on. And yet, the dangling threads of anti-vaxx anxiety tickle even the seemingly sane – research shows a longstanding scepticism about the flu vaccine, especially from young adults. People are worried about the side effects, claiming they’re worse than flu itself. These are people who, I’m confident in saying, have never had flu.

I love the feeling of smugness when I emerge from the chemist into a bright afternoon with the knowledge that not only will nobody catch flu from me, but nobody will have to care for me either, or cover my work, or offer sympathy for my deathly condition and bad skin. Smiling at sour-faced office workers I’m a silent Oprah, flinging health to women in the cheap seats as if free handbags or flights to Antigua. “No flu for YOU, no flu for YOU!”

And, leaning right back in my wheelie chair in the office, I love proselytising noisily as if a missionary returned from war, and weighed down with pamphlets and facts both reassuring (you can’t get the flu from a flu jab) and disgusting (the flu virus can survive on hard surfaces like door handles for a full day). My colleagues’ eyes glaze over as if I’m showing baby photos – people do not like being told what to do – but still, on I preach, because, it is becoming clear, I have been sent to Earth to irritate.

I love the post-jab ache, as if my upper arm has taken itself off to pilates after a messy breakup, really working it, abs, a haircut, the whole “new me” rather than simply having been poked with a pin. It feels three times its size, like the bicep of a woman tanned and oiled and still lifting weights despite celebrating her 85th birthday with all her 18 photogenic grandchildren. Someone tapped my arm at Tesco and instinctively I yelled “BCG!”, the clarion call of nerds in playgrounds between the years 1989 and 1995. I love that the flu jab is also a time machine.

And most of all, I love not getting flu. I love eating food that is not a single spoon of tinned soup, a centimetre of buttered toast, the painful slug of water that has been sitting in its glass for so long that a layer of flu dust has formed on its surface. I love the freedom of being able to fetch my own tea and daughter and put on my own tights. Walking without groaning is wildly underrated, as is getting through an entire day without complaining about one’s throat or feeling tired. I love not lying in damp sheets having dreams of death, awake all night with a single word tumbling over and over in my mind, its meaning long having been lost, now just a shape which will see me through to dawn, whereupon a dank sort of sleep will come, a drowning. All this casual, wonderful joy, from one sharp scratch.

One more thing…

Waitrose has introduced salsify in 100 stores. What a glorious looking vegetable, hairy and muted, it looks like a feminist carrot. It really doesn’t give a toss about your repressive root vegetable norms. I plan to eat plenty of it.

Gather round, gather round, for the annual UK’s Sexiest Politicians list has been published, voted for by members of illicitencounters.com – a dating website for married people. Which maybe goes some way to explain why, at number one, we have Boris Johnson. For only people who haven’t been touched in years but are too scared of their own company to get divorced, and are therefore reaching for the comfort of probable online bots instead, would consider Johnson first when it comes to Shag, Marry, Kill.

In gentler news, I’m delighted to announce that I’ve officially put the heating on. Don’t @me.

Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman