Back in August I was chatting to an old friend and, somewhat bizarrely, the subject of shingles came up.

What sparked that conversation was the TV advert which is advising people of a certain age that they will be able to get the new Shingrix shingles vaccine much earlier than had previously been the case.

It turns out that both of us had suffered from shingles when we were younger, had absolutely no desire to get it again (yes, you can get it more than once) and were looking forward to September 1 when the new scheme came into force and, so we thought, we would become eligible for the vaccine.

We were wrong.

Let’s just rewind here and put this into some kind of context.

According to the NHS, shingles can occur at any age, but the risk and severity of shingles and its complications increase with age and is higher in individuals who have a severely weakened immune system.

Shingles can’t be caught from other people. Instead, it develops in people who have previously been infected with chickenpox at some point in their life.

At least nine in 10 adults are already infected with the virus that causes shingles, having had chickenpox as children, and around one in four people will go on to develop shingles in their lifetime – the risk of this increases with age.

For many people, shingles can be painful and unpleasant but some cases can result in serious symptoms such as blindness, hearing loss, nerve pain and potentially death.

The older you are, the more severe the symptoms are likely to be.

Under the previous scheme, people became eligible for the Zostavax vaccine when they turned 70 but there’s a new, better, longer-lasting vaccine available called Shingrix and the Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation (JCVI) want people to start getting it at an earlier age.

So they’ve put in place a rolling 10-year programme and eventually, everyone aged 60 or over will be able to get the new vaccine.

Now me and my friend are both over 65 so news of the new vaccine and the fact it was being made available at an earlier age was very welcome.

The key thing to remember here is that generally speaking, the older you are the more likely you are to get shingles and the older you are, the more likely it is to be severe.

But when my friend contacted his GP to book in for his shingles vaccine he was told he would have to wait until his 70th birthday. Surely, he said, this was a mistake. All the adverts said it was now available to those who were 65 or over.

Not so, said the nurse he spoke to. She explained that anyone who is already aged 65 to 69 will have to wait until they are 70 but anyone who turns 65 after September 1 this year will be offered the new vaccine.

I checked and the nurse is right. In the most extreme example, if your 65th birthday was on August 31, you will have to wait a full five years to become eligible for the vaccine. If your birthday was on September 1, you could have had it that day.

Can someone please make this make sense?

The older you are the worse shingles is likely to be yet the JCVI has advised vaccinating younger people first, making older people wait until they are 70. What’s the logic behind this?

On another topic, we all know that Tory MP Andy Carter isn’t going to stand for the Warrington South constituency at the next general election but he has been quite coy about admitting exactly what he will be doing.

Well, it looks like he is doing a ‘chicken run’ to a safer seat. When asked by BBC local news, he didn’t deny he wanted to stand in another constituency but said that was up to local constituency associations to decide if they wanted him as their candidate.

My money’s on Eddisbury.