L
ast year ended with Britain just
about on the floor, pummelled by a
relentlessly inauspicious news cycle.
The country teetered on the brink of
a no-deal Brexit, and to top it off Kent
had somehow become the new Wuhan, with
the freshly identified Alpha variant laying
waste to Christmas and far more besides.
Despite its miserable start and uncertain
finale, there’s no doubt 2021 has been an
improvement on its predecessor. Prodigious
vaccines arrived. Holidays were taken,
grandparents were hugged and families
reunited. Festivals were held, theatres
reopened and proper football returned. But
we are still trapped in a pandemic few of us
ever expected to drag on quite this long,
and what we used to think of as normality
remains frustratingly out of reach.
Troubling new variants, persistent travel
hurdles, supply chain collapses, price hikes,
party cancellations: life is undeniably just
a bit worse than it used to be. When the
plangent tones of Auld Lang Syne fade out
on Friday night and we bid this strange and
anxious year goodbye, there will still be far
fewer hugs and kisses than usual. For if
2020 was the year of holy shit, then 2021 is
the year of meh.
This feeling of drabness and alienation
is about more than just the virus and its
attendant restrictions. Something unsettling
has happened to our sense of time and
memory in the two years since the novel
coronavirus started spreading in Wuhan.
Remember those clips of quarantined
Spaniards serenading one another across
balconies in Barcelona? That feels to me
as though it were yesterday, and yet also a
different lifetime altogether. The pandemic
has gone on for ever, but somehow it also
flashed past in an instant.
Most of us have experienced this warping
of the time-space continuum and the brain
fog that comes with it. It happens to me all
the time. Midway through writing this essay
I called my mum. But why was I calling, she
wondered. “Oh, just to wish you a good
weekend,” I said, somewhat defensively. “You
know I always call on Friday afternoons.”
Except of course it was Tuesday morning.
Remembering when and in what order
things happened has become a real
challenge. Was it during the second or the
third lockdown that I watched The Queen’s
Gambit? Does it even matter? Now that
we’re almost two years into this gruelling
ordeal, researchers have had time toJOSH
GLANCYConfetti showers a
nightclub in Liverpool,
open for the first time
in a year. The event in
April was part of a trial
to see how venues
could safely reopen
The Sunday Times Magazine • 47