Authored by John MacLeod via The Critic,
We have repressed the memories of the pandemic that changed all of our lives...
It is a little drawer in a cabinet by my bedside and I have not opened it in years. I have to steel myself to open it now. And, yes, they are all there yet in every variety - black, chequered, colourful.
The ear-looped face-coverings behind which I spluttered for two long years, tugging on and off as needs be, as we queued obediently outside supermarkets, danced on and off pavements, or chilled if anyone in the vicinity so much as coughed.
Obediently protecting the NHS by, um, not using it. And, for weeks on end in 2020, biddably stood outside our front gates to hail its endeavours each Thursday evening, clapping our hands and banging saucepans.
The initial weeks of panic, when hand-sanitiser, soap and masks were nowhere to be had. An inexplicable run on toilet-rolls. The later, weird scarcities: flour, yeast, eggs.
On all sides the shuttered shops and restaurants, many of which would never reopen. The funerals you could not go to and the weddings that never happened. Untold rings, accordingly, engraved with the wrong date.
I have the sort of bardic, Highland memory that could immediately tell you something interesting that happened in my life in, say, August 1976 or September 2002. I'd struggle to detail much between March 2020 and April 2022.
Those were months without form, and void. Without the usual milestones of big social occasions and family celebration. In hindsight, they have a nightmarish hue.
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