I marked the second anniversary of the first lockdown this week in the car park of Cardiff City stadium performing that all-too-familiar ritual of tonsil swab, retch, nostril swab, eyes water.
With a sore throat and my other half at home with Covid, the PCR test was, of course, inevitable. But as I drove between the various checkpoints, showing QR and bar codes, bagging up the sample and having it pincered through the car window by a man in a mask, it did strike me that a process that would have had the surrealism of a sci-fi movie pre-March 2020 had become entirely mundane by March 2022.
Two life-changing years have passed for all of us. While Covid hasn’t gone away the sheer terror that accompanied its arrival has dissipated. How quickly we forget that scary Spring when the world was startled into a complete standstill. There are moments, though, I will always remember. The fear on my elderly father’s face as we watched a solemn Prime Minister, devoid of his usual clownish touches, laying bare the severity of the situation. Dad was on the edge of his armchair, straining to hear every word uttered by Johnson and his scientific sidekicks.
