Last week my phone pinged an alert to tell me it had made a little slideshow. It’s one of those ‘It’s Good To Remember!’ functions you’re probably familiar with, the kind that collates a dozen photos of, say, weddings you’ve been to, or beach trips you’ve photographed, scored with enough chintzy, heart-tugging music that you don’t pause to consider how much computing power your phone uses to work out what a wedding looks like.
This, however, was a ‘Five Years Since!’ slideshow, tabulating a kind of greatest hits of my photos from March 2020. As such, the pictures soundtracked by cheerful, plinking guitar were not of perfect days building sandcastles or raising glasses to some happy couple, but a dazzlingly bleak carousel of photos from the dire onset of the pandemic and the beginning of the first lockdown: boxes of PPE that had arrived by mail, empty streets under grey skies and an embarrassingly well-documented supermarket trip that featured my first experience of socially distant queueing and eerily loo- roll-denuded shelves.
