Our local television station recently invited viewers to summarise their experience of the covid-19 pandemic in a single sentence. In our household, we came up with ‘Funny old year, eh?’ and ‘I’m getting a bit fed up with it now’.

Perhaps that sums it up for many people.

The year since March 2020 has been weird. None of us can have lived through anything like it before. Everyone will have their own story of what happened to them. Most people will remember some of the dramatic moments, for example the Prime Ministerial public broadcasts, flanked by the scientific advisers, or else footage of temporary hospitals and intensive care units. Not to mention the Dominic Cummings rose garden press conference, in the episode that undermined a lot of public confidence in our leadership. We will also remember occasions when we had covid tests or went for our first dose of vaccination. Colleagues who work in acute medicine will have seen lots of patients in distress and had anxious hours as they anticipated becoming overwhelmed by the volume of need. Many of us will have worked from home, or carried on working and perhaps feeling anxious as they did. Many families will have experienced bereavement, and for some of them there will be a sense of grievance that their loved ones were not better protected.

The experience for most of the people I know has been working from home. This has its plusses. The coffee is better. When the weather is nice, if you have a garden you can sit in it – ideal for reading boring stuff, I find. If you have access to fields or parks, you can go for walks. Home working is better if you have some space to work in, not good at all if you are having to work on the same table that you eat from or if you are a student and there’s only a bed and four walls. Remote meetings have of course been the big thing for most people and there are several new phrases we now hear every day, like ‘You’re muted’ or ‘Is that a legacy hand?’. They are convenient but exhausting, and academic papers have been written to tell us that this is because staring into other people’s faces for such long periods, coupled with extreme physical immobility, is physically and emotionally draining. People argue about whether Teams is better than Zoom, and Google Meet has some advocates. What I want to know is what happened to Skype?

After twelve months, we seem to be less in consensus than we were. Some folk are distinctly restless whereas others are still anxious about having too much contact with others. It will take us a period of rehabilitation when we emerge from lockdown to a time of less restriction. We will need to be kind to each other as some people will be more worried than others about social contact. Where I do have a sense of consistency is that most people I have talked to are OK from one day to the next. Life goes on. Work is getting done online and we are still teaching and training doctors.

However, for lots of people there is a sense of incompleteness, that there could be more to life. Now that we have target dates dangled in front of us, we are starting to think of things we’d love to do. For me, I’d just like to go to the village pub. Not for the alcohol, because of course we can buy that anyway. It’s more because it represents a form of personal liberty that has been missing. It’s not going to be far into the future but it’s still tantalisingly far off.

Will we be different when we re-emerge? Probably yes, though we don’t quite know in what ways. I think I shall be much more reluctant to use air travel. I shan’t fly anywhere in Europe if I can avoid it but will use the train. There are some serious opportunities to change the way that economies work, so that we could do something serious about climate change. Alas, I think these opportunities will be overlooked in the interests of short-term profit making. That is, until the next calamity visits itself upon us….

Written by Tom Dening in response to the National Day of Reflection, held on 23rd March 2021, and a year after he first commented about the traumas and uncertainties of Covid-19.