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.
My first thought was how comically jarring it was. My second was a near bodily rejection of the idea that this was five years ago. In the fortnight since, there have been plenty of five-year memorials of the first lockdown, many of which have made the point that it feels simultaneously as if it happened last month and a century ago.
I’m loath to memorialise this period in the manner of a terrible moment now happily passed. It demeans the suffering of those that Covid still affects every day, in the empty chairs at dinner tables, in the criminally under-reported effects of long Covid among so many of us, even now.
That precise time feels so hard to pin down. Is it plain old trauma repression, or is it the fact that so many of those days were so weirdly similar that separating them out is impossible? Why does it feel as if I clapped for the NHS just once or twice, when I know I did it for weeks? Was it months?
Turning to my full camera roll to jog my recollection, I find the slideshow left out many more memorable moments; joyous ones, of play and laughter and silly faces, albeit given strange meaning in light of everything else that was going on, the view past my son’s laughing face of our TV blaring a nightly dispatch from those three Downing Street lecterns. The first lockdown came in when the cherry blossom outside that house was in its full, brief, glorious bloom. My son spent much of his days indoors gazing out of our window towards it, a plump face suffused with its warm, creamy pink glow.
He was not yet two then and has no memory of any of this, of those first 12 weeks he spent indoors with me, his increasingly frazzled playmate; of how he would approach any hand-height object and press it, before miming the action of rubbing sanitiser in his hands. I’m glad he can’t, I’m just perturbed that I can’t either. So, I’ll make the effort, take stock, give thanks. Sometimes it is good to remember.
