It's now a year since all coronavirus restrictions were lifted. It seems much longer.
The era of self-isolation, face coverings, regular testing, daily death counts, earnest press conferences, social distancing, vaccination appointments, new variants and working from home lasted almost two years. It had ramped down somewhat by February 2022 but there were still plenty of restrictions left for Boris to bin as he tried to bring down the curtain on two extraordinarily strange years.
Of course Covid hasn't gone away, as you'll know if you caught it recently or are still suffering long-term symptoms or lost someone dear during the pandemic or still have a chip on your shoulder about having your freedoms restricted despite not feeling ill.
And it still lingers today in signage nobody's ever got round to taking down, as these extant examples demonstrate.
It'll be a long time before all this collateral fades away, especially where pavements got sprayed or stickers proved resilient to peeling off. Even by 2030 we'll probably still be finding the occasional reminder in the corner of a shop window or stuck to a lamppost, and by then there'll be a whole new generation of children who won't remember that strange time when you couldn't go out and play with your friends.
This is the Blossom Garden in the Olympic Park, the quiet space planted with flowering trees that was supposed to become a place of remembrance for those bereaved by the virus.
It's never properly taken off as a place to visit despite the Mayor and the National Trust trying their hardest, perhaps because the anniversary blossom's hardly ever out or perhaps because we don't really want to remember.
Or perhaps we cast Covid aside so swiftly because another crisis came along immediately to replace it. The gap between the lifting of all legal restrictions and Russia's invasion of Ukraine was just three hours long, a calm period you probably slept through, and now we have global instability, raging inflation, energy price hikes and food shortages to worry about instead.
How quickly we forget. Should you want to remember, three of the trees in the Blossom Garden are already in flower because climate change means spring is accelerating. And don't worry about staying two metres apart, you're unlikely to meet anyone else down there anyway.
