A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were talking about some places we’d visited and trying to pinpoint when we’d been there. I threw out a date that sounded right, and she shook her head. No, she said. We went before COVID!

And that made me pause for a moment.

I’ve read a lot of articles and commentary on how COVID was a defining period for many people, and hadn’t really made the connection myself until then, and I wondered why.

The answer, as I see it depends on how the COVID pandemic affected you. We were incredibly fortunate in a combination of working from home and living in a semi-rural area, we were shielded from many of the issues people faced in more urban settings, especially with regard to lockdowns.

I think because we didn’t have the huge dislocation many people went through, COVID wasn’t such a defining period for us, until we looked beyond a daily, or weekly focus and considered longer timeframes. So while it took me a while to catch up with the rest of the world, I’m definitely more aware now of pre and post COVID timelines.