Someday soon we’ll miss it

Sir — It already seems like another world. Do you remember in early March seeing the pictures of the situation in Lombardy, sending shivers down your spine?

I remember the emptiness of the city, the ghost trams and buses carrying nobody, weeds growing on the streets. A face mask on the Phil Lynott statue in Harry Street.

There were queues around supermarkets, people saying ‘Dunnes must be making a packet’.

We made sure to watch The Six O’Clock News to get the latest from Dr Holohan and his team. And we got loads of texts afterwards asking ‘What do you think now?’

No pubs, no bookies, no sport on TV, apart from old matches from long gone World Cups — the last time the nation held its breath.

I remember a maskless Trump spouting rubbish on CNN and Boris getting the virus and Cummings legging it out of No 10. And I also remember my granddaughters learning how to cycle and their parents sitting out on the street, watching them, proud as punch.

And then the whole city seemed to take to the bike. You’d see the green fields of the Wicklow Mountains from Portobello Bridge. An amazing pink moon in a clear sky.

Thrushes, blackbirds, robins and finches rehearsing their own Rite of Spring in the back garden every morning and most of the day.

A medic friend in North America emailed me that ‘Ireland should be proud of its prime minister’. Soon after that I got texts from friends that read ‘It must be the best

Government we ever had’.

I read two newspapers every day — and still had time to read books. I listened to the radio a lot and heard the first tracks of Dylan’s new album on The South Wind Blows ona Sunday night.

Though sometimes there was a cool east wind, the weather seemed to be always good — clear sunshine,“Great cocooning weather,” a passerby shouted over to me.

“When will it ever end?” I asked my WhatsApp group.

“Well, the Emergency was five years,” a friend texted.

“But they had the best of stout and whiskey and pubs on every street corner,” another replied.

Then last week, Monday June 29, The Great Lockdown was over. Someday soon we will miss it.