‘The phantom months we never saw are being built in our minds through odd remarks’

people in lockdown they can make us believe they went through it with us. So by Wednesday sly references were telling us that lockdown did happen: Aggie, right, the nurse, was exhausted, her husband Edison the builder hated being off work while she was carrying the burden in hospital, and now their Zoom anniversary fun is kiboshed.

On a lighter note, we learn that Patti Clare’s hilariously irritating

Mary spent those months trying to organise her reluctant flatmate Sean’s day into a timetable of online fitness videos and tuneless attempts at Italianstyle “balcony singing” across the cobbles. Oh the joy. That’s the pleasure of Coronation Street: rarely is a character purely villainous, and none are there just there to be laughed at.

New locals often turn up at first as joke figures, nightmare neighbours or irresponsible home-wreckers, but if they suit the show they stay and we start to understand their issues and why they are that way.

We grow to tolerate or even love them. Which is just what happens in real life and neighbourhoods. Especially during these last months when so many people have by necessity got to know their own real street or block rather better.

The Street’s magic trick is both crazy and inspiring, and left me wistfully thinking how nice it would be if we could all have jumped from the 23rd of March until now, picking up life again like the Sleeping Beauty. OK, the splicing and editing has caused a few wrinkles: the boy Simon had his hair grow during an ad-break, pompous Nick suddenly achieved a whole beard, and they hastily had to give Yasmeen a minor heart attack as there was no way they could film her court scene. But it hasn’t broken the reality. The phantom months we never saw are being built in our minds through odd remarks. They’ll end up with all the other memories we now share: a blip in 60 entertaining years.