The things we took for granted before Covid feel like real privileges

New Year’s Eve 2019 into 2020 was a memorable day. A few months previously, I had noticed that tickets were going on sale online for the London fireworks. Having watched them for years on television, I wanted to see them for myself, and the £10 charge, a nominal amount to defray the cost of staging the event rather than making a profit, was chickenfeed.

My elder sister lives in Surrey, so I had somewhere to stay, and the return flights cost €93. It’s always expensive to fly from the UK to Ireland over the festive season, because so many emigrants come home, but it’s relatively cheap to travel in the opposite direction.

My younger sister came too, and we had a lovely day out. We had cocktails in the Goring Hotel, then went to the Winter Wonderland funfair in Hyde Park, and had dinner in Ev, a Turkish restaurant under the arches of a railway viaduct near Waterloo, before taking up position near the London Eye.

When midnight struck, and the sky lit up with dazzling pyrotechnics, we hugged each other and looked forward to the coming year. That didn’t last long. What we had missed during the day was the confirmation by China of a novel coronavirus circulating in Wuhan, a city we never had heard of.

Pretty soon thereafter, all our worlds were upended in a way we never could have imagined.

I flew home that New Year’s Day, and it took until last Friday for me to get back to London, one of the greatest cities on Earth, and one of my favourites as well. That’s 962 days, the longest gap between visits in my adult life.

And do you know what? It was wonderful to get back, like visiting for the first time all over again. I walked from my hotel in Russell Square in Bloomsbury past the British Museum, which was thronged. So too was Shaftesbury Avenue — there was a Tube strike, so the streets were animated with people waiting for buses instead. After Piccadilly Circus, I turned onto the elegantly curved Regent Street, for my money the loveliest in the city, and went for dinner in Hawksmoor, a super steak restaurant tucked away on Air Street.

On Saturday, I had a pint at a café in Russell Square and just watched the world go by. Autumn seems to have arrived there earlier than here, and the park was knee deep in fallen leaves. An hour later, I was in Covent Garden for lunch, and summer was back, as the piazza was bathed in sunshine, and crowds gathered to watch the street performers.

And then I got a bus to Wembley and joined 90,000 others to watch Coldplay in what was one of the most memorable concerts I’ve ever seen. As you probably know, everyone gets a wristband and the bulbs on it are controlled remotely, and it turns the entire audience into the light show. There are balloons, and fireworks, and the whole event delivered such a sensory overload after two and a half years, I confess I wondered at one point why my face was wet before I realised that happy tears were rolling down it.

It wasn’t the first time I’ve been abroad since the world started to reopen last summer, but there was something cathartic about it nonetheless. I briefly lived in London in the Eighties, so there was a familiarity lacking on previous post-lockdown trips, but what made it special was that the familiar nonetheless felt exotic.

I had my second booster in St John’s Hospital in Enniscorthy on Tuesday, and it added another level of peace of mind as we head into what might be a challenging winter. Covid hasn’t gone away, and we surely are due a belt of the flu that has been more or less absent since 2019.

But what I once again was reminded of is that everything we’ve been through over the past couple of years has reset the clock. So many things we took for granted now seem to be genuine privileges. Research shows that what most of us want to spend our spare cash on now — and let’s be honest, there’s less and less of that — is not ‘stuff’, needless trinkets that very likely will end up in boxes in the attic.

Instead, we want experiences that will create memories to last a lifetime, and I certainly came home last Sunday with a few of those.