On 16 March 2020, just after 5pm, I left the office, locked the door and walked home. I remember that journey home with a strange clarity: even at the time it felt like a significant transitional moment.

Later that evening I sent a message to my colleagues: ‘Following the updated Government advice recommending home-working where at all possible, I’ve taken the decision to close the office as from this evening.’ It would be nearly two years before we all returned to office working.

Three of my small work team were already ill, one quite seriously so. We assumed that they had come down with the terrifying new Coronavirus, but there were no tests. Suddenly everything seemed risky, from touching surfaces to going to the shops. I fully expected to be struck down next.

On 19 March, as the world continued to shut down, I wrote to a friend, ‘This new and fast-changing reality is hard to adjust to’. Things were moving too quickly to process fully. It was incomprehensible that we should be denied that most fundamental human need to be with other people.

We did adjust to it because we had to. Surprisingly soon, it was hard to remember a world without restrictions, masks and social-distance. Most of us moved online, relieved at least to be able to continue our lives in the virtual world for the time being.

Four years on, I think of 2020 as an unreal, dystopian time of suppressed fear and shock, from which we are still emerging, shaken and scarred. Wary and anxious, I continue to avoid large crowds, and buy tickets with cancellation options – just in case. But occasionally, at dinner with friends or travelling on the Tube, I’m struck afresh by the novelty of being able to mingle freely, unthinkingly, with other people again. In that brief moment of awareness, it feels extraordinary.