At some point in the future you will have to explain the events of 2020-2023 to young people who either weren’t there or weren’t old enough to understand what exactly happened.

If social distancing and masking were the best we could do, then I guess 2020-2021 was as good as it could be.

In an era when half of the country was being fed active disinformation (it’s not a pandemic, it’s just the flu, drink this or that and you won’t get sick, eat this paste and it will make you all better), we didn’t stand a chance of cutting off the pandemic or short-circuiting the spread… at least we made it part way by getting vaccines before shutting the whole thing down and pretending everything was normal.

From 2020-2021, my daughters were both home with me. The eldest surviving, but not thriving, on remote schooling. The youngest struggling with a lack of social outlets.

In 2022, my father and I had a long-scheduled trip to Scotland scheduled. We were to fly into Aberdeen, go up to Orkney and Shetland and back home over a two week span with maybe 10 guests and three guides.

We took the ferry up from Aberdeen to Scotland and all seemed fine; a modicum of masking would occur, but mostly when we were outside of the confines of our group. Among the group and most were skipping the masks; hard not to, with the need to eat at the same time.

I remember the day I got covid. Well, I remember the day I got infected. It was on a shuttle bus to the Old Man at Hoy, a beautiful tower of rock at Orkney’s southern coastline.

I know this because the first person to be ejected from our group was coughing uncontrollably on the bus as we went up.

A few days later, as we all got up for breakfast, everyone noticed that the gentleman who I believe infected me, and his wife, were missing.

There was no explanation at breakfast but as we headed out on our tour, we were told that the two of them were no longer traveling with us, and the mumbling indicated it was due to covid. Indeed, the guides would have us all test that morning to see if anyone else was actively infected and testing positive.

We were off – but with no active discussion of covid – just the aforementioned tests.

It turns out that of the couple who had left, he had been on a tour with the same guide immediately before this tour, and had left with Covid – but had been permitted to join this group because he tested negative once. Either he administered the test poorly, or he wasn’t actually completely through covid.

As days passed, every few days brought more disappearances of fellow tourists. It was rather like a weird Agatha Christie mystery… you never knew which members of the group would disappear next. I would venture to guess we were down more than half of the group by the time the tour ended.

The final prod came when our main guide came down with Covid, and attempted to talk with us on a tour via phone, while we were out on a windy plateau! It was horrible.

The very next day, I woke up and felt poor myself. Of course, I wouldn’t test positive for days – but I was clearly sick with my first run of covid.

I opted out of several days of activities as our tour wound down. On the evening we were to leave Shetland, I felt horrible, and could barely eat. Due to a mechanical difficulty, our flight was cancelled, leaving us stranded overnight in Shetland in a shoddy motel, and causing us to miss all of our connecting flights out of Europe early the next morning (before we would be able to even get to Aberdeen, let alone Amsterdam to connect home.)

Of course that night I finally tested positive. I was able to find us two flights into London’s City airport the next day, where I figured we would be able to find connecting flights home.

Stranded in London for two days while we attempted to rebuild flights out of Europe, my dad took care of me – he’d had the same strain of Covid in Norway the month before.

Through the entire tour and the entire Agatha Christie mystery, nobody on the staff ever said the word covid. They pretended nothing weird was going on. It was as if this was totally normal.

Those of us on the tour at the end were aghast that the tour had happened even when the guide and two guests had been sick the week before.

Little did we know, it was normal. It was the new normal.

Pretending covid was no biggie – that life would go on as “normal”.