Alaska Airlines flight 1805, Los Angeles to Washington DC, March 5 2020. So spookily empty is the cabin, the nice stewardess keeps offering me the surplus sandwiches, somehow not realising that the physical splendour mesmerising you from the byline photo above isn’t compatible with white carbs. Not until I land in a deserted capital a few hours later do I absorb what is happening. The world has changed.
Then, quicker than even the bulls predicted, it un-changed. Urban life was mostly back by 2022. Tourism is as rampant as ever. (Imagine knowing mid-pandemic that Britain’s government would back extra runways at Heathrow and Gatwick.) Restaurants are like Fort Knox to get into. There are vestiges of the pandemic — in office occupation rates, in public debt, in ongoing health problems, in harrowing memories — but the idea that it would refashion society wholesale looks quaint.
Five years on, one lesson stands out, and it is hard for a journalist to accept: almost all events are ephemeral.