"The best way to recall all that's happened since early spring 2020 is to flick through the photographs on the phone, " says RTÉ's South East Correspondent Conor Kane. "So little has happened, but so much."
So little, in that many of the things that mark the passing of the weeks and months in "normal" years didn't happen this time. Festivals. Championships. Exams. Graduations. Confirmations. Concerts.
So much, in that few of us could have dreamed at the end of February how much our lives would be altered within a matter of weeks.
The cheeky photo of a bottle of Milton beside a bottle of Dettol taken on the phone on March 12, reflecting our new priorities when it came to shopping.
The photos taken while on work assignments of empty streets, empty beaches, empty shopping centres, locked gates, those signs with the yellow and black warnings, Garda checkpoints, having socially distanced lunch with colleagues.
And then the family photos of colouring, card-stacking, home-schooling, walking the dog within our 2K, then our 5K, visiting the park on a Sunday afternoon with barely a dozen other souls for hundreds of metres around, planting seeds, making cakes for the school's "bake-off" challenge.
All to pass the time at a stage of the year when we could go nowhere because there was nowhere to go. When the youngest in the family didn't see the inside of a building (apart from our home) for about three months. Woodies was the first they entered, not long after the country entered whatever that particular phase was.
When a drive-through Supermacs is the highlight of the week, things are strange. When Telly Bingo gathers the family together. When the day starts off with home-school instructions before work. When the GAA club you've dropped the youngest off at in early March is transformed into a drive-in Covid-19 testing centre within weeks, things are strange.
When the sign is telling you that it's 10 minutes to entry at that point of the queue and you're not at some theme park attraction, but Tesco. Luckily, the early months saw hardly any rain, making socially-distanced queuing a bit easier than it would be if we were all getting soaked. That helped with people's patience.
Weirdest of all, the nightly wait for "the numbers." Not the lotto numbers, but the case numbers. The numbers of new cases, people in hospital, and most sadly of all, deaths, which told us how our country's graph was progressing.
As the summer went on, the numbers went down, and down, to the point where it looked like we had all but eliminated the virus from our community. It felt like we could breathe again. Things opened up: gyms, hotels, restaurants, sports clubs, hairdressers/barbers (thankfully).
This year's family holiday was in Wicklow, maybe next year we'll get to go abroad again. But now they're going up. The numbers. School's back, but will it stay back?
The 18-year-old's already-postponed graduation, due to take place in the school car-park in mid-August, cancelled at less than a day's notice. The decision unavoidable when restrictions were tightened. (The day before that golf dinner in Clifden, incidentally, a detail not unnoticed by the 18-year-old...)
Football training is back. Pubs aren't back. Unless they're serving €9 dinners. How many of those establishments where the doors are still closed will ever be open again? A recent drive on the "old road" from Portlaoise to home was depressing, for the amount of darkness on the streets. Entire villages without a premises open, late evening in mid-August, a time when places should be heaving with people on leave from work, emigrants home on annual holidays, festival-goers cooling off.
This is 2020. We can but hope that the "new normal" will return, gradually, to something approaching the old normal. That we won't be confined to home so much in 2021; that the freedom we have taken for so long for our families - the opportunities to learn, work, travel, socialise, curtailed so much in these last six months, will be restored; that we won't be returned to those quiet, empty weeks of April and May. Hope.
