Nearly two long years into the pandemic, I have a strong sense that many of us are feeling particularly weary of the entire situation. While we’ve attempted to return to a version of normality in terms of work, school or travel, we’ve done so constrained by government policy, common sense, or a combination of both. Our social lives have become fractured, riven by fear of infection or contravention of the rules. Ordinary activities that we never gave a second thought to now require the production of a digital certificate, documentation or a test result. Aside from everything else, putting one foot in front of the other has become mind-bogglingly bureaucratic.

I smile ruefully to myself when I recall considering the geopolitical climate in 2019 to be the manifestation of a mad world. Who could have possibly imagined what was just around the corner? Collectively, we’ve lived through a period of uncertainty, the like of which very few of us could have predicted. Describing our experiences as a ‘collective trauma’ might be slightly over-stating the case, but undoubtedly we have all been marked by it in some way or other. Our world view will never be quite the same again.

I doubt I was alone in feeling that 2022 owed us all something that the previous two years had failed to deliver. Besides, other news stories were beginning to overshadow the never-ending stream of Covid doom in the media. Hot on the heels of the accusations that Harry and Meghan levelled at the royal family, Andrew continued to take messing things up royally to a whole new level. In British politics, although no one can be sure if Boris is the right man for the top job in the wake of Partygate, if nothing else, we can console ourselves with the knowledge that he is probably perfectly capable of organising a piss-up in a brewery.

Storm clouds have been gathering over the House of Windsor, the Palace of Westminster and indeed over many houses the world over. Our discontent is multi-layered. While Covid rumbles on, we have diminished emotional resources at our disposal. We’re fractious and impatient.

It was in this context that Covid inevitably infiltrated our family a few weeks ago. I must acknowledge that we got off very lightly, as what we suffered was evidently a weakened strain, most likely Omicron. In truth, aside from some short-lived and inconvenient symptoms, the most frustrating aspect of it all was the administration involved. In between paid work, I found myself routinely phoning SNS24, aka the Portuguese Covid hotline, in order to obtain isolation orders and prescriptions for PCR tests. It was almost a relief when my husband, literally the last man standing, finally succumbed. The time-lag between each of us becoming infected was puzzling. The whole episode felt illogical and we struggled to make sense of it all.

Yet not all our setbacks, or those being experienced by those close to us, are related to the pandemic. We are also confronted by parallel and unrelated challenges. Messaging one friend this week, I blamed a misalignment of the planets for our current low mood. Another expressed her despair at the run of bad luck she and her family had experienced since the new year. She went on to recount that a family member had confidently advised her that it was a result of Mercury being in retrograde. This tied in neatly with a student’s grumble that she’d scheduled a visit to the Planetarium last weekend to view the stars, only for it to be cancelled because the telescope had broken. Seemingly, Mercury is determined to make heavy weather of everything, even the view of its transit across the heavens.

I find comfort in the belief that, metaphorically speaking, the universe always eventually rights itself. Likewise, the only constant is change. This, and that nothing, not even Mercury in retrograde, lasts forever.