This time last year, we went west on our holidays, and I remember writing about how wonderful it was to holiday in Ireland rather than abroad. Little did I think that in 2020 holidaying at home would be the thing! But I do miss travelling. I asked my son Patrick the other day if he was having a good summer. He has a love for travel too, particularly for the places off the beaten track. He likes Finland, for some reason, and is mad to go back to Helsinki. But he said he’s having a great summer, which is good to hear.

Last March, who would have thought we would have the five months we have just had?

Going to the beach, playing football on the green and hanging out with his friends sums up the summer of 2020 for him and most other teenagers, I guess. Still, I had a plan to take him to the US this year. It goes back to a promise I made to him last Christmas. It’s obviously a promise I can’t keep now. Here we are in August. Last March, who would have thought we would have the five months we have just had? “Staycation”, “Zoom”, “face mask”, “social distancing” and “vaccine” are among the lexicon of words we rarely used before. Now they’re common in our daily chatter.

I was watching the snooker last week and at the end of every frame, a button was pressed to create a clapping sound in the auditorium. We have the same crowd noises dubbed onto the feed from soccer matches. And we have people greeting each other with elbow touches.

The main fear is not so much that people get the virus but that we don’t have a situation where our hospitals are overrun

Last year, if you said to somebody that this would be the way of the world in the future, they’d have thought you’d some sort of weird virus affecting your thought process. But what depresses me most is the thought that it will be the way of the future. Is the shaking of hands gone forever? Can older people go to the pub again?

We have, in general, stuck to the rules and remained patient. The main fear is not so much that people get the virus but that we don’t have a situation where our hospitals are overrun. The scenes from Italy earlier this year were truly frightening; where doctors had to make decisions about who to treat and who to let die. So that’s why we needed to flatten the curve and why we need to suppress or extinguish the virus as best we can. Professor Anthony Staines says we can get to zero COVID-19 cases in a few weeks without much disruption. But then, you see how New Zealand kept it out for so long before it returned. We need to find a balanced way just to live with it.

First-world problems in light of what many people are going through, I know

I’m content working from home, but I miss the interaction with work colleagues. I miss popping over to the pub. I miss not being in Croke Park this summer and I miss the opportunity to jump on a plane and go abroad. First-world problems in light of what many people are going through, I know.

But all this talk about the “new normal” – I don’t want a new normal like this. I don’t envy the decision makers, but over the past couple of weeks, I detect people are getting fed up. This will only be exasperated if there is any disruption to the return to school. People want to pull their weight and do the right thing but we need to find workable alternatives to reinforcing lockdowns intermittently and learn to live with the virus for the foreseeable future as it isn’t going away.

An enjoyable time

I was delighted to get the opportunity to fill in for Brendan O’Connor on his radio show over the past three weeks and I really enjoyed it.