WE have just passed the fourth anniversary of the start of the Covid-19 national lockdown.

March 2020. When everything changed.

How we worked and organised life certainly changed, not instantaneously, but at a faster rate than I had ever experienced before.

The pivot to online meetings, access to work systems and the logistical delineations between essential workers and others now seems seamless in the recalling, but took a lot of thought, resource, and effort to bring about.

Amongst it all, I remember feeling – and writing about – hope. Hope that the kindness I saw across Inverclyde and beyond would become hardwired into our ways of being. That the agility I saw in providing services to people in need would become the new way of working: that we would retain in some way the notion of being freer with permissions to just let people get on and do the right things.

The jury’s still out on these for me. We still have the chance to retain positive elements of that peculiar time – we just need to choose to retain them. And to keep making that choice.

I remember the effects of lockdown on households. The isolations, and the many mitigations countering them. Our retained focus on ensuring that people always have alternatives to feeling isolated is very much to our credit, and we must not lose that. Neighbour looking in on neighbour. Community buildings being used as gathering places for fellowship, food, and friendship. Employers making provision for mental health check ins. All positive. All beneficial to keeping people safe and well, longer term.

Our own lockdown involved some joyful moments in my own home – I particularly enjoyed sharing Shakespeare plays with my family. I thought I would, as it was something I always wanted to do, but had never quite found the time. Being unexpectedly time rich, I took the opportunity. The fact that they would swap ‘sharing’ for ‘inflicted’ and have a distinctly different recollection of those precious moments, show just how personal each experience of lockdown was. Even in the same household, under the same conditions, the thoughts, feelings and now memories of each of us as individuals will differ.

Looking between then and now, the effects of the last four years on our young people is what strikes me most. There was school, but not as they had ever known it before. There were key milestones and transitions that were different from those experienced by others, before and since. Our Covid babies are in or starting nursery, the youngest children of our lockdown are starting school. Lockdown toddlers have had a different start to school because some of their key early learning was missed by not being able to attend nursery.

Older young people are experiencing more difficulties with mental health and anxiety than before, and school attendance has become more difficult for families than before.

The impact for children and young people from the restrictions placed on them four years ago seems greater than that for the rest of us. This, across education, health, community, and family systems needs to be something we are mindful of and where we keep pivoting to do the right thing: bringing resources, expertise, and love to mitigate and allow healing.

In Inverclyde, a number of Remembering Together Labyrinths have been planned and will be developed. These will be new places of reflection within our communities, and beautiful reminders for many years to come of all the feelings, all the memories and all the experiences of the last four years.