There is almost no end to the topical issues that can fill a councillor’s column these days.

Is lockdown finally over? What is going to happen with our young people and their exams? Will we be able to go on holiday abroad this year? When is this all going to end?

And my answer to all of those is, in order: not yet, I don’t know, I still don’t know, and finally, I don’t know! End of column?

Well, here is a different question. Will we remember all of this in years to come?

Common sense says yes, it will be imprinted in all of our brains for decades to come. We will tell our children stories of the Virus Year, when Covid confined us to our homes, when schools were disrupted and when too many of our loved ones died.

I’m not so sure, though – and my reference point is our own past experience.

I’m a post war baby. I was born in 1953 and my mother was born in 1912 – my sister and I were ‘late’ babies.

Being born in 1912 meant that she was a young child when the Spanish flu, as it was called at the time, stalked the land, killing around 50 million people worldwide at the end of the Great War.

I have read that in Europe and North America people literally dropped dead in the street, that mask wearing was required and that like today, the virus was defeated by vaccination.

But what was really interesting was that from the time that I was a young child, to the time that she died in 2003, my mother never mentioned it once.

I had to read about it in a history book, despite the fact that it was living history in our family. How many others did this apply to?

Now I know that in 1919 she would only have been seven years old, but the world around her would have been scarred by the experience and it would surely have been a topic of discussion for some time afterwards.

Neighbours, friends, even family, would have had the flu or would have succumbed to it. In other words, surely it would have impacted on her life to the extent that it remained a memory of sorts?

Or was it something that people subconsciously put behind them?

Right now I know that once this is all over, I won’t want to hear about, or speak about, Covid again. I’ve talked it out, and I’m sick of it, and I want to get back to a world where we all go on holidays, don’t wear face masks and can actually have friends in the house!

So maybe in 25 years’ time, we will all have forgotten about Covid. That seems unrealistic now, but perhaps my mother’s experience of Spanish flu 100 years ago might give us something of an insight into our own future.