As we approach the month of March, this springtime marker has people pondering its milestone significance. It’s been one year since the start of the pandemic, which is simultaneously wearying, for how endless the year has seemed, and baffling, for how it seems not to have happened at all.

Molly Jong-Fast recently reflected in Vogue, ‘In some ways, it has been a year of lost time […] a year of absence and silence’. She recounts, as one measure of it, time not spent with loved ones, and it’s a striking truth that the year will always be characterised by people and places not seen. Jong-Fast also rightly observes, that in other ways ‘it has been a year that happened loudly and painfully’. It was a year of death and protest, of natural catastrophes and seismic societal shifts - most of which we witnessed from our homes, hibernating with our screens.

A good friend of mine, who shares my love of culture and politics, remarked this week that ‘this time last year, Biden was still a week away from his big comeback in the Democratic primary and our lives hadn’t been taken over by the pandemic yet. Crazy what a difference a year makes, right?’ Too true - and in fact I realised in response that the lapse in time feels even greater for me: I feel like the last thing I remember it was 2016, and then my life went into a vortex. There was Brexit and that was startling, then I spent a summer fixated on the US election, then I drowned in work and stayed there while Trump won and the world spun out of control. Then I worked and stressed for a short eternity, and now it’s today. My friend shared this sentiment, which makes me wonder how many people do.

What does it mean to lose time? And if we lose time, can we reclaim it? In Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part I, the young Prince Hal admits a master plan in pretending to waste his youth, so that in later emerging as the great King Henry V, he will seem that much greater: ‘Redeeming time when men think least I will.’ The character’s grandiose sense of control over time is at once ludicrous and genius; while he doesn’t have it, he assumes it, and in that way he controls his own narrative.

Remarkably, Jong-Fast also concludes her reflection on lost time by taking control of how she sees it. For her, the sadness and strangeness of the last year have had a single great benefit: ‘I appreciate the hell out of things I used to take for granted.’ It’s a redemptive revelation if I ever heard one.