If a Tree Falls on a Pedestrianised Dublin Street and I'm No Longer There to See It…

I’ve been reading a lot, lately, about the “pandemic skip”: the idea that, in those years of lockdowns and shutdowns (and near-breakdowns, for a lot of us), we feel as though we have “lost” a massive chunk of time. Except, of course, we haven’t.

Time passed. We got older. Life went on, but without the usual milestones that mark the passing of time – birthday celebrations and summer holidays and those heady late August days preceding the return to school that feel, whether you have kids or not, like the moment before something new, the last days of a season of life.

What it’s made me think of, though, aside from the parties we would have had and the weddings we would have gone to and the memories we would have made, had we been able to leave our houses and hug our loved ones and hear a cough and think nothing of it, is how emigrating does the same thing.

And why is no one talking about that, the emigration skip?