A vaccine is joyful news – but am I really ready to go back to the world? | Emma Brockes

This year has been horrible in so many ways, but adjusting to normal life again may not be as straightforward as we think

Most of us can, at any one time, hold conflicting thoughts in our heads; it's the basic condition of getting anything done. Faced with even the most trivial task, my first response is almost always I don't want to do it, followed by I do very much want it to be done. To move from one state to the other requires the kind of internal workout - think how good it will feel to be on the other side of this bump; imagine what will happen if I simply stopped doing things; what kind of person can't deal with the dishes etc - that kicked in particularly viciously last week, with news of the Oxford AstraZeneca vaccine. Three oppositional thoughts flew to mind: the end of the pandemic is finally in sight; infection rates will, between now and then, continue to rise and many people will die; and, most confoundingly, I'm not sure I'm ready to go back to the world.

There is, almost certainly, a compound word in German for the anticipation of future nostalgia. One feels it keenly with children. I look at mine, now, hitting first milestones, and experience a spasm of what feels like loss: the certainty that, at some unspecified time in the future, this period will occupy enormous parts of my hard drive. I will feel sad for what has come and gone. The intensity of this period, so much of which flies by in the scramble just to hang on without falling, will, I know, look different at 10 or 20 years' distance.