Amid the horror, we look back at this year of the virus with wonder too | Brigid Delaney

The exhaustion - and perhaps the sadness - comes from saying goodbye to our old life

I'm sure everyone after their first plague year feels totally knackered.

You can just imagine them in Constantinople at the end of 541AD - the survivors of the Plague of Justinian saying to each other: Well, that was GRIM!" If you got the disease, your body would be all lumpy and sore, then you would die. In the cities there was no room left to bury the dead, and the food supply was interrupted.