THE days are long but the years are short. The pandemic, now edging towards the two-year mark, seems to have lasted both a lifetime and no time at all.
Some days stuck at home have dragged. Longed-for holidays have been booked, re-booked and cancelled.
Important friendships have been mainly conducted via telephone or socially-distanced walks.
For many of us this last month has felt particularly difficult, not least because of the long winter nights.
Due to the highly-infectious Omicron variant, Covid cases rose last week to their highest-ever point since the start of the pandemic.
Last Christmas saw much tighter restrictions, with many of us separated from our loved ones. But there was hope as well as the first Covid vaccination roll-out began.
Now this Christmas has seemed bleaker. The vaccination and booster roll-out, although hugely successful, has not been a panacea.
There are fewer hospitalisations, but high case numbers are threatening to overwhelm our already stretched health service.
Staff absences due to Covid infections or self-isolation have meant fewer people are available to work at the busiest time of year.
The north's health trusts have already warned the public that they will have to wait longer for an ambulance in an emergency and may not necessarily be treated at their nearest hospital.
Elderly patients recovering from acute illness who cannot be cared for at home can expect to be temporarily sent to care homes.
The essential message is 'try not to get sick'.
But most of us are already doing all that we can to protect our loved ones.
On Christmas Eve, my oldest friend and I exchanged presents from a safe distance outside; I waved at her boys through the living room window and we celebrated with a ten-minute walk around her cul-de-sac.
It was very different from our normal Christmas Eve chats, which usually included buns, tea and games of Mario Kart with her boys - which I always lose.
But I felt lucky to see her at all. Since both of us have family members who are clinically vulnerable, it would have been unthinkable to meet indoors.
Short of confiscating my parents' car keys and swaddling them in bubble wrap, there's not much else that my family can do.
Not every family is in agreement about how to handle Covid.
For every one of us delighted to stay in a small bubble, our only arguments over who drank the last of the Shloer, there are others who have felt immense pressure to socialise.
Given the risks associated with socialising indoors, it seems baffling that restrictions around households mixing at Christmas were not introduced across the north last week.
Surely this would have been the easiest and least painless decision? Christmas was a hugely important day, but it was only one day.
Most adults would understand if we had to stick to tight bubbles for a few weeks. We could still have had Christmas dinner in February.
By this week, after a few days of mixing households, Covid cases will inevitably shoot up and with them the potential for further restrictions.
I have huge sympathy for the pubs, restaurants and clubs battling through another period of extreme uncertainty. Decisions around opening should have been made earlier in December when it became apparent that Omicron would become the dominant strain.
Instead, hospitality businesses were told three days before Christmas that they would have to return to table service by today, with no more than six people allowed to sit at a table.
At the time of writing, only nightclubs were due to be closed from yesterday.
But the new rules have effectively shut businesses without actually going so far as to close them down. After a month of uncertainty over vaccine passports, pubs which had battled to stay open deserved better.
To be human is to know that you are on shifting sands. There is no certainty in life and all things naturally must change.
But when you're in the middle of change, it's like being in a dark wood with no sight of the path.
I hope that some of you managed to get some rest this Christmas and were able to forget about our troubles for a short while.
There is always hope, it's just been a little harder to find this year. The path is still there, we just can't see it yet. Here's to a better 2022.
