The coronavirus pandemic has done some interesting things to time or at least to my / our perception of time.

Of course we live in the present (the immediacy of the moment) but we also live in the past and the future.

We live in the past at the same time as the present, not in a historical sense, but in the sense of our weight of experience and memories.

More particularly, we tend to think x is happening today (in the present) because a, b and c happened in the past.

There is an experiential linear continuity between past and present. That’s why the present makes sense or at lest the way in which we make it make sense.

The future is not dissimilar to the past. Similar in the sense that we live partly in the future as well as the present.

In other words, we think about what is going to happen. And not just in the short term. We think about weddings and new jobs and growing old and retirement and maybe even death.

Our perception of the future is also similar to the past in the sense that it is a linear projection of the present (and indeed the past). We don’t tend to expect the future to be radically different from the present.

And no wonder. We can only imagine the future based on our experience of today and all of our yesterdays.

Which brings us back to today. This today. Our today. The viral present in which, I suggest, for many / some / a few people perceptions of time have materially changed. Needless to say, I think this is a big deal.

I think that the radical immediacy of the present, caused by the pandemic, has fractured our customary relationship with the past and the future.

NB This may not be ‘bad’ - we may have in fact had our eyes partially opened.

Let’s consider the future. How do we think about where we are going to be in a few years time? I bet we don’t as much. And with good reason. Who knows given everything that’s going on. It’s difficult enough to plan a holiday let alone think about the year after the next.

And what about the past? Well it seems like a very strange and different country. All of our weight of experience rendered close to immaterial by the radically different nature of our current state.

The lived past seems, perhaps, more like history. Events that happened to people different from who we are today and who lived a different sort of existence with no lockdowns, no masks, no mortality tables.

Those linear connections that neatly linked the chapters already written to the one being written and the others we have plotted out to be written have been at least partly vaporised by the radical now.

Where do we end up? Living more than ever in the present with past and present almost disappeared like islands in the fog.

Here is that wise canine savant Felix contemplating the nature of time.