Most absurdly of all, though, an officer in Rotherham berated a father for playing with his children in his own front garden. This happened a mere month before the Downing Street garden party.

Benches were taped off to stop people sitting on them. Swings were removed to stop children using them. Supermarkets imposed one-way systems so that if you forgot to pick up an item from the fruit and vegetable aisle, you were expected to go all the way round the shop and back to the start. Councils tried to stop shops selling Easter eggs, because they weren’t “essential items”.

It wasn’t just the authorities who were heavy-handed, though. We were, too – because we imposed draconian rules on ourselves. We weren’t ordered to spray disinfectant on our morning post, or to quarantine the groceries we’d had delivered. Yet people did it anyway, of their own volition.

It was a mad time. But even when that first lockdown ended, the madness didn’t. Children returning to school were told not to sing Happy Birthday – just to whisper the song, instead. Waterstones announced that, whenever a customer touched a book but didn’t buy it, the book would be placed in quarantine “for at least 72 hours”. Scottish pubs were allowed to reopen – but not to sell alcohol. Meanwhile, the Government decided that you could only order an alcoholic drink if you had it with a “substantial meal”. There then followed a month of heated debate over whether a scotch egg should count.

The memory that will stay with me, though, is of the advice given by the Terrence Higgins Trust, a charity that promotes sexual health. Lovers, it said, should stay safe by “favouring positions where you’re not face-to-face”.

To be clear: I’m not saying it was mad to have a lockdown in spring 2020. It was right to be cautious, given how little was known about the virus and how precisely it spread. And in those days, of course, there was no vaccine.

All I’m saying is, I don’t think we’ve seriously reflected on how nightmarishly weird that first lockdown was. Overnight we were plunged into a surreal, paranoid, despotic bureaucracy – East Berlin meets Alice in Wonderland – and yet we’ve largely blanked that out, or shrugged it off. In fact, some people seem to remember that period almost like a kind of holiday. Lovely weather, no more commuting, boredom yet to set in…

But we must never forget how awful it was for children. My son, who’d only just turned six, created a “wish jar”. On scraps of paper, he wrote down the things he most longed to do when the pandemic was over, and placed them in the jar. This week, we opened it. Among his distant dreams were “go to seaside”, “go on a train” and “go to Scotland” where his grandparents live.

The final wish he’d included was “go to a party”. If only I could have pulled some strings and got him a little Saturday job in Downing Street.