At the end of 2020, just before Christmas, my family took a long car trip. We drove for seven hours from Melbourne to Canberra to celebrate the end of an atrocious year with the people we’d barely seen throughout it. Christmas itself was a muted affair. We so urgently wanted the celebration to be special, to mark the time we’d lived through and survived. But how do you mark the end of something before it’s “over” and before you even know what “over” looks like. And how do you reconcile the hugely different experiences of the individuals who are present? There were those who had lived in the so-called COVID Capital of our country and endured one of the world’s longest and harshest lockdowns. And there were those for whom daily existence barely changed. Pass the prawns, please. Another slice of pie? Don’t eat Santa’s leftover milk and cookies, it’s not COVID-safe. 

For me, 2020 was not unlike one long, awful car trip. We didn’t do anything much except try to pass the time. We barely moved our bodies, yet we were constantly exhausted. It was as if real life had been put on pause. But unlike the entire Netflix catalogue, which we watched in lockdown, there was no option to rewind and relive the delights of what had come before. No option to fast-forward to a more comfortable place. No time stamp to tell us how long this movie might last.