The pandemic has shown that most of us have a hankering to meet friends in person.
The pub and restaurant trades have had their bleakest years in living memory, but they should bounce back, at least in places where they were still in demand before the pandemic.
The crisis has shown us conclusively that video-conferencing services such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams cannot replace the immediacy and intimacy of the person-to-person encounter. Nevertheless, the video apps have still become part of our lives, tools we can use when we need them.
More of us have also become used to online shopping, cancelling out the necessity of a weekly trudge around a supermarket — and the decline in the use of cash has been dramatic.