Thanks to finding a cache of files, I’ve been editing some digital photos from years gone by. I am currently working through images from 2012.

This year holds a number of memories for me, but chief among them was my involvement on the periphery of the London Olympics. Working in road traffic control at Transport for London, I was part of a large team that kept traffic moving during the events. We’d prepared for it over the previous years across departments and with the police, the military and countless stakeholders. The delivery was an intense, enjoyable and comradely experience.

One day in the lull between the Olympics and Paralympics, a number of us were sent on a site visit across the various Olympic sites. We travelled to the Excel Centre, Queen Elizabeth Park and North Greenwich, returning to work on the Thames ferry, from where this photo was taken.

It’s strange looking back on this time, the Olympics events and especially its opening ceremony from today. The opening ceremony’s celebration of West Indian immigrants on the MV Empire Windrush, as well as the UK’s National Health Service stayed in the memory (along with a Conservative MP’s dismissal of it all as “multicultural crap“.) 2012 felt genuinely optimistic.

In the years that followed, we’ve had Nelson Mandela’s death, the Ebola epidemic, the rise of Daesh, earthquakes in Nepal and Italy, the Camp Speicher massacre in Iraq, the Paris attacks, the Grenfell Tower fire, the Syrian Civil War, the Windrush deportations, the Hong Kong protests and this current pandemic: events that have shaken whatever optimism I may have felt to the core. Looking back on that opening ceremony, I wonder how valued the NHS really was, or if my optimism back then was in a bubble, or just a foolish response to a manufactured event.

These and other intervening events have revealed how we have valued some people over others and how we’ve valued economic systems over people. For instance, the current rise in estimation of key workers has been significant: what happens after this pandemic will be telling. Will we give our venerated teachers, bin men, street cleaners, carers, deliverers, postal workers and retail staff decent pay, conditions and contracts, or return to the denigration of their work and workforce? I hope for the former option: such a change is something to be optimistic about.