IT seems like another world. Well, it probably is.

The first weekend in March, and we were off for a night on the tiles in Dundee. It was my birthday treat and I hadn’t been back to the city where I first trained as a journalist for 25 years.

That week, Scotland had recorded its first case of coronavirus – in Tayside. Just the time to be heading back to the area after a quarter of a century.

But it was easy to put that to the back of our minds. Stranger was having a weekend away.

Little did we know.

We enjoyed lunch in a wee pub cheek by jowl with excited Partick Thistle fans anticipating their team’s match with Dundee United with nary a care in the world.

We went to the theatre for the first time in a long time … and probably for the last time in a long time.

We tucked into a buffet breakfast in the hotel in the morning and attended a church where social distancing would not have been a problem, given the ratio of pews to congregation.

And the highlight … a trip to the much vaunted V&A. Jings, how Dundee has changed since the 90s, when the good ship Discovery was billed as the brightest beacon on the horizon.

These memories – which now seem so distant – flooded back to me when the images promoting the V&A’s delayed Mary Quant exhibition appeared in the media in all their resplendent glory in anticipation of the museum’s re-opening on Thursday.

READ MORE: Exhibition celebrating fashion pioneer Mary Quant comes to V&A Dundee

The exhibition is the first international retrospective on the iconic British designer who shook up the fashion establishment, captured the spirit of the 1960s, and started a fashion revolution.

Some of the designs featured include the pioneering “Wet Collection” PVC rainwear, a jute miniskirt (comfy!) and designs that subverted menswear at a time when women were still banned from wearing trousers in formal settings.

Sophie McKinlay, director of programme at V&A Dundee, said: “Everyone at V&A Dundee is delighted to be preparing our remarkable museum to re-open once again, and we have all been working hard to welcome visitors back for a safe, enjoyable experience.

“Mary Quant is a remarkable designer who did so much to revolutionise the fashion industry and to empower women to wear clothes that looked great and felt great, and it’s the perfect choice for our first major fashion exhibition.”

Of course, the age of Quant was about more than fashion. It was about the quest for social equality, the sparks of feminism and – as hindsight tells us – the dawn of a new era.

And here’s the thing. History does not stand still. Covid is ushering in a new age. Whether we like it or not.

It’s what we make of it that will be what defines the coronavirus years.

An old quotation keeps rumbling around in my head these days, one which has stayed with me from my schooldays, which were a very long time ago.

It’s from The Day Of The Triffids by John Wyndham, and seems as apt now as at any time in a challenging or defining transition in time:

“They danced on the edge of an unknown future to an echo from the distant past.”