They say that when the tide goes out you can see which bathers are really wearing swimming shorts.
When coronavirus struck last year it cruelly exposed Britain and Scotland and many of the neglected corners and inequalities we had chosen to overlook.
The neglect of a decade under Tory and coalition cuts meant the NHS was left facing a health hurricane it could barely withstand.
That our hospitals came through is nothing short of a miracle and a tribute to NHS staff and the millions who took the advice to heart and stayed at home to save lives.
The virus ripped through care homes, showing us through bitter tears how neglected and forgotten our elderly population has become.
The virus left a generation of pupils and students bereft of a year of proper education and the prospect of being rewarded with gig economy careers.
It has devastated ethnic minority communities more exposed to the inequalities in society.
It left over 900,000 Scots on job- retention furlough, facing an uncertain future and thousands of households clinging on above the poverty line by just the £20 a week added to Universal Credit.
If the last year has taught us any lessons, it is that we cannot go back to that old country where priorities are so askew, where inequality and lack of opportunity are somehow acceptable and where profit all too often trumps poverty.
That makes the upcoming election is a very important one for Scotland.
It will shape not just this country but possibly the constitutional future of a United Kingdom already knocked off kilter by a disastrously handled Brexit.
Over the next six weeks, voters will be assailed with different political menus offering meat and some sweets.
This is a unique election that sees a pandemic meet an electorate at a constitutional crossroads.
The constitutional debate is one Scotland is familiar with but it’s now packaged with the priorities voters want to see at this election – ones which get the country and its people back on the road to recovery.
No one wants an election of point-scoring and petty squabbling.
These are serious times and we need grown-up politics to give us rational, workable, achievable solutions to the problems we face including education, drug misuse, the climate crisis and our employment strategy.
The parties should lay out for us the roadmap they have for getting over this health, social and economic disaster we have reduced to one haunting, debilitating word – Covid.
The election should be about another critical word, recovery.
