Drinking with the present perfect
It had been a difficult time for drinkers during COVID.
They had been drinking with masks on!
How do we use the perfect tense to indicate whether an action is still in progress?
There are two ‘perfect’ tenses in English, the past and the present. With the present perfect we use the ‘have’ followed by a verb in the past form, e.g. I have walked, or I have been (or ‘he/she/it has moved’ if using the 3rd-person singular). With this form, we are usually describing something that happened in the past, but is connected with the present. So it is an action that is probably still in progress, or only very recently finished. e.g.
They have been drinking all morning (and perhaps they still are!)
It has been raining since noon (and it probably still is!)
With the past perfect tense we use the verb ‘had’ in the same way (i.e. had walked, had been etc). With this form we are also describing something that happened in the past, but it has now ended. e.g.
They had been drinking with masks on. ( but they are no longer doing this)
It had been raining for two days. (but then it stopped)
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