During 2023 I read 59 books in total, 26 fiction and 33 non-fiction and of the latter 19 were autobiographical or memoir.
My favourite novel was A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles and because they relate closely to my own writing interests the stand-out non-fiction works were Unravelled, Homelands and Kiss Myself Goodbye although I very much enjoyed the whole range of this year’s books and managed to include some older works that I knew of but had never read before. A particular failing was not to have made any further progress with the works of Charles Dickens. I will attempt to remedy this in 2024.
It was a good year for reading and in 2022 I worked my way enjoyably through 23 novels, 10 memoirs/autobiographies, three biographical books and 15 other works of non-fiction. The latter ranged from science – Covid and climate change still featured – to collections of essays. This latter is a genre I had not really delved into much before, but Rebecca Solnit, Hilary Mantel and Philip Pullman have convinced me and I hope to include more in the future. I only succeeded in reading another two of the novels of Charles Dickens, so there is a way to go yet before I have worked my way through them all. Having been given a year’s gift book subscription in late 2021 the year included a number of titles that I might otherwise never have come across or considered reading and although a few are carried over into my 2023 ‘To Be Read’ pile, I really enjoyed the surprise that each month of 2022 brought – and the very thorough bookshop questionnaire meant that I received nothing that I had already read. It has also meant that I am well prepared for the coming year with a couple of dozen new books waiting to be read and another 11 volumes of Dickens!
Just as a reminder, those are the number of days that have elapsed since the imposition of the three Covid lockdowns in England. But today is the first day in almost two years when there are no laws still in place in England to prevent the spread of Covid-19. That is not to say that the pandemic is over by any means: there are still over 39,000 people testing positive in the UK every day and there are almost a thousand deaths each week of people who had tested positive within the previous 28 days. However, both of these figures represent an ongoing decline after a further peak in this country at the start of this year. Globally, the number of deaths from Covid is standing at almost six million: an appalling loss of life and representing a mortality level around 1.4% of total cases. One can only imagine what this figure might be if effective vaccines had not been developed so rapidly. According to the really excellent website of the John Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, there is now nowhere on the planet that has escaped the pandemic; there have been eleven cases in Antarctica and seven in the Marshall Islands. So, while in England there is no longer a requirement to isolate if you test positive and no longer a law stipulating that you should wear a facemask on public transport or in certain enclosed spaces, such precautions are still legally enforceable in many other countries and with public opinion in England very divided it seems highly likely that many people will continue to be cautious here as well. Medical advice seems also to be that such caution is wise. While the omicron variant of SARS-Cov-2 has resulted in less serious illness for the majority of those who have contracted it, it has proved to be more transmissible and only time will tell whether there are more variants yet to come.
If today’s lifting of restrictions was, as widely suspected, a largely political move to distract attention away from a Prime Minister whose own conduct during lockdowns over the last two years has increasingly come under scrutiny, then – as recent news makes clear – it may not have been needed. The media have been dominated in the last week by two other much more disturbing stories than ‘partygate’. Growing tension between Russia and Ukraine, with a threatened invasion that had been predicted towards the end of last week, finally resulted in bombing in the early hours of today and non-stop news coverage is already talking about the worst conflict in Europe this century. Under what sound like completely ridiculous pretexts – to prevent the genocide currently happening in the separatist eastern regions (there is none); and to halt the ‘Nazification’ of Ukraine (whose head of state is Jewish) – President Putin of Russia has sent some of that country’s very considerable military might westwards. The Cold War may have ‘officially’ ended on 26 December 1991 after almost 45 years, but something pretty sinister is heating up now.
The other worrying events in the last ten days have been to do with the weather, always a topic of concern in this country but justifiably so when the first ever ‘red weather alert’ was issued for London in the face of severe storms. Storm Eunice battered much of the country, bringing down trees and causing widespread disruption; all train services in Scotland were suspended and in Wales all schools were closed and trains cancelled. Eunice was followed in quick succession by Franklin and Gladys, raising questions about just how much weather patterns are being altered as a result of our failure to respond rapidly enough to the climate crisis. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a ‘code red for humanity’ in its Sixth Assessment Report last August and this year it is due to publish its Synthesis Report, providing ‘an overview of the state of knowledge on the science of climate change’ with an emphasis on new data since the previous Assessment Report was published in 2014. For the sake of everyone everywhere, we can only hope that its ‘Summary for Policymakers’ will be heeded and acted upon this time, because progress since 2014 has not been nearly sufficient.
(SkyNews)
While all this ‘big stuff’ is pretty grim and we can be left feeling helpless in the face of so much suffering and misery, it is worth acknowledging that we are in a very privileged position, with each day bringing things to be thankful for. Family members who were pretty unwell with Covid – ‘our’ first cases – have made good recoveries; spring flowers have survived the wind and rain and gardens are becoming greener and more colourful by the day; and while many regular events, such as our church services, are continuing to be in hybrid form, which is of significant benefit to those who are vulnerable or otherwise housebound, other things are back to ‘normal’ and my local choral society is meeting and rehearsing again in hopes that the Easter concert postponed from 2020 may go ahead, albeit two years late.
During 2021 I read 25 novels, eight memoirs or autobiographies, 14 works of non-fiction (two on Covid and four related to climate change and/or sustainability) and two short story collections. Forty-nine volumes in total, which was rather fewer than in 2020. I put the difference down to two things: fewer long train journeys as a result of Covid restrictions; and including the first three works of Charles Dickens, which took up a significant proportion of my reading time. I am anyway a slow reader but with some sentences taking up as much space as a paragraph or even a page of a twentieth-century novel, Dickens’ style took a bit of adjusting to.
In 2020 I had read 60 books, only 20 of them novels. This tendency to read more non-fiction during the lockdowns seemed to be something other readers noticed as well. Real life had taken on sufficient unreality, becoming more like something usually experienced in a film or in fiction, and so we turned to reading more about the world as others had experienced it in the past or to the sciences that were already helping people to tackle the pandemic and that offered some reassurance that things could get better, while also sounding warnings about other global problems.
With a towering TBR pile accumulated during 2021 – and with the certainty that the year will bring yet more volumes to be added to it – I look forward to another year in books. Happy New Year!
As anyone who reads my blog or who knows me will be aware, I love reading and have always loved books. I thought that this was a relatively uncomplicated preoccupation but the last couple of years have cast doubt on that. I have been saddened to read of the way in which books and their authors are now being criticised not on the grounds of literary merit, relevance, quality of research or writing, but for wholly different reasons. There was all the controversy over J K Rowling and her comments that prompted a storm around transphobia and feminism among other things and resulted in some people declaring that her books should be boycotted. Having read in full the statement of hers that prompted the furore, my conclusion was that she had been unfairly misrepresented and that it was a great shame – but perhaps they were understandably reluctant to put their heads above the parapet – that her friends from the LGBT community had not spoken out in her defence loudly enough to affirm her actually very sensible position, which sought to protect vulnerable females while asserting the rights of trans people.
Now Kate Clanchy is under fire. I read her wonderful memoir – Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Me – and it would never have occurred to me that anyone could take offence at it. Now I do know that this may, of course, be because I am white. (I confess that it took me a little while last year to understand why ‘All Lives Matter’ was really not good enough and that after centuries of white privilege, the slave trade and racism ‘Black Lives Matter’ did indeed need to be the rallying cry from people of all skin colours.) Clanchy has been vilified for using expressions that include ‘chocolate-coloured skin’ (interestingly, the acceptability or otherwise of this phrase in a fictional work was recently discussed in my local writing circle) and various other descriptions that have been regarded by some as racist or ableist. I accept that she made an error of judgement in initially claiming that she had not used these words, but would suggest that as she probably wrote them between three and five years ago and has no doubt written a lot else since, that may have been a failure of recall. But her book is a personal memoir – is she really not ‘allowed’ to record her own perceptions as they occurred to her; cannot the reader then be allowed to decide for themselves whether that leads to a suspicion that she is prejudiced or even racist (the affectionate and respectful way in which she writes about her students, some of whom must have been quite difficult, really suggests quite the reverse to me)? Isn’t it a form of insidious censorship that she and her publisher are now considering rewriting certain passages? Perhaps, most crucially, would any of this criticism which has come from BAME writers have arisen had Kate’s skin been brown or black? If the answer to that question is ‘No’ then there is surely a double standard here that amounts to prejudice against white writers: ‘We can say these things because we aren’t white but you cannot because you are’? If writers of colour refer, for example, to ‘aggressive white colonists’ don’t we accept that this is justified by whatever the context happens to be rather than suggesting that it is ‘prejudicial stereotyping’ of all white people? If a character in a piece of writing is called a ‘pasty-faced Englishman’ or a ‘typically pear-shaped, middle-aged white woman’ don’t we just accept those as reasonable ways of describing individuals? I (even as a rather pear-shaped woman!) would regard it as ridiculous to criticise an author for such descriptions. But does the argument in favour of BLM perhaps apply here too – it simply isn’t a level playing field? I really don’t know, but I am still very uncomfortable indeed about the nature of these personal attacks. I would much prefer that the passion and energy were directed against the actions, systems or institutions that are really the problem; perhaps I feel that it is too easy to scapegoat individuals and harder but better and longer-lasting to work for real change?
I have so many questions here, which is perhaps just a reflection of the fact that the various media articles I have read on these issues all seem to generate more heat than light, but it makes me sad that instead of focussing on the under-representation of BAME people within the publishing industry or on stamping out institutionalised racism wherever it may occur, there are writers fighting battles with other writers instead.
Whether this really will be a postscript to lockdown – which officially ended on 19 July in England after a phasing out of restrictions over a number of months – remains to be seen. There are warnings that the return of schools next month, along with colder weather and people then staying indoors more and mixing with others without restrictions may all contribute to a further surge of Covid here in the autumn. And despite the media being understandably preoccupied with other important things over the last ten days – first with the release of the latest IPCC Report which sounded a ‘Code Red’ warning on the climate, and then with the takeover of Afghanistan by the Taliban – we should not forget that the pandemic is still the main concern for many people around the world, especially in areas where the proportion of people who have been vaccinated is still appallingly low. As of today, the total number of reported deaths worldwide is standing at over 4,375,000 but the true numbers probably far exceed the official figures for countries where medical services have been overwhelmed and many victims may never have had medical attention. The very informative website on the coronavirus from John Hopkins University of Medicine (https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/ – Topics/Tracking/Global Map in particular) states that the first case of Covid-19 in the United Kingdom was reported 563 days ago on 31 January 2020 and, since then, the country has reported 6,325,515 cases, and 131,296 deaths; it is a mine of information on every country and well worth a look.
Since the removal of almost all restrictions there have been some very noticeable changes here. Although still requested to wear face masks in shops – and required to do so, unless exempt, on public transport in London – rather fewer people are wearing them out and about. This seems perfectly reasonable given what is now known about the much lower risk of virus transmission outdoors as long as people are not in close proximity to each other for more than very short periods. We are also in the extremely fortunate position of knowing that over 60 per cent of the population (and very nearly 90 per cent of adults) are now fully vaccinated. While that carries no absolute guarantee against contracting Covid, it is reassuring to know that even if that does happen there is much less likelihood of becoming seriously ill. When visiting places, there also seems to be a lot less emphasis being put on ‘checking in’ to a venue using the NHS app, but this may partly be a result of the so-called ‘pingdemic’, when people who had been in the same place as someone who then tested positive for the disease were required to isolate at home. At one stage about one in five workers in the hospitality industry were isolating and many venues that might otherwise have been open for business were forced to close because they had insufficient staff.
After a year and a half of small-screen life I enjoyed visits to a local cinema twice last week and at the weekend spent a day in London, visiting a gallery, a restaurant, a concert and another cinema. The streets were busy – much as I would have expected to see on a summer Saturday pre-pandemic – as was the transport system. There were weekend numbers of people on the Underground and our mid-evening journey home was reminiscent of the worst of rush-hour commuting: engineering work and multiple cancellations resulted in standing room only on a jam-packed train. Only as a nearby passenger – no mask, as was the case for approximately a third of those on the train – breathed heavily onto my neck did I feel even slightly concerned about the virus, and there was nothing I could do about it, so worrying would have been pretty pointless! Overall, at none of the venues, either locally or in London, did I get the feeling that people were being reckless about their own or others’ safety: the vast majority were complying with the requirements or requests on distancing and face-covering and it was really good to feel a sense of normality about spending time with family and friends – and seeing some really good films on a big screen once again.
It is now days 512, 287 and 226 respectively since the introduction of lockdowns and for a while at least I will still be keeping track on my calendar, but I may also turn to other things for the occasional blog. Watch this space!
It is being called ‘Freedom Day’ but feels no different compared to last week or last month. Sixty-nine weeks to the day since the imposition of the first lockdown here in March 2020 and the idea of lifting all Covid restrictions is being criticised far and wide. In practice, it looks likely that a number of organisations and business sectors in the UK will maintain many or all of the restrictions that have been in place for over a year now. Supermarket chains will still want us to wear masks, as will the London transport network, and the majority of people are probably going to remain sensibly cautious. They are following the data and not the date! With cases of coronavirus infection rising and hospitalisations also increasing it does nevertheless seem that the success of the vaccination rollout in this country means that at least a smaller proportion of those who contract the virus are becoming seriously unwell and the death rate is thankfully fairly low. Nevertheless, people are still getting ill and we have little knowledge yet about any possible long-term effects of having had Covid, even for those who recover from symptoms relatively quickly. What does seem certain is that a not-insignificant number could be experiencing the impacts of the coronavirus for very many months if not years, and the impacts of that on the health service will be considerable. That makes the predictions of between 100,000 and 200,000 coronavirus cases per day as a result of today’s ‘unlocking’ look very scary indeed.
Daily cases by date – 8 Jan peak approx 68,000
However, with opportunities to meet up and even share hugs with family and friends, with two vaccinations administered and with summer finally here after a miserably cold spring – in great contrast to the lovely weather that made the first months of ‘lockdown 1’ in 2020 bearable – there has been a partial lightening of the pandemic mood for many. This has, however, been tempered in the last week by news of doubly vaccinated friends going down with Covid and the awful devastation and loss of life in Europe resulting from extreme rainfall and flooding. Coupled with record-breaking temperatures and wildfires elsewhere, the list of extreme weather events and the ever-increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere make it clear that whatever measure of ‘freedom’ we may – perhaps only temporarily – experience from Covid, there is no freedom in sight from the climate crisis.
Weekly averages 4 July 2021: 417.47 ppm This time last year: 415.43 ppm 10 years ago: 393.73 ppm Pre-industrial base: 280 Safe level: 350
It has been difficult to know what to write over the last couple of months. Day after day has seemed much like the day before and despite the excellent news in the UK on the rollout of the Covid vaccines, this third lockdown seems to have affected people more badly than the previous periods of restriction. Talking to complete strangers up and down the country as a Royal Voluntary Service Responder on ‘Check In and Chat’ calls, I have encountered a wide range of feelings. There have been people isolated for over a year, who have scarcely been outside their own homes in all that time and yet who have remained positive, thankful for any help they receive and hopeful about the future. Their gratitude for a few minutes of conversation has been really humbling. But there have also been those who sounded depressed, anxious and fearful and where I was left wondering whether they will ever feel truly confident to be out and about again. Sadly, those in this latter group often also spoke of family members with whom they had lost touch, of broken relationships and of not being part of any local community. All I could do was listen and hope that, having shared some of their worries, they might be left feeling a little better than before, even if only for a while. Such conversations really reinforced the value of much that I had taken for granted until a year ago: being able to see and speak to family and friends online; knowing that our neighbours would be there for us if we needed help; and being able to get out of the house when the weather is good and – especially recently – enjoy the changing of the seasons.
But as my ‘log’ blog is standing instead of a diary in these strange days, I shall periodically continue to post about the situation despite the ‘sameness’ of life at present. So, on the day that marks the passage of a whole year since the introduction of the UK’s first lockdown, the reported total number of deaths where Covid appeared on the death certificate is approaching 150,000 in the UK and the number is increasing by around 2,000 each week despite the fairly dramatic fall in cases since early February. Globally, the death toll from the coronavirus pandemic is now well over two and a half million. I suspect that epidemiologists are not completely surprised by these figures and they may, indeed, have thought they would be even higher almost fifteen months on from the first confirmed cases – not having anticipated the speed with which vaccine development and approval would take place.
Daily deaths with Covid-19 on the death certificate
In other news, I was delighted to see on my most recent visit to St Albans Cathedral that the restoration work on the shrine of St Amphibalus – look him up, the story is fascinating – is now complete. I had been peeking through the observation window in the screened-off chapel month by month up to late January and had seen the amazing workmanship that was going into the new stone being carved to enhance the original fragments of the shrine. An earlier ‘restoration’ had been done in the Victorian era and brick had been used to fill in for missing pieces; it wasn’t a particularly pleasing or inspiring sight and had languished in a side aisle for many years. Now I could walk around the whole thing in its new setting and get a close-up view of some very contemporary touches that will mark the work out as being largely done in 2020. That masked ‘gargoyle’ head is only a couple of inches across and the detail is incredible.
As I write, the country is about to hold a minute’s silence to commemorate those who have died during the last year. I hope and pray that this time next year the major focus of attention will have been able to switch away from a pandemic – even if it is to the other global threat that requires just as much urgent attention. There are no vaccines against the climate crisis.
Lockdown 1 extended from 24 March until 4 July 2020, with some initial easing of the restrictions from mid-June – but for over fourteen weeks we were urged to stay at home in order to limit the spread of this new virus. Although that resulted in a steady downward curve in the daily death rate from its early-April peak of just over a thousand, the respite in the tragic toll, coinciding with the lifting of the lockdown, lasted only until early September. It looks very much as if the effects of the good weather – which encouraged people onto crowded beaches and generally lifted spirits so that for others caution was thrown to the winds, coupled perhaps with an ill-advised policy that actively promoted eating out – initiated a second wave of infection. By mid-November the UK death rate was back up to almost half of the April level, scarcely dropped below 400 since then, and recently exceeding that earlier high despite a second lockdown lasting for three weeks in late autumn. From 5 November until 2 December the restrictions were broadly similar to those earlier in the year, except that schools were still open and the range of retail and other outlets allowed to remain trading was slightly wider. Christmas then appears to have been a major factor in sparking a further increase in cases and associated deaths; in the weeks beforehand there was an ever-changing package of advice about the permissible level of household mixing and its duration. It is no surprise that people starved of family contact for most of the year were desperate to spend time with loved ones and no amount of government messaging about the dangers that this would pose, especially for the elderly, could persuade some people that a fairly solitary celebration was the safest option.
We appear to be on a viral rollercoaster. Has this latest lockdown, which began on 5 January, succeeded in getting the country past a second wave of Covid? It is probably too early to tell, although indications this week are that the death toll is coming down slightly, while many hospitals remain severely stretched, with expanded intensive care wards still filled to capacity; a BBC News Channel film from the Royal London Hospital last week clearly shows how near to breaking point the staff and health system are. Meanwhile the astonishingly rapid development of vaccines and an almost surprisingly successful campaign to protect the most vulnerable has already resulted in nearly eight million people in the UK having received an initial vaccination as of last Thursday, with close to half a million having already had two doses.
While these optimistic figures represent the national picture, the sight of early spring flowers struggling to remain upright under recent freezing winds, driving rain and snow storms seems strangely appropriate and close to home it is hard to escape the impression that things are actually considerably worse than they were last year. While I’ve heard of a number of friends who have now had an initial coronavirus vaccination, I am also hearing day by day about friends, neighbours, colleagues and friends of friends who have contracted Covid since the start of the year. Some have escaped with only quite mild symptoms but others have been hospitalised and some are still ill. So, while the message from much of the media is about a gradual return to ‘normality’ (whatever that now means) over coming months, I am inclined to agree with what I heard from a recent Zoom session participant, ie that it will probably be 2022 at the earliest before we should even contemplate making plans for things like attending live events, let alone travelling abroad.
I keep thinking about the civilian populations of those countries affected by the World Wars of the twentieth century: they were faced with a frightening situation, with no clear end in sight and all they could do was to make the best of it and live from one day to the next, grateful for those fighting on their behalf and thankful to have survived another year, another month, another day.
Well, it has certainly been a strange year: back in March and April we were continually being reminded that plagues, high death tolls and quarantine restrictions were actually nothing new and the world had witnessed these things many times before. Come December and everyone has been talking about the ‘unprecedented’ year we have had. Perhaps our collective memory is short, or has been affected by a situation that few people really expected would last into the third decade of this century?
It has been a year of other contrasts as well, as we realised just how valuable are the people we have tended to take for granted: among them the nurses, cleaners, care workers, bin men, supermarket staff and taxi, bus and train drivers. While lockdowns meant that others were furloughed or switched from offices to home-based working these essential, key people carried on working so that the rest of us could make necessary journeys, eat and be cared for.
Time has both raced by and stood still. I was astonished to note that I had actually been to the cinema – more than once – and to the theatre early this year, as well as making it to Hilary Mantel’s book launch in London and to a number of other ‘real’ events. That all seems so far away now and almost unreal. When completing my 2020 memory book I was glad that I had produced the equivalent of ‘tickets’ for each of the various conferences, webinars, lectures, book launches etc that I attended – otherwise it would have been very sparse indeed after the first three months of the year. As it is, I clocked up well over 70 ‘events’, a number of which – including a packed week at the Hay Festival – I probably would not have got to in a normal year. The use of Zoom, BlueJeans, Ring Central Meetings and Microsoft Teams – all of which now reside on my desktop home screen – has changed things completely. I suspect that even after the pandemic is finally behind us there will be a lot fewer offline live events now that organisers have realised the potential of doing things virtually: much larger audiences joining from all around the world and paying a lot less each for tickets – and nothing for travel – will still be generating a sufficient if not greater profit. I am left really hoping, however, that there will be a return to some opportunities for face-to-face meetings if only because nothing can replace the thrill of a few words exchanged with a favourite author as they sign their latest book especially for you.
On the subject of books, this has been a good reading year: I have read 60 books altogether and was surprised to see as I reviewed them that only 19 were novels. Of the latter, the ones that have so far stuck with me include Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in This Strange World and Anne Michaels’ Fugitive Pieces. Stand-out titles among the other books were Rutger Bregman’s Humankind and Educated by Tara Westover. But I enjoyed everything I read and the remnants of my 2020 reading pile, plus a bumper crop of birthday and Christmas books, are already making next year look equally inviting.
There are undoubtedly many reasons to be relieved to see the back of 2020 – always assuming that the roll-out of vaccines around the world does succeed in curtailing the pandemic in the months ahead. But alongside those there are numerous reasons to remember the year with a great deal of thankfulness and with the hope that the lessons we have learned about valuing others and caring for the natural world will not be forgotten but will spur greater, better and more collaborative action to tackle all the problems that still beset so many people around the globe.
NB: Nicky's Blog 