Tag: pandemic

Restrictions lifting soon – how do you feel?

Here in the UK, the government announced last week a so-called ‘roadmap’ out of the Covid restrictions. They are emphasising the need to be guided by ‘data not dates’ so nothing is guaranteed of course. Like most people, I am looking forward to being able to see family and friends again; my own parents are both dead, but I have some elderly aunts and uncles I am anxious to visit, and my in-laws are in Dublin and we have not seen them for fourteen months. I am well aware that there is always someone worse off, and I am so sorry for all those who have lost loved ones in this pandemic, in so many cases, without having had the chance to say goodbye.

Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

Yes, like many, I am looking forward to booking a holiday, but it’s actually the smaller things I miss more: seeing friends, going to the cinema or an art gallery, a concert or a play. I want to eat in a restaurant again, cheek by jowl with other diners, and go shopping without a mask. I want to get in the car and drive to the coast for the day, or walk up a mountain, or visit my son at university. I would even be happy providing a taxi service to my daughters, ferrying them around to meet their friends. I want to get on the tram and go into town, or go for a swim or browse in a bookshop or the library. All those things I took for granted and sometimes sighed at having to do. I want them all back.

But there is a prevailing narrative that I feel I must challenge; my daughters will return to school sometime after the 8th of March (when the Department for Education gets around to clarifying how schools should implement rapid Covid testing). Yes, they need to get back, see their friends and be in a classroom again, but they are apprehensive. Working from home has been quite good for them – they do not have to contend with the naughty and disruptive kids. We seem to have forgotten that these things cause anxiety in normal times and that some children get bullied or suffer in a crowded classroom or playground. This is going to be worse when they all return, because so many children will have forgotten how to behave in the classroom and I feel for teachers having to manage discipline once again.

And I am a bit sick of hearing people on television, radio and my neighbourhood telling us how bored we all are and how they have been forced to take up macrame, or whatever. To those people I say, try home-schooling, or working from the kitchen table! I never seem to have the time to be bored! I am rushing around less, that is true, and I will miss this pace of life actually. I know that once restrictions lift life will speed up again.

I will also miss the time that we are sharing as a family – we watch films together, play board games, go out for a walk together every Sunday, and my husband, who used to be away several nights a month for work, has been home all the time. Everyone has time to cook, bake, chat, run, walk, and play. We have grown closer as a family and there is less pressure in life, having to be somewhere by a certain time for a given activity.

I will miss barely using my car. My car is quite old and for a while there I fancied something newer, less scratched, that didn’t scream ‘Mum’. Now I don’t care. It’s been weeks since I put fuel in it and that feels great. I bought a new coat in the sales, but apart from that, I haven’t desired any new clothes. I’m sorry for the fashion industry I suppose, but I’ve learned to be very happy with the wardrobe full that I already have, re-discovered some things I haven’t worn in a very long time and learned to love comfortable.

So, though I will not mourn the end of the pandemic (we have lost too much for that) I hope that we will all reflect a little and think about what we learned was important.

How do you feel about the end of restrictions?

How reading can keep you going right now

Image by cromaconceptovisual from Pixabay

I started the new year with hope and positivity. Yes, further tight restrictions were being imposed, but the vaccine was being rolled out and the Christmas decorations were still up. I even wrote about my feelings of optimism on here!

Since then, my mood has fluctuated wildly. I’ve had some domestic stresses in the form of day-job demands and administrative wheels turning incredibly slowly at the moment which have had some knock-on effects (too boring to talk about here). The Covid death toll is breaking new grim records every day it seems and I truly fear for the mental and physical health of NHS and care home staff at the very sharp end. If you are lucky enough to be untouched by Covid now, we are all going to be impacted by its ramifications somehow in the coming months. The weather is currently awful – torrential rain here in suburban Manchester as I write, making it incredibly dark even in the middle of the day. But despite this terrible backdrop, I don’t think it fully explains my mood. I think everything is just very frightening right now. Inside each of us is a little child who just wants to be told that it will all be okay. At this point, my adult self does not feel quite up to the job of providing the necessary reassurance.

I think there is also something about spiritual resources. Perhaps if you have a faith of some sort, you can get spiritual nourishment through prayer and your god. If you do, I hope sincerely that it is working for you. I don’t have that, so I find myself turning to books. Over the last couple of weeks, for one reason and another, there have been days when I have not had a chance to read, and that has been a mistake. Reading is my escape, my antidote to worldly anxieties, my source of wisdom and my assistant to sleep!

I am frequently asked for reading recommendations. I always give them with the caveat that taste is such an individual thing. Looking back over my reading since I started this blog, I thought it might be useful to post some suggestions here of books that have nourished me, as they might help if you are feeling anything similar to my ups and downs at the moment. The following are not all ‘cheerful’ (I don’t read many cheerful books!), but they should all enable a degree of escape and/or entertainment, which I think might just about be enough for many of us at the moment.

  1. Notes on a Nervous Planet by Matt Haig – published just before the pandemic struck, but with plenty of analysis and tips on the challenges of modern life which apply perfectly in 2020/21.
  2. The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce – lovely story, perfect ending, good solid rainy day reading stuff.
  3. My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante – if you have not yet discovered Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, you are missing out. Superb, very Italian.
  4. The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant – also Italy, but Renaissance this time. Cracking story and several centuries from here. A reminder that things used to be much worse!
  5. Ashes of London by Andrew Taylor – another brilliant series, also set a long time ago. Edge of the seat reading.
  6. Holding by Graham Norton – brilliantly funny, and a brilliant writer too. Norton evokes rural Ireland with love and with great wit.
  7. Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie – a trip on the Orient Express is on my bucket list, so this one was perfect escapism for me, but Death on the Nile would do just as well.
  8. A Whisper of Horses by Zillah Bethel- brilliant uplifting book written mainly for children which I loved.
  9. The Revenant by Michael Punke – if you think it’s a bit chilly out…. Nothing like someone else’s life-threatening terrors to make you feel gratitude for central heating and supermarkets.
  10. Becoming by Michelle Obama – I write this blog on a historic day, and am gratefully reminded that American presidents can and will be so much better.

And if that isn’t enough to be getting on with may I recommend a book I bought just before Christmas, which I haven’t reviewed on here yet, but which I am thoroughly enjoying dipping into, The Book of Hopes edited by Katherine Rundell.

Oh and just one more! The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and the Horse by Charlie Mackesy which is a joy from start to finish and is guaranteed to lift your spirits.

What are you reading to keep yourself sane at the moment?

Dipping into science-fiction

I’m not a huge fan of science-fiction, but the friend who recommended this book assured me that I would enjoy the theme of pharmaceutical meltdown and the emergence of a post-apocalyptic society that it examines. This novel was the winner of the Arthur C Clarke Award for Science Fiction in 2015, so it is acclaimed in its field.

station-eleven-imgThe book is set in Canada and the United States just 20 years after a catastrophic virus seemingly wipes out about 99% of humanity in a matter of days. The consequences of this are that, within a short space of time, electricity, running water and all the other basic services we take for granted, cease to exist. Vehicles are abandoned on motorways as their passengers leave their homes, to escape to…where? These people then die. Aircraft no longer fly and people are stranded pretty much wherever they happened to be at the moment the virus struck. And then mostly die. Whilst reading I recalled all those diseases in recent years that seemed to prefigure cataclysmic consequences (AIDS, Swine fever, SARS, Avian ‘flu, Ebola) fights which, for the most part, we eventually won; in this novel it is the disease (Georgian ‘flu) that prevails. And that’s scary.

The central character is Kirsten, who was 8 years old at the time of the disease, and was performing in a production of King Lear. The character of Lear was being played by Arthur Leander, a renowned celebrity actor, who dies on stage (not from the ‘flu). This seems to be a catalyst for chaos as that very evening the ‘flu takes hold and people start dying very quickly and in vast numbers.

“Hell is the absence of the people you long for.”

Station Eleven

The plot of the novel is complex. Kirsten survives the pandemic and we follow her in Year 20 as she becomes part of a travelling orchestra/theatre company bringing Shakespeare to remote and unconnected communities in the central states of North America. There is also Arthur Leander’s story – recollections of his childhood on a remote island off British Columbia, his early life as an actor before he became famous, then his acquisition of celebrity status, life in LA and, most significantly, his three marriages and relationship with his son.

There are two further significant characters: Clark, an old friend of Arthur’s, who survives the virus, but finds himself stranded in an airport, which becomes a significant community in the post-apocalyptic scenario. And Miranda, Arthur’s estranged first wife, who, when unable to cope with the trappings of fame and the effect this had on their marriage, sought sanctuary in writing a graphic novel (called Station Eleven) which envisaged a frightening future world controlled by an evil megalomaniac. Her graphic novel, a copy of which Kirsten treasures, provides a motif for the events of the book.

station-eleven-img-2The author has quite a task managing this complexity: each of the four characters’ stories are told separately and in a non-linear way, but they are like pieces of a jigsaw gradually being pieced together until the overall picture becomes clear. The novel jumps back and forth in time and I found this quite difficult to follow. Also, for me, the drawing together of the strands was a little too contrived; it just did not seem entirely plausible that a tiny number of survivors could have such a connected past. I think this has been my problem with science-fiction generally (but perhaps I haven’t read enough); I get that you have to suspend disbelief but it’s too much for me when that means suspending credibility.

Despite my reservations about the plot, I think the themes explored are very interesting: firstly, our vulnerability – technology has brought us so much but without it we are lost. Secondly, how we have so many communication tools at our disposal, but we don’t use them to say the things that really matter. And, thirdly, how society organises itself (or not!) when the usual social structures which keep us under control disappear. What is also interesting is that we take for granted that time equals progress, but in Year 20, so much ‘progress’ has been lost that things like engines and antibiotics seem like science-fiction. People can die of a cut from a rusty blade.

So, I enjoyed this aspect of the book, and it is well-written, but for me the plot did not work particularly well and the time-shifts were a bit frustrating and confusing. One to read if you like being a bit scared!

 

Do you love science fiction? Can you recommend a title for this reluctant sci-fi reader that I might enjoy?

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