The year in brief:
Blah, Blah, Blah.
I was tempted to stop there. Greta Thunberg’s words say it all. Anything else is just description.
I could talk about another year of living in fear, and another year of being lied to, and a second pandemic year which is different from the first one because this time we’re not all in it together.
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| December's books. Guess which one's for book group. |
In 2021 I made a new year resolution that I kept. This might be a first. It was to read four books a month.
It doesn’t sound much, and it’s nothing compared to people like Andy Miller, but it gave me the chance to tackle a bit of the feeling I get of “so many books, so little time” every time I go on Books Twitter.
Actually I’ve averaged five. I could have read more, but I don’t live alone, and I feel obliged to spend Quality Time with my husband occasionally.
I can read fast – I sometimes finish a book in one or two sittings – but I don’t think reading fast is necessarily a good thing. It dawned on me some time this year that the time spent reading a book is longer than the time you are physically looking at the pages. There’s the time you spend processing it afterwards. If I ate up books at the rate I did as a child, or went from one book straight to another, I’d lose that.
Last night I watched Our Family and Autism, a BBC One documentary in which Paddy and Christine McGuinness talked about their experience of having three autistic children. It was widely trailed as a heart-warming documentary. For some of us it was more like heart-sinking.
Anyway, that shows how spurious the “music and memories” thing is, because that memory is not significant in my life.
Not, like Will, growing up in a council flat, closer to Kirkby than Liverpool. Not going to a comprehensive school that decided who was thick. Not getting a dead-end job in 1970s Liverpool. But I was at Eric’s, the punk-era music club that grew Echo and the Bunnymen, and many more post-punk Scouse stars. I remember it as a golden era, and Will’s book confirms it.
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| My generation. |
Douglas Copeland is getting a lot of publicity at the moment. His novel Generation X is 30 years old. Cue lots of nonsense about generation theory. Again.
The Guardian Review carried a piece called The books that defined a generation. There are two things wrong with this concept. 1. Generation theory is nonsense. 2. Generations don’t define themselves by books.
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| Photo from the Women's Equality Party. |
I don't want to be inspiring. I just want to be safe.
On Monday this week, it was International Women’s Day and social media, as usual, was full of people going on about “inspirational women”. They failed to notice that the theme this year was #ChooseToChallenge. And we all are now.
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| Prospect Cottage in Dungeness, Derek Jarman's old home. |
There’s a research thing about Covid that I take part in and every month they ask you to fill in a questionnaire about how you’re feeling. I like doing it because there’s a question about how much you trust the government to manage Covid and I can put the biggest tick ever next to “not at all” (or as big as you can when it’s an online check box).
Anyway, this month there was a question about what things you are missing. And I wanted to put the biggest tick ever next to “everything”. People. Travel. Going for a coffee or a drink. And the one that said “art and culture”. I wanted to put a big tick on that, because I grieve for it.
Last year – well, last month – I saw a thread on Twitter of “ten things that have brought a smile to my face in 2020”. I was going to copy the idea, but I didn’t get round to it, and now it’s January.
But there is never a bad time to say thank you for creative consolation.