Happy Easter
It’s been a long time since I posted a blog. Despite enjoying acres of unusually unstructured time, currently I’m finding it hard to (a) find the level of privacy I usually enjoy and which allows me to work without the constant feeling that I’m excluding the rest of my family. Is this a common experience? I’m also finding it hard to (b) focus on writing about anything that is the usual subject matter for this blog, which frankly pales into stark insignificance in the face of our current health, social and economic dilemmas.
Unless I am writing in a strictly fictional context in which our previous “normal” life expectations can continue unchanged – as good a defence of fiction as I have yet come across – every word I write will be coloured by our current over-riding preoccupations.
Apart from having to live with a continual, low-grade anxiety about our future global prospects, I realise that my usual topics of conversation – editing, indie publishing, proof reading, how I read books, techniques that I have deployed to help me finish a book I’m writing – are likely to be met with the response, “Who cares? Don’t you know there is a pandemic on?” or “It hardly matters at the moment, does it? I’d count myself lucky, if I were you!” And I do, most sincerely.
So I read the news, while trying not to take it too much to heart, I fret about the future prospects of such unguarded continents as Africa, and I wonder where we will be in a year’s time. And I recommend reading cheerful, forgiving books that entertain while also being enlightening and heart-warming. Bill Bryson is my current re-read favourite, a joy which I’m delighted to say, my husband seems to have finally cottoned on to. Which makes a nice change from his usual preoccupation with books about the Great War, the Irish Wars of Independence or Edmund Burke’s Political Philosophy.
Happy Easter season. Stay well, and thanks for reading.
Please share:
April 15, 2020 @ 6:25 am
It’s good to hear from you again. I was interested in the following: “It hardly matters at the moment, does it, I’d count myself lucky, if I were you!” Sometimes when really bad stuff happens we should do what we can and then try to accept it. Then we get on with what we were doing. I’m not all that happy with people being negative. I think, and I’ve said this over and over, I think we have a great opportunity to start over when we get through the present and build something new. I don’t want to get back to normal. The normal is what caused so much of the problem.
April 15, 2020 @ 1:23 pm
Hi John, it’s so good to hear from you too! And I thank you most sincerely for your thoughtful comments. I don’t really want to get back to “normal” either, so I’m glad that you cherish hopes of building something better: more inclusive, less based around money-at-all-costs, a philosophy which seems, literally, to be costing us the Earth. We need good leaders, from the ground up, and it’s time to live more simply. Once I get past my current urge to read the news, I shall resume writing, which I do so enjoy, even if it never sees publication. Meantime, we are enjoying our Easter holidays. Bless you! 🙂 Xxx