Summary: well, what have I been up to

About 12 months into lockdown, during the plague, I thought it would be a good idea to think about what if anything I had achieved during that period of enforced isolation. A year or so later I repeated the exercise and found it quite therapeutic. About 18 months later, I thought it was about time to have another reflect. So, what have I achieved?

1. My father died in February 2024. I managed to deliver his eulogy – mostly – without crying.
2. Having read Susan Sontag’s On Photography (A LOT!!!) I think I worked out how to, occasionally, take a decent photograph. 
3. I had received an honorary OBE in 2017 for services to the eradication of slavery. I sent it back in protest at the British government’s and Opposition’s clear repudiation of the ideals of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, most notably for migrants and Palestinians. 
4. Probably the British government paid no attention, I mean they have a state to plunder and a genocide to facilitate: those things don’t happen by themselves. But, at time of writing, no deportation flights to Rwanda have taken off. 
5. Best books I read? Well, My Father’s House, by Joseph O’Connor is just outstanding. Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour Trilogy is wonderful: it’s a classic for a reason. James Kestrel’s Five December’s is an empathetic and original take on the detective in war-time sub-genre. My pal Lara Pawson’s book, Spent Light, is an extraordinary and intimate examination of everything from toasters to love to war and atrocity, to the joys of a good broom.
6. And then there is Ellen McWilliams’ Resting Places, an exquisite exploration of the author’s people and her place, the Bandon valley, where the blood of Protestant neighbours, murdered in 1922, still cries from the ground. A remarkably courageous work on how the political and personal interplay. 
7. Roger Casement once said, “… we all on earth have a commission and a right to defend the weak against the strong, and to protest against brutality in any shape or form”. So I wrote on Gaza, in a vain attempt to prick the racist mindset of the war criminals.
8. Published my second detective in war-time novel, Some Service to the State. It is about the repercussions arising from an enquiry into the fate of a missing girl in a newly partitioned Ireland.
9. My pal, Fergus, said it was over-didactic. I said you mean political. He said, I mean over-didactic. 
10. “Didactic” means “intended to teach, particularly in having moral instruction as an ulterior motive” Example, “a didactic novel that set out to expose social injustice”. Except he didn’t seem to mean it that positively. “Didactic” also means “in the manner of a teacher….” Or, sometimes, “patronising”. 
11. Well, I didn’t mean to be patronising. But my father was a teacher. So, if being didactic means I’m a bit like him then that is okay.