The qatsi awards
Dec. 31st, 2021 03:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
qatsiThis time last year I see I was predicting my covid vaccination would be in 2022, so there have been some positive things this year (with thanks to NHS and rather less to NHS Digital, who corrupted my record when the site crashed the day my age group became eligible for jabs). Here are my other highlights.
Honourable mentions for The Thursday Murder Club (fiction); The Battle for Spain, Last Hope Island and Seasons in the Sun (non-fiction); The Aurora Orchestra at the Proms (music); I was pleased with my attempt at moules marinière over the Easter weekend (food).
In these parts any sense of a return to the old normality has distinctly stalled. I feel quite settled with a generic working-from-home framework. Work is not perfect, but I acknowledge some economic privilege in that I feel I am now working to make my retirement comfortable rather than to pay the bills; my fear is that the "easy" choice of inflating our collective covid debts away will erode my pension. I would dearly love to be able to go about at leisure in my free time, but no amount of Johnsonian bluster encourages me to "live with" the virus. It seems as a nation we are just prepared to accept hundreds of deaths daily, with no end in sight. Hundreds is, obviously, better than the thousand or more we experienced almost a year ago, but we did get it rather lower before "freedom" day. Ho hum. I believe many of us - one way or another - are now endowed with what ought to be a surfeit of antibodies, yet the universe it producing better and better virus variants. Yay.
- Fiction - The Echo Maker, by Richard Powers
- Non-fiction - How Britain Ends, by Gavin Esler
- Music - none
- Film and Theatre - none
- Museums, Exhibitions and Visits - an unblogged visit to Thenford Arboretum and Gardens
- Food and Drink - an unblogged trip to Twickenham to see rosamicula and strange_complex
Honourable mentions for The Thursday Murder Club (fiction); The Battle for Spain, Last Hope Island and Seasons in the Sun (non-fiction); The Aurora Orchestra at the Proms (music); I was pleased with my attempt at moules marinière over the Easter weekend (food).
In these parts any sense of a return to the old normality has distinctly stalled. I feel quite settled with a generic working-from-home framework. Work is not perfect, but I acknowledge some economic privilege in that I feel I am now working to make my retirement comfortable rather than to pay the bills; my fear is that the "easy" choice of inflating our collective covid debts away will erode my pension. I would dearly love to be able to go about at leisure in my free time, but no amount of Johnsonian bluster encourages me to "live with" the virus. It seems as a nation we are just prepared to accept hundreds of deaths daily, with no end in sight. Hundreds is, obviously, better than the thousand or more we experienced almost a year ago, but we did get it rather lower before "freedom" day. Ho hum. I believe many of us - one way or another - are now endowed with what ought to be a surfeit of antibodies, yet the universe it producing better and better virus variants. Yay.