facttime

This post is rather more personal than usual but I wanted to write down some thoughts during these most uncertain COVID-19 times. Normal coffee- and travel-post service to resume...at some point, I hope. “I never realised you were so into football,” a colleague said to me last year. It was a fair point: although I had mentioned the game and my team — Wolverhampton Wanderers — periodically over the five years we’d been working together, I'd also been inflicting my updates on my non-football-following co-workers with increasing frequency. In fact, I’ve followed Wolves for as long as I can remember. My family are from the Black Country and Wolves are a ‘family team’. But my interest has waxed and waned over the years, rather like Wolves’ own fortunes. For much of my childhood and teenage years, their performance could perhaps best be described as ‘underwhelming’ or ‘frustrating.’ Jumping more solidly onto the bandwagon during the recent (old) golden period could be seen as glory hunti...

Like many people, my prime time for reading was on my commute, which gave me a total of 90 minutes to two hours per day with a book or my Kindle. I read 135 books in 2019 , most of them on the bus, but when the lockdown was brought in in London, I found it hard to motivate myself to read initially. I had so much more time to myself but I couldn't quite tear myself away from the Sisyphean search for scintillating shows on streaming services, or random rabbit holes on the internet. Part of the problem was that I was being too ambitious. I started re-reading one of the set texts from my Italian degree — Boccaccio's Decameron , which is delightfully bawdy and lockdown-relevant, but also very long. Then I came across Jane Casey's new novel, The Cutting Place , which was being serialised in The Times . But when I realised it was part of a series, I decided to start with the first DC Maeve Kerrigan novel instead. Well-written detective novels are a great choice for lockdown readin...