Four Seasons in One Day @catecaterina - Tumblr Blog

Go to the Limits of Your Longing

Isn't this the most beautiful poem? I remembered the few lines quoted at the end of Jojo Rabbit (which, can I say, led me to get a seriously impressive right answer on University Challenge - it went like this: "I'm looking for a film. 'Let everything happen to you...'" Me: " JOJO RABBIT!") but the whole poem is even more wonderful. Here it is, by Rainer Maria Rilke:

GO TO THE LIMITS OF YOUR LONGING God speaks to each of us as he makes us, then walks with us silently out of the night.

These are the words we dimly hear:

You, sent out beyond your recall, go to the limits of your longing. Embody me.

Flare up like a flame and make big shadows I can move in.

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final. Don’t let yourself lose me.

Nearby is the country they call life. You will know it by its seriousness.

Give me your hand.

It *feels* different...

#butthatswhatwesaidlasttime #Youtube

My birthday in 2012.

It was a good one.

#Youtube

Passport Out of Plague Island

As my last two blog posts were cliffhangers – will the passport photo be rejected or not? Oh, the suspense! – I thought I’d post a not-so-brief update.

THE PASSPORT: My passport photo failed and was rejected, but not for the reasons you’d think – i.e. for its general hideousness, or because a lock of hair was partly covering one eye. Nope, it was rejected because I was supposedly “smiling” and didn’t have a “neutral expression”. Now, I’m many things in that photo, but smiling isn’t one of them. Certainly I’m smiling much less than I was in my last passport photo, in which the corners of my mouth have a slight but definite upturn. I suspect that something in the photo – but not a smile – triggered some kind of automatic smile detection software and the computer said no. Perhaps my naturally sunny disposition.

I’d prepared a reserve photo in the event that the first photo was rejected for hair reasons, but this rejection for unexpected and clearly fallacious reasons threw my careful plans into turmoil. If I were smiling in the first photo, I practically had a saucy grin in the second. Eventually I landed on a third photo, in which I was most definitely not smiling, even if it did make me look – to quote one person I showed it to – “like a Baader-Meinhof terrorist”. I reluctantly submitted that photo and it was accepted immediately. So it seems that even the vague impression of the hint of a ghost of a smile will get your photo rejected by the passport office. On the other hand, looking like a member of a far-left guerrilla group means you’re good to go.

The passport arrived last week, in all its blue/black Brexit bleakness. I’ve heard lots of discussion about the colour of the new passports, but nothing about the poor quality of these passports compared to the previous ones. It looks like something I could’ve put together myself in half an hour. Guess that’s what happens when a passport suddenly plunges in value. As for the photo, I’m not entirely clear why it was necessary to print it fifteen times throughout the passport, when in my last passport just once sufficed. There’s even a cut-out on the first page through which a little version of my face peeks, to accompany the larger photo of my face on the same page. It feels like they’re mocking me. Or rather, like I’m mocking me. I’m clinging to the thought it’s possible to change your passport photo if you renew your passport early. I wonder if nine years and eleven months early would be a record? I bet it wouldn’t.

ON COVID: None of us caught it! Aside from my brother, obviously. Which seems little short of miraculous, given that we’re all part of the same household at the moment. However, we had yet another close Covid encounter shortly afterwards (Seriously. It’s everywhere). My parents have a small conservatory in their back garden, where they pretty much live – coffee in the morning, gin and tonic in the evening, etc (you see where I get it from). A little while ago my dad decided to replace the frame and windows of said conservatory, and asked the husband of a good friend of mine – let’s call him (the husband) Covid John – to come round and help. They’d been working on it for about five days when John arrived one morning with the news that his wife had woken up feeling unwell. Uh-oh, I thought.

Later that day, I heard my parents and Covid John discussing plans for the following few days. John would come round as usual, and he’d also bring round his seven year old daughter – perhaps my mum could look after her? “Um, I don’t want to put a dampener on things”, I said, feeling as if I were piping up at the “Speak now or forever hold your peace” part of a wedding ceremony, “but given that John’s wife might have Covid, is this the most sensible plan?” Well, they near enough bit my head off! “It’s just a cold, isn’t it?” said Covid John, “are you worried?” “You can sit in your bedroom with a mask on if you like”, said my dad, “the rest of us will get on with living with Covid”. “I see”, I said, “fair enough”.

That evening the phone rang: in a wholly unpredictable turn of events, turns out Covid John’s wife does indeed have Covid. Undaunted, they decided to go ahead with plans for the following day anyway, with the small modification that my mother would wear a mask when in the car with Covid Kid. However in a last minute change of heart, my dad decided that, after all, he could manage without Covid John’s help for a couple of days. Not because of Covid, you understand, which we all have to live with. Just that, you know, maybe they could both do with a break? John in particular was looking quite run-down today, for some reason. Two days later, in another stunning and unexpected twist, Covid John also came down with Covid.

I mean. I feel like on the one hand I’m living in the eye of a Covid storm, while on the other trying to reason with parents behaving like irresponsible teenagers because they have a conservatory to finish. “Needs must when the devil drives”, as my mother put it. I do, of course, appreciate the necessity, nay the inevitability, of “living with Covid”. I’m just not over-eager to invite it in for a nice cup of coffee and a gin and tonic.

Anyway, to cut a long story slightly shorter, we escaped Covid again, even though John came round just four days after his positive test, and the conservatory got finished; I’m sitting in it now as I write this, my parents away on holiday. And I have a flight out of Plague Island on Saturday, assuming they don’t take one look at my passport and say “You knocked this up yourself, didn’t you? Hilarious photo, by the way”.

What do you reckon are my chances of catching Covid on my fully-booked flight to Milan? Better than even, I’d say. I’ll keep you updated.

Succumbing to the Inevitable?

My brother came to talk to me last Thursday, shortly before he tested positive for Covid. "I was wondering," he said hoarsely, "whether you'd - cough, splutter - like to go to that - splutter, cough - really long zip line in North Wales - sneeze - next weekend?" "Sure," I said, struggling to see him through the swirling clouds of Covid germs eagerly occupying each corner of the room.

"This is so typical of my brother," I complained to a friend over Zoom later that day. "I just knew he'd go and get Covid. Also what's the point of the vaccines if you can catch Covid anyway?" "Well you know, they don't actually stop you getting Covid," she said sensibly, "they just protect you from serious consequences if you do." "Yes, well, they're not going to protect my brother from serious consequences if he ends up giving it to me," I said.

To be fair to my brother, Covid does seem to be everywhere at the moment. I went for a walk with my parents on Mother's Day - happily, the brother decided not to come - when we bumped into one of my mum's friends out for a walk with her son, who'd come to spend the day with her. She lives just around the corner from my parents, so we all walked home together. The son tested positive on Monday, his mother on Thursday. Talk about an unwanted Mother's Day present.

In my household we've spent the last week in a sort of Covid limbo as we wait for symptoms to strike. The most fun part is interpreting any sort of physical discomfort as a possible sign of Covid. For example, in the days leading up to my brother's positive test, I had really achy legs. I googled and, sure enough, "unusual muscle aches" are a potential Covid symptom. On the other hand, they could also be a symptom of the thirty-five mile bike ride I did that week. Who can say? Then last night, I panicked because my temperature was 37.3°, which according to some websites is a "low-grade fever". Of course, I had just downed a large mug of hot chocolate to which I'd added a generous measure of Bailey's. Twenty temperature readings later, it was back down to 36.5°. Still, it was a scary half-hour.

Obviously I've also been taking all the usual precautions: snorting First Defence like I'm Boris Johnson at a party, taking a full array of multi-vitamins, and wearing a head-to-toe hazmat suit around the house. Somewhat astonishingly, all three of us - my parents and I - are negative so far, though admittedly I'm the only one taking a daily lateral flow test: my parents say they're only going to test if they get symptoms. Me, I'm hooked on that adrenalin rush you get when the little red line fails to appear: like a scratchcard when you really, really don't want to win the prize. I reckon it'll be several more days before we can say we're in the clear. If that happens, t'will be an authentic Mother's Day miracle.

P.S. My brother is fine, at least as far as I can tell from a safe distance, and I even bought him some salted caramel-flavoured M&Ms to speed his recovery. Lest you think I'm a completely heartless sister.

Marks of Satan

There isn't a word to describe the fear of having your photo taken: the closest you get is some combination of eisoptrophobia, the fear of seeing one's reflection, and scopophobia, the fear of being looked at. Not in English, at least; I imagine the Germans have come up with one. Whatever it's called, I definitely have it. The thing is I look absolutely hideous in photos. Probably I look hideous in real life too, but fortunately I don't normally have to look at myself, so that's less of a problem.

Suffering from what I shall call eisoptroscopophobia is particularly awkward these days, what with everyone having a smartphone and a social media account. My sister is the worst culprit: every time we get together as a family she insists on taking scores of photographs. Fair enough, you might say; maybe she just wants to record the day for her own personal memories, and it's not as if you have to look at the resulting photos. That is, until the next time you log into your Facebook account and get the message "Your Deeply Annoying Sister has tagged you in 561 photos". Then you embark on a desperate race to untag yourself from as many photos as possible as quickly as possible, lest anyone on your Facebook friends list should catch a glimpse of them.

Perhaps it's partly down to a discrepancy between how I see myself in my head and the awful reality. If that's the case, I'm perfectly happy to take the blue pill and keep dwelling in the Matrix; to remain in blissful ignorance by never having my photo taken again, ever. Unfortunately, when I explained this to the Passport Office they were less than understanding. Nor did they accept my - perfectly logical - argument that while my passport may be ten years old, the actual dimensions of my face haven't changed, and thus there's no need to update the photo since facial recognition technology will work perfectly well with the old one. Surely, I urged, they should be jumping at any opportunity to save resources? Yet quite unreasonably, they rejected all my arguments out of hand, and refuse to issue me with a new passport until I send them a new photo, which they further insist must be taken under the least flattering conditions possible.

As I arrived back in the UK with just three weeks left on my passport - I travelled via Dublin, so this involved a long conversation with Ryanair staff about the Common Travel Area, to whom this was apparently brand new information - this means I can't return to Italy until I send the Passport Office a new photo. The way I'm going, this may quite plausibly mean never leaving the country again. I've been scouring every corner of the house for the least bad location in which to take a photo, and so far that seems to be on the landing, doors open at a precise 45° angle, phone balanced on the second shelf of the bookcase, with a lightly overcast sky outside. Normally I'd say overcast skies are easy to find in north-west England, except that six of the last seven days have been completely sunny, so even the weather's working against me. Even with everything arranged perfectly, the only photo I can look at without howling will probably be rejected because it has a lock of hair partly covering my face. In truth, I probably like it because there's a lock of hair partly covering my face.

To make matters worse, yesterday I was changing the sheets on my bed, and trying to put on the fitted sheet - you know, the one which fits well enough over the first three corners but is impossibly tight over the fourth - and as I was putting all my weight on the fourth corner trying to get it over the mattress, it suddenly gave way and I headbutted the wall. Now I have two purple bruises on either side of my forehead, like satanic marks. I'm trying to decide whether to use make-up to hide the bruises for the photograph, or to take photographs with the bruises and use make-up to reproduce them every time I travel. At least they'd be a distraction from my face.

At any rate, it's reassuring to know I'm not alone (in the phobia, if not in the bruises). While I was searching online to see if the fear of being photographed has a name, I discovered there were other people with the same fear, in some cases even more extreme than mine:

One woman in Canada wrote "I have the most intense crippling fear of being photographed. I didn't join the library until they had an online membership. I can't renew my passport... Or my drivers licence... It seems like you need photo membership cards for everything now..." A lady in the UK responded with a comment "I cut myself out of every photo and threw my wedding album on the fire".

Now personally, I wouldn't be crazy enough to throw my wedding album in the fire (because I wouldn't get married in the first place. Because of all the photographs). So you see, I'm really not that strange, after all.

Things I Read in 2021

It was World Book Day a few weeks ago, apparently. That seems as good a reason as any to write about what I read last year. When I first thought about it, I couldn't remember many books from last year at all. It wasn't until I checked Goodreads, where I keep track of what I read, that I realized there were quite a lot of interesting books on the list - I'd just forgotten I'd read them! That says more about me than it does about the books, and something too about the benefits of recording what you read; remembering that you read a book inevitably jogs free memories of the book itself. So here are some of the books I enjoyed last year:

Anna by Niccolò Ammaniti

Apples Never Fall by Liane Moriarty

Chief of Staff: Notes from Downing Street by Gavin Barwell

The Fell by Sarah Mosse

Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead

Hard Choices: What Britain Does Next by Peter Ricketts

Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family by Robert Kolker

Ladies in Black by Madeleine St. John

Last Night in Montreal by Emily St. John Mandel

Let Me Tell You What I Mean by Joan Didion

Moab is My Washpot by Stephen Fry

Living Better: How I learned to Survive Depression by Alastair Campbell

The Pandemic Century: One Hundred Years of Panic, Hysteria and Hubris by Mark Honigsbaum

The Prince of the Marshes: And Other Occupational Hazards of a Year in Iraq by Rory Stewart

Second Place by Rachel Cusk

Silverview by John le Carré

Square Haunting: Five Writers in London Between the Wars by Francesca Wade

The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris

The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again by M. John Harris

Temples of Delight by Barbara Trapido

This Boy by Alan Johnson

Travels With Charley: In Search of America by John Steinbeck

Among the novels, I loved Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle, which is about a female pilot who tries to fly around the earth crossing both the North and South Poles ("Great circle": "the largest circle that can be drawn on any given sphere". Thanks, Wiki). I read all 600+ pages over a long summer weekend in Maranzana, where I mostly lay in a hammock, ate fresh figs from the garden, and went for the occasional swim in the pool. That isn't to say this is just a light summer novel, at all; rather, it's one you want to read in great gulps, alongside a sweet summer cocktail. "Immersive" is the word I keep hearing to describe it, and I can't think of a better one. I could hardly put it down, except for when I went into the kitchen to make another gin and tonic (just kidding; obviously I took it into the kitchen with me and carried on reading).

I also loved Sarah Mosse's novel The Fell, which is set in the rainy English countryside during lockdown, and thus marked a change in atmosphere, not to say temperature. As with Emily St. John Mandel last year, I can't believe I haven't read any of her books before; I'm glad to have her whole back catalogue to dive into.

Speaking of Emily St. John Mandel, I also read Last Night in Montreal. This is the only one of her books I hadn't read, and I think it might even be my favourite, because it's so much about language - like this passage:

'What was my first language?" 'What?' 'Was it English or French?' 'We lived near Montreal', her father said. 'Just near the American border. Your mother and I both spoke English and French. You always knew both languages'. 'But which was my first?' 'There was no first, he said. 'You have no first language'. 'How can someone have no first language?'

Happily, as I've now read all her books, it's exciting to know she has a new one - Sea of Tranquility - coming out in a couple of months!

When I looked back at the non-fiction books I read, I was startled to discover how many of them were audiobooks; a couple of years ago I didn't listen to audiobooks at all! I seem to gravitate towards autobiographies read by the author, perhaps because you feel as if you're getting something extra not offered by the paper or e-book versions; hearing the author's story in their own voice, I guess. The excellent autobiographies from Alan Johnson and Stephen Fry (and all the sequels) and Rory Stewart's account of his time as a governor in Iraq, The Prince of the Marshes, were highlights.

Perhaps my most momentous discovery, though, was when - more or less at random - I took the audiobook version of Travels with Charley out of the library. It's by this great new author - I don't know whether you've heard of him - called John Steinbeck! No but seriously, this is the first book by Steinbeck I've ever read. I didn't study him at school, and I never sought him out afterwards because I had the off-putting impression he was a Terribly Serious Author who wrote Great American Novels on vaguely agricultural themes: GRAPES of Wrath, Of MICE and Men. I certainly didn't expect him to be funny. It helped that the narrator of Travels with Charley sounds like just the sort of bloke you'd like to share a beer with sitting round a campfire, telling stories as the sun goes down (well, he'd be telling the stories, you'd just chip in with the occasional appreciative comment). Obviously this is now precisely how I picture Steinbeck too. Travels with Charley is non-fiction - nominally at least - and describes his travels around America with his dog, Charley.

Actually his name is Charles le Chien. He was born in Bercy on the outskirts of Paris and trained in France, and while he knows a little poodle-English, he responds quickly only to commands in French. Otherwise he has to translate, and that slows him down. He is a very big poodle, of a color called bleu, and he is blue when he is clean. Charley is a born diplomat. He prefers negotiation to fighting, and properly so, since he is very bad at fighting.

I made a start on Steinbeck's fiction recently with Cannery Row, which was wondrous, and its sequel, Sweet Thursday, is next. I'm now such a confirmed fan I'll probably even get round to reading his agricultural novels eventually.

I failed miserably at all the reading goals I set for myself last year, which is to say I read hardly any books not in English (and none in Welsh) and hardly any poetry. So I guess I'll try to do a bit more of those things this year. Again. And of course, there's my recurring, never-achieved goal of reading 100 books a year. That's really just there to encourage me to pick up a book rather than opening up Netflix, but still, it'd be nice to achieve it just this once, wouldn't it? Goodreads tells me I'm currently "11 books ahead of schedule", but it usually does happen that I sprint into an early lead before trailing off miserably as the finish line approaches; so I'm not counting my chickens, even if I am mixing my metaphors.

I mean sure, if I read TWO BOOKS A DAY.

I mean.

Bwahahahaha.

Kasper Schmeichel punctures the balloon of English hubris with a dazzling smile.

C'MON DENMARK!!

I watched last night's match at an open air event with a big screen, and cycled back afterwards to a cacophony of celebratory car horns. The funny thing I realised afterwards is that *no-one there was drunk*! Those who were drinking had one beer, two at most. I imagine things may be a little different in Manchester tonight...

Things I Read in 2020

I know it’s traditional to write a “Best Books of 2020” list at the end of the year in question. However, my considered opinion is that it’s OK to write a “Best of 2020” list for as long as it’s too early to write a “Best of 2021” list. And, therefore, May June certainly qualifies.

Well, 2020 was a bit of a weird year, wasn’t it (I feel the question mark is unnecessary). For a while there – right about the time then-PM Conte announced all of Italy was going into the RED ZONE, and the walls closed in – it was hard to concentrate on very much at all, let alone reading. Flights and bus routes vanished from web pages soon as you looked at them. Dog dealers hung out in the shadows at street corners, or in the closed-off parks (€10 for a 15 minute walk). Police cars roamed the city ordering people to “Stay at home” over the loudspeaker. Police officers checked the papers of people queueing to get into supermarkets. One weekend the ambulance sirens were never-ending.

But it’s amazing what comes to seem normal, isn’t it, and one day you even start reading again; one book I’d recommend, if you’re in a can’t-concentrate state of mind, is Cultural Amnesia by Clive James. It’s made up of brief essays on various individuals – Charlie Chaplin, Jean-Paul Sartre, Hitler – which you can dip into as and when you feel like it, thus avoiding the need to concentrate for more than ten or fifteen minutes at a time. And it has bits like this in it: “Chamfort was the one who supplied the lasting definition of fraternité: ‘Be my brother or I will kill you’. That, in fact, was the joke that killed him: he was arrested soon after making it”. Cultural Amnesia isn’t on my “Books of 2020” list, but only because I haven’t finished reading it yet (there’s an Italian word “centellinare”, which means to prolong the pleasure of consuming something by sipping it a little bit at a time. I guess that’s what I’m doing).

Here are some other books I enjoyed reading or re-reading in 2020 (or at any rate, which made an impact!):

Asymmetria (Asymmetry) by Lisa Halliday

Averno by Louise Glück

Citizen Doctorow: Notes on Art and Politics by E.L. Doctorow

Deacon King Kong by James McBride

Dolenni Hud (Magic Links) by Owen Martell

L’Estate del ‘78 (The Summer of ‘78) by Roberto Alajmo

The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel

House of Glass: the Story and Secrets of a Twentieth-Century Jewish Family by Hadley Freeman

The Long Take by Robin Robertson

On Chapel Sands by Laura Cummings

Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart

La Peste (The Plague) by Albert Camus

Say Nothing: A True Story of Memory and Murder in Northern Ireland by Patrick Radden Keefe

Spying on the South: Travels with Frederick Law Olmsted in a Fractured Land by Tony Horwitz

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel

Still Life by A.S. Byatt

A Stranger City by Linda Grant

Summer by Ali Smith

Twilight of Democracy: the Seductive Lure of Authoritarianism by Anne Applebaum

Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

A Village Life by Louise Glück

The Virgin in the Garden by A.S. Byatt

La Vita Bugiardi degli Adulti (The Lying Life of Adults) by Elena Ferrante

Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury

One non-fiction book I loved was Hadley Freeman’s House of Glass. Starting from an old shoebox of photos and documents belonging to her grandmother, she explores the story of her family as they moved west through Europe in the 1930s and ‘40s, to Paris and finally to America. I listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by Hadley and has a particular vividness. She started out as a fashion journalist, and one of the things I found fascinating about her story (especially as someone who loves sewing) is that we’re used to thinking of clothing and fashion as frivolous and unimportant, and yet in her own family, those things were not only a way out of poverty but also, for some of her family members, even life-saving. On the fiction side of things, I discovered Emily St. John’s writing after reading a review of her most recent book, The Glass Hotel. Her novels are thought-provoking, meditative, and stay with you after you’ve finished reading them. Station Eleven is even about a pandemic, if you haven’t heard enough about them already. I’ve read three of her books so far and am about to start a fourth (the only one of her books I haven’t read), Last Night in Montreal.

My goal last year was to read more books not-in-English, although given I only read one such book last year, this wasn’t a high bar. At any rate, I’m happy to report I read seven books in a mixture of Welsh, French and (mostly) Italian. One of these was Lisa Halliday’s Asymmetria, which I’d already read in the English original. It was one of my favourite books of 2018, but then I gave it to my aunt for Christmas, and ever since then I haven’t been able to read it due to an explicit extract from one of James Joyce’s letters which appears near the beginning of the novel, in which he describes having sex with his wife Nora. Every time I picked up the book, it was as if my aunt was reading it over my shoulder. Then I had the inspired thought that perhaps reading the book in Italian might make it less awkward to read. And I was right! Turns out “È meraviglioso scopare una donna mentre scorreggia” sounds far less embarrassing in Italian than it does in English.

I should probably set some reading goals for this year too, while there’s enough of the year left to achieve them. So aside from my usual target of reading 100 books during the year, never yet achieved (Goodreads: “You are 8 10 books behind schedule”), I thought I’d try to read more books in Welsh. As I only read one last year, this seems achievable. And more poetry: I read a couple of collections by Louise Glück last year, which reminded me how much I enjoy reading poetry, and the way its melodies find their way into your brain. Plus the collections tend to be short, thus contributing to Goal One as well: killing two goals with one stone, as it were.

This was the local supermarket yesterday. No panic-buying going on in Turin, no sirree.

There have only been three cases of coronavirus here so far. Which hasn't stopped both my parents, separately, sending me text messages asking me whether I have face masks, hand sanitizer, and preferably one of those top-to-toe protection suits investigators wear at crime scenes.

I do actually have face masks. The reason for this is that when I was at my parents' house over Christmas, my sister turned up with some vile lurgy, infected everyone, and left a couple of days later. So once I'd recovered, I decided to get some face masks from eBay so that if she does that again, she can wear one of the masks and keep her germs to herself. I know, I'm a great sister.

As for hand sanitizer, the only way to get *that* right now is to spend €250 on the black market.

I'm supposed to be going to Perugia on Friday for a long weekend. I don't know about you, but eight hours on a bus with a bunch of total strangers sounds like a particularly sensible thing to do at the moment (no, I haven't mentioned it to my parents). Keeping my fingers crossed I'm the only one brave/foolhardy enough to travel and that I have the whole bus to myself. Also keeping my fingers crossed they let me into Perugia, once they find out I've come from the infected north...

Here We Go Again

It's that time of year again! That is, the time when I realize the Oscars are *tonight*, and despite my plans to blog my very influential thoughts on Best Picture several weeks, if not months in advance, I still haven't done it, and thus will have to scribble down some very brief, random, unfinished thoughts just to get them down before the Oscars are actually announced. So here we go.

This year is a bit unusual, in that from the moment I watched 1917 at the cinema I thought it was the clear winner. "Wow, it'll take one heck of a film to beat that" were, if I recall correctly, my thoughts. It's a film about war, but I think it's also about stories and storytelling. I have half a blog entry written on 1917 and storytelling, but it's so late now I have no hope of finishing it before the Oscars so I fear you'll just have to take that on trust.

Honourable mentions to Jojo Rabbit and Parasite. Jojo Rabbit is just the sort of quirky, off-beat film I'm always drawn to but which has absolutely no hope of winning (see also: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; Juno; Whiplash) but which does, however, sometimes get Best Screenplay or Best Adapted Screenplay.

I also loved the quote from Rilke which ends Jojo Rabbit:

Let everything happen to you Beauty and terror Just keep going No feeling is final

It made me want to read Rilke, if I only knew where to start (with that poem would be one place, I suppose). As for where to stop, here seems as good a place as any (1917 for the win!).

Well, that's just crazy. Today has been like a little piece of early summer. Contemplating a first Aperol Spritz of the year on the balcony (the first on the balcony, I mean; obviously this isn't the first Spritz of the year, that would be as ridiculous as the weather).

ETA: I have discovered that this weather is caused by what they call a “Föhn” wind, which according to Wiki is “a type of dry, warm down-slope wind that occurs in the lee (downwind side) of a mountain range”. ”Föhn” is also often used in Italy to mean “hairdryer”! So there you go.

I’m totally in favour of Scottish independence (run, run while you still can, Scotland) but I love this, despite its vague unionism. And it seems appropriate on this miserable night...

Books of 2019

Every year, inspired by Barack Obama and Nicola Sturgeon, I plan to post a list of the books I've enjoyed reading over the previous year, and every year before I know it it's the end of the year, and posting a list of the books I enjoyed the year before last seems a little silly, or at least outdated. And then I have to make a whole new list of books I enjoyed over the last last year instead of the last year but one.

So! To prevent this happening yet again, today, on the first day of the year, here are some of my favourite books from those I read (or re-read) in 2019.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power - Shoshana Zuboff Agent Running in the Field - John Le Carré Airhead: The Imperfect Art of Making News - Emily Maitliss An American Marriage - Tayari Jones The Bluest Eye - Toni Morrison Educated - Tara Westover The Five: the Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper - Hallie Rubenhold Furious Hours: Murder, Fraud, and the Last Trial of Harper Lee - Casey Cep The Gendered Brain: the New Neuroscience that Shatters the Myth of the Female Brain - Gina Rippon Intermède (Intermission) - Owen Martell Lanny - Max Porter The Looking Glass - Michèle Roberts Mythos: the Greek Myths Retold - Stephen Fry Notes on a Nervous Planet - Matt Haig Once Upon a Time in the East - Xiaolu Guo Pachinko - Min Jin Lee The Places In Between - Rory Stewart SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome - Mary Beard The Time of My Life - Denis Healey The Transit of Venus - Shirley Hazzard White Chrysanthemum - Mary Lynn Bracht Yes to Europe! The 1975 Referendum and Seventies Britain - Robert Saunders

2019 was the year I finally got over my aversion to audiobooks. This is mostly because I read a thread on Twitter in which a man, on the occasion of his birthday, offered up various pieces of life advice, and one of these was "Get over your aversion to audiobooks". So I did, and in fact I 'read' the books by Hallie Rubenhold, Stephen Fry and Rory Stewart in the audiobook version.

This year I'd like to read more books which aren't in English. The problem is simply that it takes me longer and I'm lazy. This year I think the only one I managed is the French translation of Owen Martell's Intermission, which is terrible (I mean the fact I only managed one book not in English is terrible, not the book itself, which is very good and self-evidently not terrible, or it wouldn't have made it onto my Favourite Books of 2019).

I'm currently in the middle of Roberto Alajmo's L'estate del '78 (The Summer of '78) and I have Elena Ferrante's new novel La Vita Bugiarda degli Adulti (The Lying Life of Adults) waiting after that, so those should get me off to a decent start. Here's hoping.

Happy new year!

This was briefly Jofra Archer's Wikipedia page (I didn't do it, I kinda wanted New Zealand to win).

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