In our third and last selection of Lockdown Lit, the difficulties of lockdown are to the fore for some of our writers.
For Michele Witthaus, ‘life is filtered as if through muslin’, in Malaise, as people ‘try to stick to a script they barely understand’ in Distance Education. Sean Chard, ‘living on lockdown with not much to do’, reflects on the minor dramas of life at home in Four Days, like the all-too-familiar moment when you discover that the supermarket delivery has left off ‘the crisps, the sweets and the booze’. Susie Helme’s main character meanwhile deals with the prosaic aftermath of her ex’s death as she sorts out his possessions in Hard Surfaces.
As winter closes in, many of our writers are thinking about the natural world. A C Clarke remembers the ‘playlist of forgotten tunes’, like ‘the sudden trill of a bird’ of the first lockdown in Listening to the Sound of Silence. Kate Noakes remembers the frogs of the Oare marshes this summer in Kent Marsh Frogs, while Mandy Haggith learns to love being in one place from the life teeming in her pond in Lockdown. Linda Hibbin meanwhile welcomes our new rodent overlords in The Reality Check.
Moving on from the minutiae of lockdown, Joanne Walton Taverner takes the long view of the 2020s in The Howling Twenties. And Rajes Bala gives the last word to the coronavirus itself in My Name is Covid.
We hope you enjoy all these fantastic pieces as much as we have enjoyed choosing them.
Bounds Green Book Writers 