The UK is once again in lockdown awaiting vaccination and hoping the NHS can withstand the immense and appalling pressures that have been forced on it. In England we’re allowed one walk a day, otherwise required to stay home unless buying food, getting medicine, caring for others or going to “essential” work (the devolved governments of the other UK countries set their own rules, so I’m not too sure what they are).
There’s a real issue with mental well-being not just from health and financial worries but loneliness caused by enforced isolation.
So how’s everyone coping?
Me, I hardly dare watch, read or listen to the news.
I need to escape.
Into fictional worlds.
Can’t go to the library - closed since last March. Can’t buy a book - bookshops not essential.
So thank goodness for the internet.
Stumbled across this audiobook yesterday of Tom Sharpe’s novel, Vintage Stuff, read by Stephen Fry in 1987. The kindly uploader explains this has been unavailable for a long time, so he’s done a public service putting it on YouTube. I’m only on chapter 4 but so far it’s a marriage made in heaven , Sharpe’s peerless prose read with marvellous mellifluousness by Fry. Whether you enjoy his style or not is personal choice but Sharpe was an exceptionally skilled writer, carefully constructing each sentence with not a wasted word, alliteration and assonance being deployed with exquisite precision to enhance the comic absurdity of his ghastly characters. His writing must have been influenced by an earlier humorous writer, P.G. Woodhouse (they both went to the same appalling public school of the kind savagely satirised in this novel ), but Sharpe’s satire shows no mercy on his targets where Woodhouse is content with amiable buffoonery