Maintaining a streak

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Nope, don’t have much to say this week. Only posting to maintain my streak – every Sunday this year – and I’ll cut myself some slack for it.

My household has had both doses of COVID vaccine. We are expecting visitors within the week. This is the first time in almost ten months since we’ve had people round, and of course we don’t go out. Things will seem a little… weird, at first.

And, of course, there’s the recent surge of the “Indian” variant in the UK, which threatens to send us into a tailspin yet again, vaccinated or not. Och, there’s always more disaster if you go looking.

"You may lie awake at night listening to the disorder of your veins, you may miss your only love, you may see the world about you devastated by evil lunatics, or know your honour trampled in the sewers of baser minds. There is only one thing for it then - to learn. Learn why the world wags and what wags it. That is the only thing which the mind can never exhaust, never be tortured by, never fear or distrust, and never dream of regretting." - T H White, the author of The Sword In The Stone

Lessons from last time: take care, be aware, and don’t keep keeking at the internet to see if there’s doom in the air.

With that said, here’s this week’s links:

Yersina pestis and other plagues – an interesting post from a blog that seems abandoned now, written before our current pandemic was even a twinkle in a bat’s eye.

Bandwagon jumping with this one, sourced via a recent tweet from Terri Windling: Confronting Reality by Reading Fantasy, wherein author Lev Grossman discusses C S Lewis and the impact of Narnia on his own writing. See also my own post, Narnia Underground. There’s more than an element of J M Barrie about Narnia, too.

An archived BBC article by Mike Harding, skipping across Laurie Lee’s autobiography As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning. I originally chose this link for a different post, which I didn’t have the oomph to complete to my satisfaction, but the link is still good. The unvarnished nature of some folk singing. The blog finished in 2010, but you can still find @MikeHarding on Twitter and elsewhere.