Ctrl Alt Delete: Back to Nineteen Eighty-Four

'Nineteen Eighty-Four' by George Orwell (Penguin Modern Classic edition, 2000)

One of the few fun features of lockdown has been getting a look inside people's homes during video calls.  After a short while, it became obvious that people were curating the rooms they broadcast from.  "I'm a family man!" cried the wall of kids photos and crayon drawings.  "I've got incredible taste!" boasted a minimalist display of just one, large, abstract artwork.  "I'm an intellectual!" crowed bookcases of leather-bound classics.  The only problem is that bookshelves cannot be trusted.  As many well publicised surveys have proven over the past decade, not only are shelves littered with unread volumes, but people happily lie about reading some of the world's most prestigious works.  George Orwell's infamous novel 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' is often listed among them - ironic for a book themed around truth.

Sex, Guys and Audiotape

'Diary of a Drag Queen' by Crystal Rasmussen (Ebury Press, 2019)

Picture the scene.  It's a beautiful sunny day in spring 2020.  Outside, the birds are singing a delicate morning chorus while the flourishing plant life sways and nods languidly in the gentle breeze.  Inside, a nearly-but-not-quite middle-aged woman sits quietly, embroidering a picture of a cute puppy dog using the softest of threads.  It's a complex pattern requiring infinite patience.  All is relaxed and calm and excessively gentile.  So, what do you suppose the embroiderer might be listening to?  Surely nothing so filthy, fun and raucous as 'Diary of a Drag Queen' by Crystal Rasmussen!

Sleep Walking

'Walking Away' by Simon Armitage (Faber & Faber, 2015)

Being stuck inside, I thought that the logical thing to do was read something that took me to the great outdoors.  So I picked up 'Walking Away' by Simon Armitage, hiker, Yorkshireman and Poet Laureate.

'Walking Away' is the follow up to 'Walking Home', the story of Armitage's 2010 hike along the Pennine Way as an itinerant poet, performing recitals for bed, board and whatever audiences were willing to donate.  In late summer 2013, he repeated the exercise along the northern section of the South West Coast Path, starting at Butlins in Minehead and aiming for the Scilly Isles off the toe tip of Cornwall.  Along the way, he suffers the extremes of British weather, traverses tourist hotspots and rural idylls, and rhymes for his supper every step of the way.