The world is burning and humanity repeatedly learns bugger all from the lessons of history, so I figure what we really need right now is another sarcastic blog post.
As the UK eases its lockdown measures for no scientific reason*, there is surely no better time to reflect on how readers have spent their isolation.
A few days ago, I polled the cyberweb and literally thousands of people didn’t respond. So, before I share with you my fascinating findings, allow me to seduce you with my own thrilling reading habits during this period of prolonged uncertainty.
It started off - as all ambitions do - loftily. I seized the opportunity to finally get round to all those books I’d been meaning to digest over the years and, in the first two weeks, I read A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking, and even understood some of it, before going on to polish off a couple of novels people had loaned me and had long felt guilty about not starting. So far so good. Onwards. I read a couple of books I hoped might be useful for my own research. Brilliant. I had entered a new dawn of literary consumption. I began A Tale of Two Cities. Again, it had been on my shelf for years and I love Great Expectations. What could go wrong with this beloved classic?
I was about halfway through this widely-renowned epic when I realised I’d overreached myself. The fine but overwritten prose turned to soup in my eyeballs as one set of characters after another exited stage left. I began to look forward to reading something else and caught myself peeking ahead to determine chapter length. Something was wrong. Reading had become a chore.
I had reached peak isolation saturation syndrome, or - as I like to call it for short - PISS. Lockdown had fatigued me. Quarantine had made me its bitch.
I put down Dickens and picked up Terry Pratchett.
This was a time for light relief, an antivenom to the planet’s relentless chaos and poison. I had never read a book by Pratchett before, and assumed I’d find the exercise amusing but, ultimately, toothless. I plucked his first Discworld book off the shelf and burned through it on the balcony in more or less the amount of time it takes a middle-aged man with two children and remote work commitments to read two hundred and eighty seven pages of Times Roman, twelve-point print. That is, about two, maybe three, days.
I am now on his twelfth book.
That’s where my mind’s at, lords and ladies, but I’m far from ashamed about it. His stories may not be serious literature in the highbrow, snobbish sense, but he wrote wonderfully and, even if the first two books are a bit meh in retrospect, each successive entry in the series is better than the one before and almost every line is hilarious. For those who aren't interested in science fantasy, rest assured the satire is very planet earth and, right now, I need a Granny Weatherwax or Rincewind to explain to me the utter illogic of our times. Reality got too real. Yes, Pratchett may be the literary equivalent of watching the snooker, but I bloody love me some snooker.
Anyway, I was interested in other people’s reading habits and reached out to the wider writing community on Twitter. I began by asking, simply, whether people had been reading more or less than usual during the lockdown.
The results were as follows:
Of course, a real statistician would have included a third ‘Or about the same’ option, but it seems people were using their lockdown time to read a little more, though not significantly. Contrast this with my next question, whether writers were writing more, and the results appear a little more pronounced, since writers, apparently, will write whatever the backdrop and an enforced lockdown made little difference in that regard.
It was at this point that I realised the pointlessness of my research, since my small samples of writers couldn’t possibly provide me with their job situation, childcare responsibilities or state of mental exhaustion, Twitter polls being, by nature, anonymous (plus: the second poll, inexplicably, failed to even add up to 100%). The results did not account for furloughing, key worker commitments or a host of other lifestyle variables.
It was at this point that I put out my ‘control’ poll.
As you can see, Kevin Bacon was by far the best Kevin. Costner came from behind to bag joint second place. Kevin Hart can take solace from the fact that, had Spacey been included, he most definitely would not have been bringing up the rear. The real loser here, to be honest, is the kid from Home Alone, who was the clear leader in the poll’s early hours.
More significantly, this was by far the most popular poll, despite the absence of writing community hashtags, proving, once and for all, that people really have had enough of experts.
To be honest, I’m not sure what we’ve all learnt from this.
How very human.
*I’ve redacted a sweary and spurious rant from this section, you’ll be disappointed to learn, because freedom of speech is a paper-thin veil and men with masks will bludgeon me in my bed, employing suitable social distancing measures, if I’m on record as calling Boris Johnson a colossal, Terrier-haired shitgibbon
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