Before we begin, a passage of fiction that evokes something of how we inhabit the world. Play above for an extended reading.
The suspense, partly mitigated by Adam’s reasoning, and thinly spread across the days, then even more sparsely across the weeks, heightened our appreciation of the daily round. Mere ordinariness became a comfort. The dullest of food, a slice of toast, offered in its lingering warmth a promise of everyday life – we would come through. Cleaning up a kitchen, a task we no longer left to Adam alone, affirmed our hold on the future. Reading a newspaper over a cup of coffee was an act of defiance. There was something comic or absurd, to be sprawled in an armchair reading about the riots in nearby Brixton or Mrs Thatcher’s heroic endeavours to structure the European Single Market, then glancing up to wonder if that was a rapist and would-be murdered at the door. Naturally, the threat bound us closely, even as we believed in it less.
—Ian McEwan, Machines Like Me
How’s everyone?
I’m safe, and well, sheltering amid this ongoing pandemic in the company of W.C.—as in the Willing Companion, haha—after being separated for a year amid restrictions on travel and the suspension of longer-term visa applications.
