Every Easter for more than a decade now (16 years?) Tim has got together with a group of friends to play computer games for the bank holiday weekend. Usually they come to our house and I either go to visit my family or I hole up in the bedroom reading books. This year we of course could not have several house guests, but they still gamed together remotely while I enjoyed the freedom to read all over the house!

I set myself the ambitious target of reading 5 books in 4 days:

Doppelgänger by Daša Drndić
Hons and Rebels by Jessica Mitford
Black Wave by Michelle Tea
The Room of Lost Things by Stella Duffy
The Reluctant Fundamentalist by Mohsin Hamid

I didn’t quite make it through them all, but the 3.5 books I did read feels like a pretty big achievement all the same. And it might have been 4.5 books if I hadn’t taken almost 6 hours out on Sunday to watch the complete box set of the BBC Pride and Prejudice from 1995, as part of a Twitter communal viewing with Helen Zaltzman, Jenny Owen Youngs and a few dozen others. But that’s at least book-related and it was a lot of fun so I have no regrets.

It was super sunny for most of the weekend, so I did also take some breaks to potter in the garden. But mostly I sat in bed with the bedroom windows wide open, a stack of books and chocolate at my side, and the radio on. So not all that different from any other Easter weekend.

I know I am super lucky to be in this position. Some of my immediate family are key workers still going out to work most days, and I worry for them. I am grateful to them and all the other essential workers enabling life to go on for the rest of us. Thank you so much.