I had a clever and sublimely courteous surgeon, who made the neatest job possible of removing parts of my pancreas, small bowel and stomach, but this is major surgery and my recovery was very slow. In October 2019 I went into Addenbrooke’s Hospital in Cambridge for the fearsome ‘Whipple’ operation for pancreatic cancer. My own lockdown reading has been sustained, but it has been a peculiar kind of catching up, because of what happened to me last autumn. But more often we’re taken along roads we’ve never travelled, and this is what, in our recent incarceration, we have come to appreciate more than ever. These glimpses of a singular personal truth are one of a hundred consolations which fiction offers and the image in this mirror, the one that both is and is not us, can be so thrilling that it makes us stop and wonder.

In this always surprising place, we may sometimes recognise our own suffering or our own joy and murmur to ourselves, ‘yes, that’s just how it is’. Our bodies may be locked in under the same dreary roof but our thoughts are flying free in a new continent. What matters is that we’re somewhere else.

We arrive in seconds at our destination.ĭoes it matter if we find ourselves in the gravel sweep of a Jilly Cooper Bonking Hall or on the fog-shrouded pavements of Dickens’s London, with the loquacious Newark family of Philip Roth’s Nathan Zuckerman, beside a frozen lake in Canada with Marilynne Robinson or even down some toilet bowl or other with Irvine Welsh? But come on, we’re grown-ups, and what counts is the journey we embark upon when we open a book. It can also be irritating, disappointing, terrifying or shocking. It can teach, challenge, comfort and inspire. Some of us always knew it: reading frees the mind from its conversation with the insistent self. But the bee buzzing the loudest inside our PPE bonnets is the one telling us that writers (past and present) ought to be valued just a little bit more than they are in this country, because what are the things that are bringing us the greatest amount of comfort in these dark times? Books! Monty Don is, rightly, a national hero for suggesting we can nurture courgettes on a window sill and plant out chillipeppers under a skylight. As far as I can judge, we’ve all discovered or rediscovered a love of growing vegetables. The weary old UK is interrogating itself in a Plague Year, trying to understand what we’re learning about ourselves when kept away from so many of those we love and from the activities which give our lives meaning and solace.

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