Meg Mason’s Sorrow and Bliss is not a book that has arrived quietly. Although Mason herself says she wrote it pretty much in secret, it has been received with enthusiasm from reviewers and fellow authors to the extent that, despite a self-imposed book buying ban and a general dislike for heavier, more expensive hardbacks, I was desperate to read it.

OK here it is, here’s one of those coming-out-of-the-pandemic moments I was referring to in the previous blog.

If I were writing in the before times the blog would be chock a block with theatre trips or stand-up comedy nights.

I assume I must have snapped up Anna Wilson’s A Place For Everything on Netgalley as soon as I saw that it was a memoir about her mother’s late-diagnosis of autism but I have no memory of doing so. However, when I came across it one evening recently I was absolutely hooked within the first few lines.

We’re creeping ever closer to Christmas and, in this mess of a year, nothing is quite how is usually is.