Wishing you all a twist of chaos for 2022!

New year 2022! Everyone’s feeling it… A fresh start. A time to move forward – hugs still hampered, kisses only for knuckleheads in knickerbockers, while coughing is still definitely de rigueur, but then seriously, it always was a no-no.

My To-Do list is the same as last year’s – finish my African memoir – The Lion behind the Anthill.  I so enjoyed the writing journey that I dilly-dallied on the way, plunging into innumerable rabbit holes while wrestling to fathom the naïve and clumsy younger me. I also needed to revisit the way it was then – before big tech put us constantly in touch all the time – back when headlines were just that – a teaser for the news article – rather than the whole story in a word grab.  

My African memoir is an entirely different book when compared to The Hong Kong Letters, because it is written AM - After Marriage. I marvel at how carelessly both Mike and I threw away our autonomous freedoms to become a harnessed team. Yet talking to Mike about the extraordinary adventures we had, has been a highlight of 2021 and would never have happened had I not embarked on the manuscript… or got married in the first place.

Mike and I a few days before we got married practising being in harness. Barnstaple, Devon June 1972

I’m still having a lot of fun with The Hong Kong Letters. I had a lovely email mid-year from Russell, a Hong Kong reader, who sent me a picture of the bookshop in Sheung Wan, a district on HK island, where he’d found my book: “… two tiny rooms overflowing with books in shelves, on the floor, on chairs and in boxes.”

I looked and thought, ‘How on earth would anyone find anything in such chaos?! How random that The Hong Kong Letters landed on the top of the pile!’

And then I thought, we need more chaos. We’re channelled by the web that suggests books by an author, or in a genre, we have read before. It seems cute and caring to help us save time making choices. Yet, is it? I think back to literary discoveries at book sales or, as a backpacker, ferreting around hostel bookshelves for anything in English. Most searches left me feeling Germans were the largest cohort of reader-backpackers.  Now of course, I take my kindle. How convenient. It is, but oh, how tame, a little less of an adventure, not forced to read anything oddball... or consider learning German!

In 1973, Mike and I lived in Egypt. Newspapers were censored, as was our mail, and we quickly ran out of anything to read. We lived in a Mess with pilots and engineers, and exchanged what we had. So it was that I, a little priggish, discovered Playboy Magazine actually had good articles! Don’t ask me how the pilots got those well-thumbed editions through Customs, when my Penguin modern Russian classics were confiscated.

Thinking back on 2021, the lockdowns, restrictions and controls, pushed me out into the chaos of alternative news channels, threw my assumed allegiances into turmoil and forced me to devise my own fact-checking for fake news. Invigorating and surprisingly scary, I settled into a newfound emancipation, which is one of many positive aspects of the past year.

I wish you all a healthy, calm and peaceful New Year – with just a twist of comfortable chaos.