Seeking companionship in memories and literature

Our April garden

It is spring, and all around the blossoms have burst forth and the trees are rich in their fresh green smocks. Son Edwin planted the flowering trees a few years ago, and are a reminder of him now we are kept apart. Walking in the silent fields, the skylark sounded so close and loud, yet too high for me to see him. This beauty in isolation is a small consolation for losing contact with friends and family, with the children and grandchildren we each miss, and the lack of fellowship in our homes or pubs. Ann and I are fortunate to have each other; but many older people living alone must feel totally isolated.

Books are an invaluable companion during lockdown. For a little while, we enter a world apart, carried to a realm we can only imagine by characters drawn from the mind of the writer, yet who seem so real we feel they are neighbours or relatives we have known all their lives. We follow their lives within the pages avidly, eager to know what happens next, or if they will succeed in whatever task the author has set them, or how they will escape some impossible situation. We admire them or hate them, or fall a little in love with them, or wonder how they could be so blind and silly doing something that will clearly bring them harm, and think either "I would never fall for that," or "I wish I could meet such a person!" At the end, if it is a great book, one wishes it could go on, to see how they progress through life, and feels the sudden absence of the protagonist as a death and sadness.

My current book, The Little Paris Bookshop, is such a one. The bookshop in question is a floating barge on the Seine. The bookseller, known initially just by his surname, Perdu - a name that means 'lost' or 'wasted' - likens books to an apothecary's medicines, prescribing them to his customers according to the sickness they carry within; but for himself, he has found no such balm. Yet one book gives him solace, written some years ago by an anonymous writer about whom he has often wondered, until a chance change in circumstance leads him to travel across France to trace this mysterious writer. Each page leads the story forward, and one wonders what will happen next and eager to learn. It is simple escapism in a forest of new characters and friends.