Day 10 begins with Neil commenting that I missed an opportunity to do a Harry Potter themed post – Day 9¾, comparing Covid 19 to Voldemort. Personally I found Voldemort much scarier than a global pandemic. JK Rowling should be pleased. I dodge a bullet here – Neil is the satirist in our family – I can write but I’m not that clever.
He made me think about how important books are when getting outdoors is limited. We’re in the unfortunate position of our books being 300km away – we stored them at our holiday home whilst we are in a small apartment. We’re in the fortunate position of having a Kindle each and access to the online store where we can buy e-books. Twenty four hours before lockdown this wasn’t a guarantee – we had no home internet and faced rationing our phone internet to ensure we had enough to last the month. Another bullet dodged.
The books we have here are my cook books. I like cooking because I like eating so there was little chance they would not be part of our apartment life, especially after missing them for five months whilst we were overseas. Although there’s always the internet for that too and I can lose myself for hours down rabbit holes of recipes and cookery articles. So much food, so little time.
I love the convenience of an e-reader, especially when travelling or living in a small place. When we first came to New Zealand we soon read the books we carried with us but they were (and still are) expensive to buy here and our limited finances meant it was a challenge to find sufficient reading material. How we would have loved an e-reader then! But I could never give up my physical books. My copy of Little Women is from 1908 and belonged to a distant Aunt before it became Mum’s, then mine, and I have some that were her school prizes. They are a challenge to read, the print tiny and the pages yellowed, but I can’t discard them, as I can’t my collection of Enid Blyton, spines cracked and held together with tape. They might look like a pile of rubbish but they’re my precious. (I know, wrong literature reference – told you satire wasn’t my forte.)
Tracy Annenberg 