With a world-leading vaccination program, people here in the UK can almost taste life after lockdown, but the pandemic is still far from over. I am as yet unable to schedule a book launch, or an album launch but am working to make sure those nights are as good as possible.
As well as tutoring regularly – guiding two pupils to exams – I have been writing a lot, including some professional copywriting. There are now two Amazon reviews of my book, and my strategy for getting reviews in newspapers and magazines should pay off later this year.
Wider World
With vaccines being rolled out all over the world, there is much cause for optimism. This illness that has killed over two-and-a-half million people worldwide has created another challenge for those of us lucky enough to survive – to not die inside.
For me, being better off than I was a year ago, through sheer luck, it is difficult not to have some form of survivor’s guilt. Some days ‘Fitter Happier’ by Radiohead captures my mood:
This month, two of the biggest moments of my creative life happened within a few days of each other. On February 6th, I held a Zoom concert to showcase my Chinese-language song-writing. Also, my first book was released.
Output
‘The Naked Wedding’, my first short story collection, is now available as an e-book and in print. I have started soliciting reviews but have heard nothing back yet. Reviews are a hard sell; they take a lot of time and tend to pay zilch. I still hope and expect that some will have materialised by the end of the year.
Also, this month I held a Zoom concert that was a risky mixing of professional life and personal passion project.
Hopefully, this will inspire new Chinese songs, an artform on which I have been quite unproductive recently. The English songs however seem to keep flowing out. This was an attempt at a romantic salsa song written for Valentine’s weekend.
Activities
The Mandarin Club continues to thrive. As well as the Zoom concert, this month there were two literary events with well-known Chinese authors, and the February edition of the China Book Club was ‘Factory Girls’ by Leslie Chang. In March it will be the post-reform & opening masterpiece ‘Life’ by Lu Yao.
Another regular Zoom event I host is the Castle Music Group, a music, poetry and comedy group open to everyone. The March events will be on the afternoon of the 14th and the evenings of the 20th and 31st. This helps to fuel my weekly recordings of miscellaneous covers.
As relieving as it is to be rid of President Trump, the honeymoon is already over with Biden. In late February he launched military air strikes in Syria, continuing a decades-long trend of American military intervention in the region.
Trump’s obnoxiousness was often a distraction from the genuine intractability of the problems facing the world. Here in the UK, there is genuine optimism that life will return to something resembling pre-coronavirus normalcy by the end of 2021. Still, the social and economic fallout has yet to be understood.
With the Conservative Party, whose disastrous governance has led the UK to a world-leading death toll and the worst recession in three centuries, leading in the polls, I am reminded of this poem by Erich Fried.
My first book, a short story collection titled ‘The Naked Wedding’ has been published. It is available on both Amazon and Google Books.
This short story collection revolves around Shenzhen, one of the most exciting cities in China, and therefore the world. Having grown from a cluster of villages to a metropolis of over 12 million people in four decades, Shenzhen encapsulates the nation’s economic miracle, and its associated growing pains.
From a tale narrated by an anthropomorphised iPhone reincarnated from a Foxconn worker to one that takes in a broken engagement and the possibility of female infanticide, “The Naked Wedding: And Other Tales from the Overnight City” has a bit of everything. From China’s impoverished side, where factory workers are driven to take their own lives, to its prosperous side, where people have gone from the barnyard to the boardroom so fast they have neglected to shed the manners along the way”.
The UK is now back under the strictest level of lockdown for the foreseeable future. Everyone is having a tough time mentally and emotionally, but I have been lucky enough to see business grow and to be able to keep pursuing passion projects.
Output
In January I wrote two new English songs. As is often the case, I was so eager to get them recorded, there are flaws. ‘Someone Somewhere’ – which is a hybrid of ‘Someone’ by Dennis O’Driscoll, ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell, and ‘The Bad Touch’ by The Bloodhound Gang – should have been in a lower key
This song, ‘Voice of a Generation’ – which started out as a comedy song but ended up just as a list of things that happened – should really end with the line: “And now I have a PhD and work in a coffee shop”.
Another project, which took almost a month to practice and is still far from perfect, brings together two things that were long-term companions before bawdy ballads were a twinkle in my eye: East Asia and the classical guitar:
Most exciting, personally, is on February 6th I will perform a set of self-penned Chinese songs. It will hopefully provide inspiration for more songs yet to be written.
For reasons beyond the obvious, the world is going bad and things are set to get much worse. Covid deaths passed 100,000 here in the UK. The economic impact of lockdown is yet to be fully understood. The trauma of the past ten months will last years if not decades.
But it is not all gloom.
Joe Biden had already signed forty-two executive orders by January 28th. These include cancelling the permit for the Keystone XL pipeline; the phasing out of private prisons; and elevating climate change to the status of a national security threat.
It reminds me of this poem by Sheenagh Pugh:
‘Sometimes’
Sometimes things don’t go, after all,
from bad to worse. Some years, muscadel
faces down frost; green thrives; the crops don’t fail,
