If press reports are right then tonight Boris Johnson will announce to the nation that the Covid-19 slogan ‘Stay at home. Save lives” will change to “Stay alert, control the virus and save lives.” As an English teacher…

There is a baby sparrow our garden fence. It has been there for more than an hour and I keep going to check on it. It inches a few steps one way and then back and it is alternately cheeping and twisting its head to look up into the sky.

The Great Fire of London burned for 4 days from Sunday 2nd of September 1666 until Thursday 6th by which point the medieval city had been destroyed though its embers still smouldered. Rain on Sunday 9th finally extinguished the last of the fires and traumatised Londoners were able to assess the damage.

Gordon lives two doors away from us. He turned eighty a fortnight ago and one of his retirement pastimes is wood-turning. Periodically, he brings us scraps of wood from his workshop to use as kindling for our wood-burner. One of these kindling bags contained the two halves of this beautiful sycamore bowl.

As the Durham Commission on Creativity and Education — https://www.dur.ac.uk/creativitycommission/ — makes clear, ‘teaching for creativity’ is, and should be, a vital part of what we do in the classroom.

Lara Maiklem (Bloomsbury, 2019)

I read this memoir-history during the hot May of lockdown but it occurs to me that Mudlarking would be a lovely companion for the long, cold evenings of November or February when reading in front of the fire is infinitely preferable to actually sloshing around in the freezing mud of the Thames. 

Maggie O’Farrell (Tinder Press, 2020)

I bought Hamnet having looked at a weather forecast that showed large raindrops for each day of the forthcoming week, and double raindrops on several days. I needed a really fine novel to carry me through the impending sogginess.