Will Burns

The rambling thoughts of the author as the country goes into lockdown in 2020 and his life working in his parents’ village pub stops. The author considers that his life has perhaps been marked by failure, as he quickly dropped out of university, for many years was unable to become a published poet, and after so many of his contemporaries have moved away (mainly to London), he has returned to the Middle English village he was brought up in. He discusses (moans about) the ills of private property, the environmental damage to be inflicted by HS2 (the High Speed rail line passing close to the village), the inequity of the educational system etc. The book is good at reminding us of the material facts of the past and its inescapable impact upon the present.
The book is interesting as a collection of reminiscences and reflections on late twentieth and early twentieth first century English village life, and of the immediate experience of England’s initial pandemic lockdown. But the book also feels relatively unstructured, woolly, rambling.… (altro)