The answer to Wordle earlier this week was 'gecko' - a small hardy lizard for which I have a particular fondness. They flickered across my childhood walls and occasionally dropped from the rafters onto an unsuspecting head or lap. I got the word quickly, which is always partly due to luck, but cheered me up because it seemed to prove I was finally shaking off the COVID caught while visiting our family in South Africa. 

We weren’t surprised when we tested positive: we’d been travelling for the first time since it all began and we did more socialising in Johannesburg in 3 weeks than we’d done in the previous 2 years. Still, we’d had the vaccines and boosters and although the first few days brought all the expected symptoms - hacking cough, brain-fog, pain, fatigue, plus a few more – I wasn't expecting what happened on day 8, when I suddenly found myself barely able to move or talk. Be warned, friends, this thing can turn extremely nasty.

So, while the vote was being counted in Northern Ireland, I was being cared for in A+E. My youngest child was standing for election, and it seemed a terrible dereliction of  maternal duty to abandon my watch, but then it occurred to me that if I actually died, it might cast even more of a blight on proceedings. Anyway, she got in and I got out, and here I am again, a tad more battered but extremely proud that my little daughter (in reality 34 years old, inches taller than her mother and expecting her second child any minute) has been elected a Member of the Legislative Assembly for the cross-community Alliance Party. 

Alliance, and I quote, ‘was founded in 1970 with the objective of healing the bitter divisions in our community. We believe in a shared society, free from intimidation, discrimination and fear, where everyone is safe, can play their part and is treated fairly and with respect.’ Well, for my money, you can’t say fairer than that. I came here myself for the first time in 1970, a period vividly recalled for me by Louise Kennedy’s new novel, Trespasses. I was so painfully reminded of those days – the fear, the bigotry, the violence, and the shocking attitudes to women – that I wasn’t sure I could go on. But once you start reading Kennedy, you can never stop; she breaks your heart but she gives you hope, and I think she is extraordinary.  And 50 years on, we have proof that even in the most bitterly divided of societies, a few good people banding together can eventually bring about change. Alliance is also a party notable for being both led by a woman and represented by an unusual number of brave, principled, and inspiring women. My daughter is in excellent company.

Enough of that. This blog is supposed to be about books, and I’ve been trying to think of a memorable novel about a woman in politics – there are any number about men - but Curtis Sittenfeld’s American Wife apart, I’ve drawn a blank. Suggestions, as always, will be welcome. My holiday reading was mainly escapist. A Discovery of Witches (witches, vampires and demons living undercover in Oxford - and where better?) was fun at first but 600+ pages of delayed gratification, in every sense, was far too much. The Word is Murder came next, the first in Anthony Horowitz’s Hawthorne-Horowitz series. I'd already enjoyed A Line to Kill, where the action takes place at a literary festival in Alderney (and what writer hasn’t been moved from time to time by literary festivals to thoughts of murder?) and now I'm looking forward to The Sentence is Death. Horowitz sets out to entertain you, and he does it with consummate ease. I also read the third of Amor Towles’ novels, The Lincoln Highway. His second, A Gentleman in Moscow, is still my most enjoyable book of the year; Rules of Civility, his first, was also highly readable, if not in the same class. And perhaps it was partly due to COVID but for me The Lincoln Highway, despite some memorable characters, was in the end too sprawling and unfocused. A pity. 

As so often happens, my back-up book proved best of all. In the Skin of a Lion by Michael Ondaatje, was hardly escapist, but such a moving, lyrical account of the strange lives and loves of the immigrants, workers and dreamers who were building Toronto in the 1920s, that I couldn’t put it down.

Like so many others, my own family have travelled far from their beginnings. I sometimes think we'd all have been better off if humans had just stayed home and quietly tended whatever corner of the planet they'd been born in, but it's a bit late for that now. All we can really do is remind ourselves that although we are threatened by so much - not least, the older, power-hungry men and women who continue to send the terrified young to fight their battles for them - there is always hope. And cling on for dear life when the walls start closing in. A bit like geckos.