Books in May
Here we are at the end of May - numbers are down here in Quebec, and the curfew is finally lifted! But I still had a lot of time to read:
Professor Hilary Tamar, Don of Oxford specializing in the history of law, is friendly with the young barristers at 62 New Square, Lincoln’s Inn: flighty Julia, mellifluous Selina, angelic Ragwort, sardonic Cantrip (he in possession of the unfortunate degree from, sadly, Cambridge) and slightly older Timothy Shepherd. When Julia finds herself in a spot while in Venice - the “spot” being a suspicion that she is a murderer - her stalwart companions leap to her defence - well, as long as the leap isn’t too far past a local pub or three - and Hilary is there to both guide them and capture the events for posterity…. I ran across the four novels in this series back in the mid-1990s (although they were published in the 1980s), but had not re-read any of them for a long, long time. The writing style takes a little getting used to - it’s a very English upper-class style, wherein the characters are constantly pointing out each other’s faults while apparently heaping effusive amounts of praise on each other - but once one makes the effort, it’s utterly hilarious. (An example, early on; Hilary writes: “On my first day in London, I made an early start. Reaching the Public Record Office not much after ten, I soon secured the papers needed for my research and settled in my place. I became, as is the way of the scholar, so deeply absorbed as to lose all consciousness of my surroundings or of the passage of time. When at last I came to myself, it was almost eleven and I was quite exhausted….”). Often compared to the Rumpole of the Bailey series, this set is updated to the more-or-less modern world of the 1980s, with mentions of fluid sexuality abounding, and the results are quite delicious. Ms. Caudwell died of cancer in 2000; otherwise, one could envisage this series continuing on into the present day with no loss of enjoyment; I’m looking forward to re-reading Book Two already! Recommended.
All of the members of 62 New Square are representing individuals of one family with respect to changing the family’s trust arrangement, this needing to be done to avoid paying some 3 million pounds in taxes on a 5 million pound estate upon the death of the matriarch. But all the parties must agree, and young Deirdre, just turned 18, decides she wants more money than the agreement allowed; shortly after the family agrees to her request, she accidentally falls to her death. If further deaths are to be prevented, Professor Hilary Tamar must leap ahead of a possible killer’s mind…. This is the second of four novels featuring the amateur sleuth Hilary Tamar, written mostly in the 1980s (the final book was published in 2000) and reissued some 10 years later, when I discovered them. One delightful aspect of the series is that we never know if Hilary is a man or a woman, which leads to an awareness of how little that matters. Primarily, though, these books are very funny, definitely in the comedy of manners tradition, with 1980s-specific musings on sex, sexuality and conventional wisdom thrown in. Recommended, but read the first novel (“Thus Was Adonis Murdered”) first in order to get the most out of this second one!
The third Hilary Tamar novel finds barrister Michael Cantrip requested to assist in a tax law case on the Channel Islands, despite the fact that he has no tax law experience to mention; but a short, all-expense-paid holiday suits him just fine. Once there, however, he learns that one person formerly attached to the particular case had died by accident some six months earlier, and when a second person dies under peculiar circumstances, he’s not quite sure how to proceed. Having been able to apprise his fellow barristers at 62 New Square and, of course, Professor Hilary Tamar of Oxford, by sending copious telexes about the strange events, it is only a matter of time before Hilary starts investigating, hopeful of solving the case before another member of the legal team dies…. I am really pleased to be able to re-read these hilarious novels, three written in the 1980s and the final one in 2000, the year of the author’s untimely death from cancer; they can easily be read as an update of John Mortimer (for the legal aspect) or even Wodehouse (for the comedy of manners), although they are set in a time now some 40 years ago. Perhaps one can read each novel separately, but I think reading them in order would give the reader more pleasure overall; recommended!
The final novel in the Hilary Tamar series takes place, once again, largely through letters - in this case, to Julia from her aunt Regina, who is living in a small village in Sussex. It seems that Regina and two of her friends have done very well financially by heeding tips to invest in specific companies at specific times; they are extremely pleased with their returns, and quickly spend the extra money on luxuries they can’t resist. Until, of course, they learn of a little thing called the capital gains tax. Could Julia, perhaps, help them handle this financial crisis? In the meantime, a relative newcomer to their village has had the effect of turning everything upside-down socially, and perhaps that newcomer’s death wasn’t quite as natural as it seemed…. I will miss the voices in these novels, particularly that of our narrator, Professor Hilary Tamar, who is mysterious about personal matters but quite eager to share opinions about the personal lives of others. Our intrepid barristers seem to dive headlong from one crisis to another, ranging from renovation work in their Chambers that seems never to be finished to dashing as speedily as London traffic on a Friday afternoon will allow them in order to prevent, well, something bad from happening in Parsons Haver. Again, reading all four books in order is the best way to approach these tales, although reading any one of them should provide the reader with a goodly number of laughs; recommended!
When Susan Arkshaw turns 18, she leaves her mother in their country farmhouse to travel to London, intent on discovering the identity of her father before she starts her art course in college. She first visits the one person whose full name she knows (because he always sent Christmas cards), but before she can ask him anything, he is, well, discorporated and she is forced to flee with the person responsible: Merlin, an impossibly handsome left-handed bookseller, whose work involves protecting England from the more unsavory aspects of the Otherworld. Together with Merlin’s right-handed sister Vivien, Susan embarks on an extraordinary journey to find her father, who may or may not be mythical - or alive…. I’ve heard of Garth Nix, possibly read some short stories, but no novels until now; I may need to rectify that omission soon, on the basis of this YA novel. The fantasy elements are distinctly British, with elements from Celtic and Norse and more generic Pagan mythology, but Mr. Nix is able to blend these disparate stories into a seamless whole. Which is to say, I completely believed his “hidden world” and its interactions with the “real” world of (a somewhat different) 1983 London and more generally England. I gather that this is a stand-alone, but I’d love to read of the further adventures of Susan, Merlin and Vivien as they continue to interact with the fantastical realms just underneath our normal one; recommended!
I continue on my kick of reading short-story anthologies featuring historical detective fiction, most recently with “The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits,” edited by Mike Ashley, which covers the history of the Roman Empire from Octavian to the so-called Dark Ages. Most of the 20 stories here are original to this 2003 anthology, aside from one from 1952, another from 1966 and a third, anonymous tale that might have been published as early as the 1860s. As ever, readers will differ on their favourites, but here are mine: “A Gladiator Dies Only Once,” by Steven Saylor, featuring Gordianus the Finder; the 1952 tale “De Crimine,” by Miriam Allen deFord, in which Cicero saves the day; a John Maddox Ford entry in his SPQR series, “The Will”; Michael Kurland’s “Great Caesar’s Ghost,” in which Orator Quintilian solves Vespasian’s ghost problem; the anonymous tale from, possibly, the 1860s, “The Missing Centurion”; the long-titled “Some Unpublished Correspondence of the Younger Pliny,” by Darrell Schweitzer, an epistolary story concerning early Christians and a conman; “The Lost Eagle,” by Peter Tremayne, featuring Sister Fidelma, who is asked to find the lost Eagle of the Ninth; and my favourite overall, Marilyn Todd’s “Honey Moon,” wherein wine seller Claudia exacts appropriate revenge. Mike Ashley’s introductions to each story are entertaining and useful, providing information about the authors and the time period in which they have set their story, and while the above are my personal favourites, there really isn’t a bad story in the batch; recommended!
“The Mammoth Book…” series is a well-curated set of themed anthologies, sometimes comprising mostly new stories and sometimes with more reprints than originals; the current volume, “The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits, Volume 2,” contains 22 stories set from Roman times to roughly the mid-1600s, most original to this volume. As with any such anthology, each reader will have his/her favourites: mine include Steven Saylor’s “Poppy and the Poisoned Cake,” the only reprint here; “The Last Legion,” by Richard Butler, depicting murder within the precincts of the last Roman legion, about to leave Britain; a new entry in Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma series, in which she investigates the death of a scholar/monk; Susan Gregory’s “The Death Toll,” about a dispute along the Welsh Marches as to who is empowered to collect tolls from a nearby ford, a dispute leading to death; “The Amorous Armourer,” by Michael Jecks, featuring Keeper of the King’s Peace Sir Baldwin, who must determine whether the new, foppish Coroner is guilty of murder; Mat Coward’s “And What Can They Sow, or What Reasons Give?”, set during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and my favourite in the whole book; “House of the Moon,” by Claire Griffen, set first in Venice and then in Istanbul in 1503, and featuring a Borgia spy; and Paul Finch’s novella, “Flibbertigibbet,” which has a serial killer stalking the Southwark Stews in 1581 during the reign of Elizabeth I (squeamish readers should be warned that explicit violence and Elizabethan methods of torture are described in detail here). Once again, Mr. Ashley provides lively and interesting introductions to each story, and all of them are well-told and well worth the reading for anyone interested in historical mystery fiction; recommended!
Detective Superintendent Alan Banks and his team, Detective Inspector Annie Cabbott and Detective Constable Gerry Masterson, are investigating the rather brutal deaths of a crooked property developer and his assistant when they come across a cache of videos depicting various sexual shenanigans at parties the developer held. When it turns out that one of those videos depicts the rape of a young woman, Annie and Gerry are quick on the trail to find the perpetrator. In the meantime, Zelda, the much younger lover of Annie’s father Ray, is on a quest of her own: to find, and punish, the people who permitted her abduction from a Moldavan orphanage and her subsequent sexual slavery, and she doesn’t mean to let her tormentors go…. “Not Dark Yet” is the 27th in the long-running series about Superintendent Banks, and as usual, I devoured it in a day or two. There’s a lot of police procedural here, a great deal of dialogue between various characters, but also a lot of descriptions of beautiful vistas, both in Yorkshire and various parts of Europe. And, of course, Alan’s eclectic taste in music throughout. I always enjoy these novels, but I would recommend the new reader start with the first in the series (“Gallows View”) and carry on from there, as the relationships between the main characters are complex and nuanced; that said, recommended!
Claudia Seferius, wife of a wealthy wine seller, has a gambling problem, and as a consequence owes a lot of money to a rather shady money-lender. To pay off her debts, she takes on a discreet clientele: wealthy and upper-class Roman men whose sexual proclivities tend toward bondage, dominance and the like. But somebody apparently knows who her clients are, because they keep turning up dead, with their eyes gouged out. Patrician Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, noble but relatively poor, is trying his hand as a detective, and he is determined to discover what Claudia knows, and how, before any more people have to die…. I quite liked a handful of short stories about Claudia that I’ve read over the years, so finally decided to give this series a try, but unfortunately I was not impressed. For starters, Claudia is an odious person, as is pretty much everybody in the book; I don’t insist on *liking* characters in books that I read, but I need to at least not hate every single one of them! The story is mostly told from Claudia’s point of view and perhaps in the early 1990s, when this was first published, the idea of writing a historical novel using modern vernacular (in this case, the cockney version of Latin - in translation of course) was very novel and new, but some 30 years later it’s fairly normal and feels a bit grating here. I think perhaps I can only stomach this character in short-story bursts, rather than at full length; definitely not for me.
If you grew up in the US in the 1970s, you may remember Ronald Reagan’s first run for the presidency in 1976, during which he frequently referred to a “welfare queen” living in Chicago, who gamed the system such that she had numerous houses, cars, fur coats, etc., etc., all the proceeds of fraud on the federal welfare system. Well, “The Queen” is that woman’s story - going by the name Linda Taylor, she actually had some 10 or 12 aliases, not to mention numerous birth dates, parents, children, husbands, living situations and races. In reality, she was born in 1926 in the US South, the product of a white woman and black man (whose sexual union was literally illegal at the time). Because of her mixed race, her family largely rejected her, and she grew up all over the southern part of the country, with various family and non-family members and very little (if any) education. Her life of crime began long before the 1970s, when she was identified and prosecuted as a welfare cheat, charges that eventually led to her incarceration for a little over two years; but she may also have been a kidnapper, a bigamist, an “ordinary” thief (of other peoples’ property) and, not least, a murderer. Journalist Josh Levin has waded through thousands of documents, all meticulously laid out in the notes and bibliography sections of this book - indeed, in my Kindle edition I discovered that I still had some 20% of the book left to read when the story was done, that last 20% of the volume being devoted to sources and thank-yous. A really fascinating tale, rather heartbreaking when you think about this woman’s life, utterly impoverished in terms of human contact, love and acceptance - no wonder she felt entitled to take what she wanted, as she’d been deprived of so much. Recommended.
And onward, to Summer! Let's hope it becomes a pandemic free one!
Professor Hilary Tamar, Don of Oxford specializing in the history of law, is friendly with the young barristers at 62 New Square, Lincoln’s Inn: flighty Julia, mellifluous Selina, angelic Ragwort, sardonic Cantrip (he in possession of the unfortunate degree from, sadly, Cambridge) and slightly older Timothy Shepherd. When Julia finds herself in a spot while in Venice - the “spot” being a suspicion that she is a murderer - her stalwart companions leap to her defence - well, as long as the leap isn’t too far past a local pub or three - and Hilary is there to both guide them and capture the events for posterity…. I ran across the four novels in this series back in the mid-1990s (although they were published in the 1980s), but had not re-read any of them for a long, long time. The writing style takes a little getting used to - it’s a very English upper-class style, wherein the characters are constantly pointing out each other’s faults while apparently heaping effusive amounts of praise on each other - but once one makes the effort, it’s utterly hilarious. (An example, early on; Hilary writes: “On my first day in London, I made an early start. Reaching the Public Record Office not much after ten, I soon secured the papers needed for my research and settled in my place. I became, as is the way of the scholar, so deeply absorbed as to lose all consciousness of my surroundings or of the passage of time. When at last I came to myself, it was almost eleven and I was quite exhausted….”). Often compared to the Rumpole of the Bailey series, this set is updated to the more-or-less modern world of the 1980s, with mentions of fluid sexuality abounding, and the results are quite delicious. Ms. Caudwell died of cancer in 2000; otherwise, one could envisage this series continuing on into the present day with no loss of enjoyment; I’m looking forward to re-reading Book Two already! Recommended.
All of the members of 62 New Square are representing individuals of one family with respect to changing the family’s trust arrangement, this needing to be done to avoid paying some 3 million pounds in taxes on a 5 million pound estate upon the death of the matriarch. But all the parties must agree, and young Deirdre, just turned 18, decides she wants more money than the agreement allowed; shortly after the family agrees to her request, she accidentally falls to her death. If further deaths are to be prevented, Professor Hilary Tamar must leap ahead of a possible killer’s mind…. This is the second of four novels featuring the amateur sleuth Hilary Tamar, written mostly in the 1980s (the final book was published in 2000) and reissued some 10 years later, when I discovered them. One delightful aspect of the series is that we never know if Hilary is a man or a woman, which leads to an awareness of how little that matters. Primarily, though, these books are very funny, definitely in the comedy of manners tradition, with 1980s-specific musings on sex, sexuality and conventional wisdom thrown in. Recommended, but read the first novel (“Thus Was Adonis Murdered”) first in order to get the most out of this second one!
The third Hilary Tamar novel finds barrister Michael Cantrip requested to assist in a tax law case on the Channel Islands, despite the fact that he has no tax law experience to mention; but a short, all-expense-paid holiday suits him just fine. Once there, however, he learns that one person formerly attached to the particular case had died by accident some six months earlier, and when a second person dies under peculiar circumstances, he’s not quite sure how to proceed. Having been able to apprise his fellow barristers at 62 New Square and, of course, Professor Hilary Tamar of Oxford, by sending copious telexes about the strange events, it is only a matter of time before Hilary starts investigating, hopeful of solving the case before another member of the legal team dies…. I am really pleased to be able to re-read these hilarious novels, three written in the 1980s and the final one in 2000, the year of the author’s untimely death from cancer; they can easily be read as an update of John Mortimer (for the legal aspect) or even Wodehouse (for the comedy of manners), although they are set in a time now some 40 years ago. Perhaps one can read each novel separately, but I think reading them in order would give the reader more pleasure overall; recommended!
The final novel in the Hilary Tamar series takes place, once again, largely through letters - in this case, to Julia from her aunt Regina, who is living in a small village in Sussex. It seems that Regina and two of her friends have done very well financially by heeding tips to invest in specific companies at specific times; they are extremely pleased with their returns, and quickly spend the extra money on luxuries they can’t resist. Until, of course, they learn of a little thing called the capital gains tax. Could Julia, perhaps, help them handle this financial crisis? In the meantime, a relative newcomer to their village has had the effect of turning everything upside-down socially, and perhaps that newcomer’s death wasn’t quite as natural as it seemed…. I will miss the voices in these novels, particularly that of our narrator, Professor Hilary Tamar, who is mysterious about personal matters but quite eager to share opinions about the personal lives of others. Our intrepid barristers seem to dive headlong from one crisis to another, ranging from renovation work in their Chambers that seems never to be finished to dashing as speedily as London traffic on a Friday afternoon will allow them in order to prevent, well, something bad from happening in Parsons Haver. Again, reading all four books in order is the best way to approach these tales, although reading any one of them should provide the reader with a goodly number of laughs; recommended!
When Susan Arkshaw turns 18, she leaves her mother in their country farmhouse to travel to London, intent on discovering the identity of her father before she starts her art course in college. She first visits the one person whose full name she knows (because he always sent Christmas cards), but before she can ask him anything, he is, well, discorporated and she is forced to flee with the person responsible: Merlin, an impossibly handsome left-handed bookseller, whose work involves protecting England from the more unsavory aspects of the Otherworld. Together with Merlin’s right-handed sister Vivien, Susan embarks on an extraordinary journey to find her father, who may or may not be mythical - or alive…. I’ve heard of Garth Nix, possibly read some short stories, but no novels until now; I may need to rectify that omission soon, on the basis of this YA novel. The fantasy elements are distinctly British, with elements from Celtic and Norse and more generic Pagan mythology, but Mr. Nix is able to blend these disparate stories into a seamless whole. Which is to say, I completely believed his “hidden world” and its interactions with the “real” world of (a somewhat different) 1983 London and more generally England. I gather that this is a stand-alone, but I’d love to read of the further adventures of Susan, Merlin and Vivien as they continue to interact with the fantastical realms just underneath our normal one; recommended!
I continue on my kick of reading short-story anthologies featuring historical detective fiction, most recently with “The Mammoth Book of Roman Whodunnits,” edited by Mike Ashley, which covers the history of the Roman Empire from Octavian to the so-called Dark Ages. Most of the 20 stories here are original to this 2003 anthology, aside from one from 1952, another from 1966 and a third, anonymous tale that might have been published as early as the 1860s. As ever, readers will differ on their favourites, but here are mine: “A Gladiator Dies Only Once,” by Steven Saylor, featuring Gordianus the Finder; the 1952 tale “De Crimine,” by Miriam Allen deFord, in which Cicero saves the day; a John Maddox Ford entry in his SPQR series, “The Will”; Michael Kurland’s “Great Caesar’s Ghost,” in which Orator Quintilian solves Vespasian’s ghost problem; the anonymous tale from, possibly, the 1860s, “The Missing Centurion”; the long-titled “Some Unpublished Correspondence of the Younger Pliny,” by Darrell Schweitzer, an epistolary story concerning early Christians and a conman; “The Lost Eagle,” by Peter Tremayne, featuring Sister Fidelma, who is asked to find the lost Eagle of the Ninth; and my favourite overall, Marilyn Todd’s “Honey Moon,” wherein wine seller Claudia exacts appropriate revenge. Mike Ashley’s introductions to each story are entertaining and useful, providing information about the authors and the time period in which they have set their story, and while the above are my personal favourites, there really isn’t a bad story in the batch; recommended!
“The Mammoth Book…” series is a well-curated set of themed anthologies, sometimes comprising mostly new stories and sometimes with more reprints than originals; the current volume, “The Mammoth Book of Historical Whodunnits, Volume 2,” contains 22 stories set from Roman times to roughly the mid-1600s, most original to this volume. As with any such anthology, each reader will have his/her favourites: mine include Steven Saylor’s “Poppy and the Poisoned Cake,” the only reprint here; “The Last Legion,” by Richard Butler, depicting murder within the precincts of the last Roman legion, about to leave Britain; a new entry in Peter Tremayne’s Sister Fidelma series, in which she investigates the death of a scholar/monk; Susan Gregory’s “The Death Toll,” about a dispute along the Welsh Marches as to who is empowered to collect tolls from a nearby ford, a dispute leading to death; “The Amorous Armourer,” by Michael Jecks, featuring Keeper of the King’s Peace Sir Baldwin, who must determine whether the new, foppish Coroner is guilty of murder; Mat Coward’s “And What Can They Sow, or What Reasons Give?”, set during the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 and my favourite in the whole book; “House of the Moon,” by Claire Griffen, set first in Venice and then in Istanbul in 1503, and featuring a Borgia spy; and Paul Finch’s novella, “Flibbertigibbet,” which has a serial killer stalking the Southwark Stews in 1581 during the reign of Elizabeth I (squeamish readers should be warned that explicit violence and Elizabethan methods of torture are described in detail here). Once again, Mr. Ashley provides lively and interesting introductions to each story, and all of them are well-told and well worth the reading for anyone interested in historical mystery fiction; recommended!
Detective Superintendent Alan Banks and his team, Detective Inspector Annie Cabbott and Detective Constable Gerry Masterson, are investigating the rather brutal deaths of a crooked property developer and his assistant when they come across a cache of videos depicting various sexual shenanigans at parties the developer held. When it turns out that one of those videos depicts the rape of a young woman, Annie and Gerry are quick on the trail to find the perpetrator. In the meantime, Zelda, the much younger lover of Annie’s father Ray, is on a quest of her own: to find, and punish, the people who permitted her abduction from a Moldavan orphanage and her subsequent sexual slavery, and she doesn’t mean to let her tormentors go…. “Not Dark Yet” is the 27th in the long-running series about Superintendent Banks, and as usual, I devoured it in a day or two. There’s a lot of police procedural here, a great deal of dialogue between various characters, but also a lot of descriptions of beautiful vistas, both in Yorkshire and various parts of Europe. And, of course, Alan’s eclectic taste in music throughout. I always enjoy these novels, but I would recommend the new reader start with the first in the series (“Gallows View”) and carry on from there, as the relationships between the main characters are complex and nuanced; that said, recommended!
Claudia Seferius, wife of a wealthy wine seller, has a gambling problem, and as a consequence owes a lot of money to a rather shady money-lender. To pay off her debts, she takes on a discreet clientele: wealthy and upper-class Roman men whose sexual proclivities tend toward bondage, dominance and the like. But somebody apparently knows who her clients are, because they keep turning up dead, with their eyes gouged out. Patrician Marcus Cornelius Orbilio, noble but relatively poor, is trying his hand as a detective, and he is determined to discover what Claudia knows, and how, before any more people have to die…. I quite liked a handful of short stories about Claudia that I’ve read over the years, so finally decided to give this series a try, but unfortunately I was not impressed. For starters, Claudia is an odious person, as is pretty much everybody in the book; I don’t insist on *liking* characters in books that I read, but I need to at least not hate every single one of them! The story is mostly told from Claudia’s point of view and perhaps in the early 1990s, when this was first published, the idea of writing a historical novel using modern vernacular (in this case, the cockney version of Latin - in translation of course) was very novel and new, but some 30 years later it’s fairly normal and feels a bit grating here. I think perhaps I can only stomach this character in short-story bursts, rather than at full length; definitely not for me.
If you grew up in the US in the 1970s, you may remember Ronald Reagan’s first run for the presidency in 1976, during which he frequently referred to a “welfare queen” living in Chicago, who gamed the system such that she had numerous houses, cars, fur coats, etc., etc., all the proceeds of fraud on the federal welfare system. Well, “The Queen” is that woman’s story - going by the name Linda Taylor, she actually had some 10 or 12 aliases, not to mention numerous birth dates, parents, children, husbands, living situations and races. In reality, she was born in 1926 in the US South, the product of a white woman and black man (whose sexual union was literally illegal at the time). Because of her mixed race, her family largely rejected her, and she grew up all over the southern part of the country, with various family and non-family members and very little (if any) education. Her life of crime began long before the 1970s, when she was identified and prosecuted as a welfare cheat, charges that eventually led to her incarceration for a little over two years; but she may also have been a kidnapper, a bigamist, an “ordinary” thief (of other peoples’ property) and, not least, a murderer. Journalist Josh Levin has waded through thousands of documents, all meticulously laid out in the notes and bibliography sections of this book - indeed, in my Kindle edition I discovered that I still had some 20% of the book left to read when the story was done, that last 20% of the volume being devoted to sources and thank-yous. A really fascinating tale, rather heartbreaking when you think about this woman’s life, utterly impoverished in terms of human contact, love and acceptance - no wonder she felt entitled to take what she wanted, as she’d been deprived of so much. Recommended.
And onward, to Summer! Let's hope it becomes a pandemic free one!