OYSTERHOOD is reclusiveness or solitude, or an overwhelming desire to stay at home.

— @HaggardHawks

In the audience at Open Book Festival 2022! How good to be able to attend a live festival again, with all that it entails. I had quite a lot of work to get through this weekend, so could only attend a few events, but I loved it – all of it. And despite all the busyness, there was time for a fabulous dinner with lovely friends on Saturday evening (I cooked Scandinavian dishes from Andreas Viestad’s cookbook and my love served a few divine wines with them), a swim and some sunbathing, leisure reading and TV watching. All in all, a really satisfying weekend.

But no matter how intense, demanding and amazing our everydays are, somewhere in the background I cannot stop thinking about a drone video I saw on the BBC website – the cold-blooded murder of a Ukrainian civilian by Russian soldiers. The man was not armed and had his hands up in surrender when he was shot. Under other circumstances – i.e. during peace times, those times when a madman does not decide to destroy an entire nation because of some insane vision of his – with such clear evidence of what happened captured on video, the people who fired at the innocent man would be in prison, awaiting trail.

War is a crime against humanity. It is ungraspable.

Be kind. Wear a mask. Support local. Get vaccinated, please. Live.

“Physical distancing remains one of the key strategies to curb this pandemic.”

— NICD