Writing

 

I was at first rather puzzled to receive this comment about my last blog:

 I find it all very interesting. You have a very interesting life where you live. I envy you. Life there sounds very exciting. I cannot report anything so interesting to you. My intellectual life has ground to a standstill, dried up as a result of the lockdown and being unable to travel and meet freely.

I couldn't see how Jan got the idea that I lead an enviably interesting life here in Granada. Since I got back from Vietnam in the middle of February I have been living in almost total isolation. First I locked myself away writing and publishing my ebooks. The imposed lockdown came within a month, and the tentative relaxing of restrictions soon showed itself to have come too early. By then I had committed myself to a long-distance teaching assignment for the University of Birmingham. So since the middle of July, I find myself tied to my computer teaching a virtual class of postgraduate students scattered all across eastern China on Zoom. I am preparing them in academic English for a course at the University of Birmingham, which is supposed to be starting in situ this autumn. It’s a rather weird experience, if you think about it.

The course runs until 21 August. By then, my life will have been restricted largely to a virtual online reality for a full six months. As a result, I am developing an aversion to my computer and a reluctance to open it for anything that is not strictly necessary and I have a great need to take up contact with the outside world again.

So I could not imagine how anybody could see that life as interesting, and even less as exciting.

But re-reading the post, I realise how my fascination with Granada and the city’s great poet and playwright and the complex relationship between the two has been a great stimulus for me over the years. And I can see how it has been an impetus for a rich interior world which comes to manifestation in my Granada la bella website.

It has taken shape over a large number of years, some of it going back to the 1990s, soon after I got my first computer and internet connection. It was an engaging hobby.

If you want to be kept up to date with developments in my new life - though not so new, after all - as Simon the Writer, sign up for my newsletter by filling out the subscription form on my new Writer webpage

View from my high window, next to which I sit in splendid isolation, teaching my Chinese students on zoom, or writing my ebooks, or working on my Granada la bella website, or messaging my friends, or writing this blog ...