Hello prersent surivivors of covid and furure historians trawling the ancient net archives for tiny fragments of social and cultural life during what we with little affection and great trepidation call 2020, but which the future will centextualise in ways we probablty prefer to avoid imagining. The only insight I have to offer is that reading and reviewing books is hard. Really, really hard. I don't know why. It's just difficult. Everything feels difficult. Everything's tense and anxious, even for people like me relatively well set up to endure lockdown.

Anyway. I have read a few books, and I haven't reviewed them, hopefully I'll get back to them at some point. I picked up Spy Hook having watched the old TV adaptaion of Game, Set And Match on YouTube. Personally, I thought it was very good with excellent performances and a good script. It did make me not exactly nostalgic but wistful about the good old grimy grey drizzly days of the Cold War and the threat of nucear annihilation and the backstabbing, treachery, double dealing and sheer human waste of the espionage game. so I fished out Spy Hook because I couldn't remember how it all worked out in the subsequent trilogies.

Poor old belligerent and pig-headed Bernard Sampson ploughs on doggedly with a life wrecked by his wife's defection. Poking around in places he doesn't belong despite increasingly elaborate warnings by everyone around him leads him to a troubling conclusion and a whole heap of trouble, and then the book ends and I don't have Spy Line, and the libraries aren't taking orders yet, dammit! When will my suffering end?