- ASIN: B08TCJM5CP
- Language: English
- Print length: 162 pages
- Genre: Memoirs
The BookViral Review:
Full of irony and with a wry, sometimes depreciating flavour, ‘Cauliflowers through the cat flap and other tales from a solitary lockdown’ is a transparent and honest fly on the wall biographical account of one woman’s lockdown experience. Not just any woman. A woman who is indeed, as her friends tell her, ‘excellent at putting words together.’
Though a thoroughly entertaining read, it’s a bit like being found with your nose in your favourite aunt’s diary -some parts feel decidedly voyeuristic- even as you snort out loud in mirth!
With a unique delivery in which she builds fellow feeling and reduces her readers to chortles of a politically incorrect nature in equal measure, Cassandra Campbell-Kemp‘s get-on-with-it attitude in the face of adversity is truly inspiring; as is her ability to laugh at her own choices, actions and motivations.
Practical considerations -some a little over the top, such as the ‘spare room larder’, or the ‘portable loo and accompanying tent for solitary trips out’- are interspersed with vulnerable and tender moments which represent the serious business of actually surviving the pandemic as a person of low mobility with excessive pain, begging us all to self-reflect on whether we were (or still are!) truly there for our fellow man.
Despite being a book of personal experience, Campbell-Kemp’s wonderfully delightful metaphoric imagery stops the reader in their tracks to ingest great gulps of ‘country-flavoured air’ and watch clouds ‘scuttling across the fields’ as if out on their own illegal lock-down jaunt, creating pauses of joy and still amongst the frantic business of doing nothing.
Full of amusing mental meanderings, ‘Cauliflowers through the cat-flap and other tales of a solitary lockdown’ will bring your own memories and experiences of the pandemic flooding back as a shared but separate experience. It is highly recommended!
