The Aardvark Blog

March 2020:-March 2021: The year the whole world jumped the shark
1/03/2021

Yesterday I went down a wikipedia wormhole (always a possible lockdown peril ) when I read in a newspaper another use of the term 'jumped the shark'. This phrase which, as I understand it, denotes a desperate plot twist in a TV show where the writers have run out of ideas, apparently comes from an episode of Happy Days in which Fonzi visits Los Angeles and decides to water ski over a shark enclosure.

Well, readers, in the past year we have all enjoyed the exhilaration of jumping our own Covid-19 sharks, and in the process what had seemed like a bad B-movie plot has become our day-to-day reality for an incredible 12 months.

Still, whilst it is a universal experience, everybody has their own particular story. For Aardvark Books, our Covid-19 telenovela began on the 7th of March 2020 with a musical event we had planned to celebrate International Women's Day. We had arranged for an American pianist to come and play a really interesting slate of women composers, including the much under-rated Fanny Mendelssohn. When the pianist arrived to set up on the Friday afternoon I discovered from talking to her that she had been living near Salo on the Italian/Swiss border. At that time the only place where Covid-19 was known to have established a base in Europe was 10 villages some distance south of where she was living in Northern Italy. Still, I was worried by the circumstance, and having spent a sleepless night, talked to the musician and after some discussion we cancelled the concert. Needless to say I felt terrible as on the one hand it seemed like an over-reaction, on the other I just felt that I couldn't take the risk. Looking back I wish very much that others had made the same decision, as it is clear to me that allowing a number of mass events such as the Cheltenham Festival to run in the following week was a massive mistake.

Within a few weeks the book shop was shut, and we endured our first period of lockdown. Then in July, we re-opened and had a strange but enjoyable summer culminating in our first ever car boot sale on the August bank holiday. After an increasingly worrying autumn we were closed again in November, briefly open in December, before closing the bookshop again at the beginning of January, and continuing with online book selling only. By my reckoning, we have spent over half of the last year closed to physical customers and according to the latest schedule we have another 6 weeks before we can re-open the bookshop in the middle of April.

Some jump, some shark, as Churchill might have said.

But as I look forward to the year that will come, I do so with increasing confidence. More and more customers are reporting they have been vaccinated (Ethel received her first shot over two weeks ago), and we have emerged from the year more keen than ever to continue to serve our local community and the wider world of booklovers, selling books, secondhand books, new books, childrens books - talking about books, browsing books, promoting reading. We have discovered a resilience that we didn't know that we had. Millions of people have come to realise that books are a great source of personal salvation. Some, albeit alternative, doctors have even started to prescribe them.

So here's to a year when we can return to our core character-based narrative. No more shark jumping or fridge nuking (a variant which denotes a plot in which a hero/heroine emerges unscathed from certain death - don't ask, the internet really is a colossal machine for time-wasting). But lots and lots and lots of great books!