Just Googled “artisanal chocolate near me” hoping to find a place that delivers – I’m feeling a powerful need for good chocolate. The thrill of this moment is that Mrs. Cardinal, with her orange beak and soft brown feathers, is perched on the clematis just outside. I keep a ceramic plant base filled with water on the fence, in which the birds drink and bathe. Hope she will try it. So far, no luck with chocolate. The dark chocolate bikkies will have to keep me going. Can I get some Easter treats somehow?

Here’s what a very nice rejection looks like:
Thanks for your submission. Unfortunately, we are unable to accept it for consideration as Invisible Publishing’s non-fiction list has a rather narrow focus and we do not currently publish memoirs. 

Very grateful, as I wrote to them, to have received their no so fast. Yesterday, I heard the publisher of the small press Biblioasis being interviewed on CBC, saying he feared the press would go under, but also that he still hoped to find new voices. Though I’d sent a submission to them late last year, I sent another on the spot, saying New voices? Here I am. But am going ahead speedily with self-publishing. Want to get this book out by my birthday in August. What a present that will be.

Another great gift: Sol Hermolin, who produces the Yiddish event I spoke at a few months ago, sent me a link to God, Man and Devil, the movie of my great-grandfather’s play. When writing my book, I spent a year tracking down a video copy, and now here it is on my computer. Sol told me his family will be celebrating Passover this year in their separate houses, by Zoom. Not quite the same, but wonderful nonetheless.

Last night, Call the Midwife, then a drama about the Second World War I didn’t like very much so left to read, though one of its points was particularly relevant right now – that just before the war, in 1939, ignoring the warnings of journalists, Europeans west and east were determined to pay no attention to the advance of the Nazis and danced on as usual, until their lives were smashed to bits.

And then The Windermere Children, a harrowing drama about 300 orphaned Jewish children rescued from the camps and sent to be housed in England, in an attempt to rehabilitate and heal them. Again, like Unorthodox which was largely in Yiddish, this was mainly in Polish with talented young Polish actors. It was heart-wrenching and deeply moving, especially at the end when it showed a few of the boys whose stories had been dramatized returning to the same place as old men and telling us what they’d achieved in their lives – one had been knighted. We saw that despite the kind efforts of the adults around them, what made the children better was the lush green beauty of the Lake District where they were housed, and the support and love they gave each other.