This looks warm but it isn't. I am cold. My feet are cold. So, instead of telling you about another day in the life of Peter Goerman, I shall go back inside before my coffee also gets cold, and watch "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich".
This book was released when you watched the Essendon Football Club win the VFL premiership and the rest of the world the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was 1962 and the Cold War was at its height, and Solzhenitsyn's works, particularly "The Gulag Archipelago" but also "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich", played a significant role in exposing the brutal realities of the Soviet system and challenging its ideological claims.
There has never been a book that described so minutely a single day. Every meal was the height of importance, finding some tabacco was a constant goal, staying warm was always in the back of the main character's head. There was actually very little about life outside; everything was focused on getting through another day alive.
Discovering the importance of a piece of bread or an extra bowl of soup, the incredible luxury of a book, the ingenious possibilities of a nail, a piece of string or a single match at a time when survival is all, makes you appreciate the life we enjoy here, even if it lacks a bit of sunshine.
P.S. And while I'm huddled close to the electric heater, Padma and her sister and brother-in-law and their son have arrived at Soekarno Hatta airport in Jakarta, where they hired an electric car to take them to central Jakarta for a mere $22. Who is the third-world-country now?
