 Welcome everyone, thank you for joining us. My name is Jonah Albert and I am one of the cultural events producers at the library. Today we are extremely happy to have one of the best known figures in children's literature, poet, writer and broadcaster Michael Rosen, talking with Chris Riddell, illustrator, author, cartoonist and also another well-known figure in children's literature. They are going to talk about Michael's new book, Many Different Kinds of Love, which contain illustrations by Chris. Just a little housekeeping before we get started. If you have any questions for Michael during the event, you can submit them using the question box below. A selection of questions will be answered later during the event. Use the above menu to provide us with feedback on the event and also to donate to the British Library. Your feedback is very important to us. It will help us to continue to plan and run our cultural events program. The British Library is a charity and your support helps us to open up a world of knowledge and inspiration for everybody. If you don't already have a copy of Michael's book, please click on the bookshop tab for an opportunity to get one. You'll find social media links below this video in case you want to continue the conversation on other platforms. You will also find out more about the event and also read short biographies of our speakers. And now I'll hand over to Chris and Michael. Thank you. Well, I'm absolutely delighted to be here and just in a very sort of quick pre-conversation with Michael. We were both getting rather nostalgic for actually being in a large tent with the wind blowing sort of across the Herefordshire countryside or possibly across a town square in Edinburgh. And that lovely expectance sort of buzz you get as an audience waits and settles. And here we are, you know, sort of seamlessly. And Michael, I want to first begin by sort of thanking you for being in conversation with me this evening. But more than that, I would just like to say a few words about sort of my response to this extraordinary book which I saw in manuscript form. And as soon as I sort of saw it, I relived as I think many of us subsequently have done this extraordinary year we've had. And what sort of leapt out at me from the book was two things. One was the extraordinary sort of candour and the poetic form, which I think it's really sort of conveys the extraordinary experiences you had. But also a chapter in the book that wasn't there. And it was the diary of the carers, the daily diaries. That wasn't actually in my manuscript. And so I sort of only saw that once the book came out. I actually saw those extraordinary letters. And what I'd like to do, I think is just begin by asking, I mean, I love the title. This was the other thing as well in many different kinds of love. And I'd like to sort of maybe structure what we talk about based on kinds of love and your experience of that. And to start maybe with maybe a first sort of kind of love, love of life. Tell me a little bit about where you were sort of before all this happened, sort of the things you were enjoying, your enthusiasm, your daily life in some sense is before this extraordinary occurrence. Thanks for that, Chris. Yes. Well, it's quite interesting in a rather morbid way. I have spent a bit of time looking at the weeks before I got ill and indeed the two weeks that I was ill before I went into hospital, just sort of piecing together. What was I doing in February and March? What were we all doing with at the time, apparently, at any rate, if we can mention the government, not seeming to be too bothered that there was something on its way. They seemed almost, it had now in retrospect, sort of surprised. The World Health Organization was kind of shouting from the wings saying, terrible things are happening in, first of all, in China. And then it got nearer to Italy. And it was as if our government was saying, oh, well, if it's in Italy, it won't get here then. And I'm afraid, in a strange sort of way, I got affected by that and sort of went about my business. So I could, in myself, March the 10th, I was in a school, I was in a school in Burford, I think, and also as it happens in a BBC studio talking about, you know, the awful idea that was circulating that some other old people were a bit superfluous to needs. And there was me sitting there in a BBC radio for today's studio saying, well, actually, I want to live. And at that very moment, I could well have been infected or possibly even infecting other people. I was at the Arsenal Stadium, the Emirates, a couple of times in March, I was visiting schools. So yes, I was round and about in various places. Oh, a teaching at Goldsmiths, as you say, living life in the way that I did, traveling on buses and trains, something that I enjoy, making jokes about the fact, oh, think on Twitter, I think I made some joke about the fact that I better not touch the banister, the not what's it called, the rail by the side of the escalator. It's not called a banister, is it? The rail on the moving rail by the side of the escalator, because otherwise I could get infected and drop down dead. How funny. There's a kind of morbid sort of frame of mind that I was in, little knowing that I was about to cop it. I remember that. I remember that, Michael, exactly that time you've brought it vividly back to me, because as children's people who work in children's literature, we were in schools, weren't we? Because it was World Book Day. That week was a week of sort of book based events in schools. So we were all invited, weren't we, to go to lots and lots of different schools. And I remember that extraordinary sort of slightly jocular sort of atmosphere when we were told that shaking hands wasn't a good idea. So we used to sort of bump our sort of elbows together. Yes, though, you should say, in fact, on March the 3rd, I think it was, if I remember rightly, our good Prime Minister was saying that he was shaking hands with everybody. I mean, he's tuned a few days later, but he said shaking hands, even with coronavirus patients, he said, that's how safe and fun it all was. So on March the 3rd, he was as it were, you know, suggesting that either it was perfectly safe or, and excuse me of being a conspiracy theorist, if you like, but that another plan was afoot that somehow or other the virus could spread amongst the population. A few oldies like me would cop it, but were a bit superfluous, as I said. And the population would be saved. So this lovely thing they call herd immunity without vaccination. So whether he was giving us that message or not, but suggesting that we all go out and shake hands with people with COVID seem to be his message on March the 3rd. Interesting, Michael, isn't it? You know, that was a period when I suppose the, and I hesitate to say this, but Boris Johnson's skill set, such that it is, was rather cruelly exposed. Because I think, you know, as the seriousness of the situation started to sort of, you know, hit us all, there was a sense in which I found huge comfort in the experts, the so-called experts, the I call them experts, who were telling us, you know, things that weren't easy to sugarcoat. And yet I suppose, you know, sort of, Johnson to his podium was all about sort of the full dog spirit, which is inappropriate. Take it on the chin was one of his phrases, though he did modify that by saying, but we're taking measures to balance it. I'm not quite sure how you balance taking it on the chin, either you get it on the chin or you don't. But there we are. So that's yes, that's all in the moment leading up to when I got ill. And I noticed from Twitter that I was tweeting about my illness. And on day 12, I said, the year's seasons roll by in a night. Sweats freezes, sweats freezes. Wondered whose mouth I had. I didn't remember it as made of sandpaper. Water is as good as ever. So that was on the 27th of March, which I've put as a sort of opening lines of the book. Yeah. I'm fascinating as a poet, Michael, were you, were you thinking, do you think sort of in a daily sense about recording your feelings, your thoughts? Or is this, you know, when does the spirit move you? Well, I wrote something today, given that you ask, and it is sort of relevant. So I lost a child, as you know, Eddie, many years ago. And I, because I have to ask myself every day, how am I coping with this thing that happened to me? I then also asked myself, how did I cope with Eddie? And so I did put pen to paper or finger to keyboard, and sort of asked myself that question. How did I cope? What did I do? And one of the things that I thought about, and it's also to do with the book, that our brains are quite complicated, aren't they? Because what we do is we see, hear, smell, taste, touch things. And then we put them into words in our head. And then we might call that inner speech, if you like. But it's full of sensations and things. And you're somebody who then expresses that, not in words, unless you're writing a story or something, unless you're writing, but when you're doing pictures, you express that stuff in your head, visually. I don't do that. I can't do that. And I don't really dance. I don't make pots. And I don't sing in opera. So what I do is I sort of feel that I'm pulling words out of my head in order to put the stuff in some kind of order, in some kind of shape. And so I found myself thinking today that that's what I was doing with Eddie, with the memories of the pictures of the moment that he died and so on, and that I put those into words. And by sorting it, it somehow rather puts me at ease. I can't really describe it. But so writing this book has been in part, at any rate, a matter of putting things to ease and thinking about the pictures of me getting ill, me just before I went into the coma. I can't put the coma into words because it's it's gone. And then putting bit by bit the stages of recovery into words, because I suppose I'm baffled by it. I'm baffled by the idea that you could be a kind of nearly dead or a halfway between alive and dead. And you can't find it. And then you and then you have to sort of live with that. As you see, I'm struggling for words, even just to say it. So just to sort it out, it helps me to sort of lay it down on the page and lay it down in these sort of short prose, poemy, free verse kind of way, that doesn't interfere too much with the first flow of feeling. So that's what I do. I mean, talking about love, Michael, you know, I feel this palpable sense of talking to you now of sort of huge relief, because you were the person I knew personally, who contracted Covid. This thing that haunts our imaginations, those of us who sort of haven't been lucky enough not to have come down with it. But you were the someone I knew, who had contracted this illness, and you disappeared. You disappeared. I loved your daily tweets. I loved your education column, which I'd love to talk a little bit about in a Covid sense. But I also sort of just loved our personal connection and illustrating wonderful sort of poetry for young children. Could I just say, I really don't, I really don't like that, the fact that we stood on the stage together and there was me trying to make two or 300 children laugh at my jokes. And what were you doing? You were standing behind me, drawing me, caricaturing me and making them laugh at your pictures rather than my gags. And you want me to join into some kind of ho ho. You know, it was one of the most outrageous pieces of upstaging that I've ever enjoyed. No, didn't enjoy. Look, it's about to happen again. I think that's a little unfair, Michael. I think I seem to remember you were sort of talking to some children doing this wonderful, wonderful impromptu poem that involved sort of jazz hands. And you were being very expressive, sort of showing, you know, doing these wonderful sort of jazz hand things. And I was able to sort of sit behind you drawing and as you're right, and you're right, completely sort of attempting to upstage you. And I should have known better because you turned my drawing of your jazz hands into a lovely, lovely impromptu sort of poem where you mentioned your jazz ears and your jazz eyes as well. So you turned it into a whole performance. So I learned my lesson that way. So I'm not going to attempt that now, obviously. Very good. Yes, yes. Glad to see. Yes, that's right. That's, yes, it's almost like a demon that's kind of visited us that we're sitting here talking nicely. And suddenly there's this dibbuk in Jewish mythology has kind of appeared in the room. Yes, lovely. I like it. So disembodied dibbuk has just appeared between lovely. Love it. But that's that sense, Michael, that you, this book has sort of for so many of us has taken us on a journey we haven't, we fortunately haven't been on. And it's that sort of insight, I think, that I found, and many people are finding profoundly moving about the book. It will be for many of us a record of this extraordinary time. And coming back to this notion of love, I was very struck by the elements in the book from your wife Emma. Yes. And then watching the extraordinary documentary that was made by Kevin McDonald, where your your doctor sort of described Emma coming into the hospital and having a sort of being able to see you. And they constructed an extraordinary sort of area almost in the lobby, you were wheeled out to see. And that was a real turning point. You seem to sort of come back from this liminal place that you describe in the book. That's right. Yes. Well, Emma was trying to talk to me via the phone before I went under. So she was saying things like doctor told me you're all stable again and that you look better today that you've been in a different position on your tummy, which is helping and you've been having something to eat. This all sounds V like progress to me. And I want you to be encouraged and feel reassured that although it may feel V slow going and V hard work, you are going in the right direction. Melon fruit cocktail and tango on its way tomorrow. Lots of love. E kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss. And then the next day she said, you know, the shit has hit the fan when the queen is making a speech. And it's not even Christmas. Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss. And then straight after that, in fact, I got much worse. And this is what happened. The doctor is standing by my bed asking me if I would sign a piece of paper, which would allow them to put me to sleep and pump air into my lungs. Will I wake up? There's a 50 50 chance. If I say no, I say zero. And I sign. And I can remember that very clearly, that conversation. Because remember, I remember feeling that actually 50 50 was actually quite good. Because I was so short of oxygen, you're quite lightheaded. And so I remember thinking 50 50. But I mean, that's not so bad. Zero doesn't sound very good at all. So that's why I kind of signed. And so that's when I went under. And then as you say, we'll go back to the coma time in a minute. But doctors get worried, they put you under in this coma, under what are you in it, or under it or both anyway, they put you in a coma. And then they get worried whether they can wake you up. And by all accounts, I was sort of shaking about and waving my arms about getting agitated. And as they saw it and reported it to Emma, that I was delirious. And this is quite common in people who've been in induced coma. And then the worry is to say getting woken up. And I think the doctor said on that documentary you mentioned that they were getting worried that I was brain dead. First time I'd heard that I was watching the film. And then when he said it, I went, really? They were worried I was brain dead, I must have been worried I was brain dead. No, that doesn't make sense. Anyway. And then so they got Emma to come in. And I was wheeled out onto the atrium of the fourth floor of the Wittington hotel hotel hospital. Sorry, I do stumble with my words, if only hospital. And it looks out over London. It's where in mythology or otherwise Dick Wittington stood. That's why it's called the Dick, it's what called the Wittington hospital. Yeah. So there I was, not looking out over London, because I couldn't see anything. And Emma held my hand and played recordings of my children and our children, my older ones and our children talking to me and my brother, I think, and some music. And I don't remember any of this at all, nothing at all. And then when the doctors put me back in the lift, according to Hugh Montgomery, the prof who was in charge of the intensive care, I became lucid, I became coherent for the first time. And so that was a turning point in the end of May, because I'd been in unconscious in intensive care for something like 40 days up to that point. So they do find that's a sort of potential tipping point, if you're really in for a long time, they do get quite worried. But I was in that time because they were trying to get my lungs better. That's an amazing love story in itself, isn't it, about that notion of somehow being reached in that way. And it can only be love, can't it? And it's almost that sense of being drawn back out of the underworld. For me, that felt like it was sort of... Indeed. And that was why I wrote. I did think the more I heard about all this in retrospect, it did feel that that great piece of work that I always love at the Odyssey, Odysseus manages to, he cheats a lot of things, he managed to listen to the sirens by tying himself to the mast. And then the other thing he manages to cheat is to go to the land of the dead just to check it out. And I thought, well, in a way, I'm not actually Odysseus, I'll just clear that up for you, Chris. Q drawing. And I had sort of saw myself as having visited the land of the dead. And then because I've lost most of the sight in this eye and most of the hearing from this ear, I sort of thought about this. And so I wrote, I'm a traveller who reached the land of the dead. I broke the rule that said I had to stay. I crossed back over the water. I dodged the guard dog. I came out. I've returned. I wonder about. I left some things down there. It took bits of me as prisoner, an ear and an eye. They're waiting for me to come back. The ear is listening. The eye is the lookout. So that was one way, you know, I said earlier about putting words on the page, sorting things out. One way to do that is to be ruthlessly real. That's one of the things I do. And then right up the other extreme is to be ruthlessly mythological. Yes, in other words, to visit mythological things. Shakespeare plays anything that I've read and sort of find a place in them. And this is why I think literature is so powerful and important in schools. And it's also kind of, it's incalculable. That's the point about literature. The idea of trying to tie it down into kind of measurable quantities and, you know, giving marks for getting it right. As if somewhere other, what we've got to do is take eggs out of a box and you don't have to cook the eggs or change the eggs. It's just that is the egg that is in that box. That is what Shakespeare meant. So, boom, take it out, say it, get the mark for it. That I think there's something else going on with literature and the way I use it, and I mean that, is to find these incalculable things that reverberate in you in ways that you couldn't expect. I never thought, as I've read the Odyssey, that somewhere other one day I would think I visited the land of the dead. That's not for me that bit. You know, maybe my bits, you know, grappling with, I don't know, Silla and Charybdis or something. Or following Arsenal Football Club. Yes, I hear you. Exactly. That's right. You know, I haven't stabbed anybody's eye out, which Odysseus did, just to clear that up with people, not me. And so, in a way, these myths, these stories, what they enable you to do is to sit in them and be contained by them, so that the pain of the things that we go through as well as the joys, they're somehow or other, we're in a secure place, because it's not actually happening to us when we read it. It's happening to that poor bloke Odysseus, or it's happening to whoever, to Jane Eyre, we were talking about earlier. Dear reader, I lived. Instead of dear reader, I married him. So, yeah. And that's nice to be able to sometimes, instead of being ruthlessly real, as I repeat myself, to be ruthlessly mythological. Lovely, Michael. And that also comes across in your use of humour, the way that you can sort of just sort of go to this awful place and then start to sort of come out of it with insights into sort of how you're feeling. I love the passages where you talked about the sense of your body, you know, the being sort of liminal, being on the edge of something, and then sort of coming back and thinking about every part of you in a new way, which must be, I suppose, the journey of recovery, where you're taking an inventory, I suppose, of different things and different faculties that might be failing or coming back. Yes. I mean, when they told me that I had blood clots, right, immediately I thought, and I've written about this, is blood clots, is that they're really like scabs, that they're like, it's when the blood solidifies. And so the huge danger of having blood clots, which I had in my pulmonary blood vessels, is that they'll wander off into either your brain or your heart and either give you a stroke if they're in brain or in your heart, your whole system will stop. And so when I was told about it, I immediately sort of thought, because I did O-level biology and I also started doing medicine, I could sort of picture lungs and things like this. And so I remember saying, well, what's going to happen to these blood clots? And I remember the doctor saying, you'll digest them. I've written about this. And I thought, digest them. And immediately I thought, and it is quite disgusting, so get ready to put your hands over your ears, folks, of how as kids when we got scabs, we did used to pick them off and chew them. This is the sort of child's thing. And of course, I was going to say that's another thing that happens to you when you lie there all day, is that your life goes zigzagging through to childhood back to adulthood, to the deaths of others, to wondering about your own death, and zigzagging and zipping between the two. And as you say that what keeps recurring is this thing about your body. And though I haven't mentioned it, that in a part, in part, the inspiration behind this is King Lear, that what happens in King Lear is that here's this great grand king, you know, with his kingdom and his three daughters being very lordly and magnanimous about bestowing it on his three daughters. And then at the kind of nadir point of the play, he's just reduced to him and poor Tom, who isn't really poor Tom, as we know, he's Edgar, poor Tom's a cold and there they are just feeling the weather, they are exposed Shakespeare has created this incredibly brilliant metaphor of a storm and out on the on the on the heath on the kind of moorland. And I found myself thinking of that and thinking of how your body is your as it were reduced to poor forked man, you know, you're reduced to being this kind of simple mortal thing in the hands of others. And so that's kind of how I got reduced to that. And also listening to other people, the ward is dark. I can hear a metal per from the other side, then a bubbling syrup. He coughs more bubbling. It must be coming up from his chest. The metal per must be sucking it up. A light is on behind the curtains over there. The nurse tells him to keep still. And so you have companions in this place. And every now and then you become aware of them obviously when I'm out of the coma. And because sometimes they're behind curtains, there's a strange kind of unearthly quality about it. And they that the suctioning as it's called, you can hear it goes like that. And then you hear this and sometimes the odd grown with it. You look up and you see this light behind a curtain. And you see, you see what we're reduced to. And also the fact that you're totally in the hands of these. Well, as you've depicted them in your wonderful pictures kind of angels of mercy. I mean, they're much more than that because they're dealing with all your nasties. They are, aren't they, Michael? And yet in a sense as a layman, I can't be alone in this. Being utterly awestruck by the quiet methodical professionalism of carers, particularly I suppose in the ICU environment where it is a very sort of technological sort of environment. But just all the different things that need to be doing as common places. And I want to ask you a little bit about the wonderful part of the book, which is the diaries, the daily entries from the medical staff who looked after you. But I love the way that they mention everyday things, whether it's cutting fingernails or shaving, shaving you these little inventory of everyday acts of love, I would say. Yes, indeed. Let's read one. This is the patient diary. There we are. I'll show that to the camera. Patient diary that they wrote. So they were writing after their shifts. So these are nurses and as you'll hear, not necessarily trained in intensive care. If you think when you're trained in intensive care, then one of the things you're trained in is that the person you're looking after with such devotion and care, and as you say, love, may die. 42% of my ward died when I was in there. And some people were coming in from all other parts of the hospital where people don't normally unnecessarily die. And so all this devotion and care and of course it was very, very difficult for them. Young people who may not necessarily have seen that amount of mortality. So here's Holly writing to me on the 6th of May. And if they're writing to me, remember, I'm just basically virtually looking like somebody in a morgue with tubes in and out of them, not responding a great deal far from it. Afternoon, Michael, it's Holly Helper again. Today I'm looking after you with lovely nurse joy. We've had a busy day so far. It started off with spa time, a bed bath, hair comb, nail cut and clean. And we also shaved your beard. Sorry, we know you usually have a beard. That's just so we can keep the area around your tracky, the place where the tube sits in your neck clean. We've placed some pads on your eyes to keep them closed as they had been open and you need some rest. I tend to sleep with my eyes half open, by the way. We then spent some time listening to your fab playlist again that was put together by Emma and our children. You appear much more comfortable and settled today. You've been breathing with the ventilator today and your oxygen requirement has been reduced. All great progressions. We're going to let you rest now as we've moved you on to a new bed. I hope it's comfortable. I'm unsure whether I will work with you again, Michael, as the IT unit is slowly returning to normal. This means Helpers, which it means her, will go back to our usual jobs. I should be heading back to my bladder and bowel team. I wish you all the best with your recovery. You're a fighter and can do this. Best wishes, Holly. PS, happy birthday for tomorrow. I mean, it's just majestic, isn't it? It's wonderful. It's wonderful, Michael. It is that sense in this environment of oxygen masks and beeping machines and the whole tech that the people caring for you are addressing you as a person, not this inert figure being kept alive by technology. They are seeing you. I think that's an extraordinary act of devotion. For me, a real standout part of the book because I didn't see it in manuscripts, so it was wonderful to discover that. Yeah. Look, I'll show you the writing itself. You can see when it's typed, it doesn't quite have that immediacy. Afternoon, Michael. Oh, look, it's actually open to Holly's letter. Look, can you see it? Yes. Can you see that? Wonderful. It's Holly's letter. The playlist and going back to the bladder and bowel team. There you go. And PS, happy birthday for tomorrow. There we are. You can see it on the bottom. Am I showing it right? You are. Yeah. So there it is. I have this treasure. Look, here it is, patient diary. This diary can be completed by relatives, friends, nurses, doctors, it says. Yeah. And passed on, I would say passed on, Michael, in the pages of this extraordinary book. And you were sharing with me a slightly unfortunate review. We don't need to necessarily mention the newspaper, but they sort of had an extraordinary view of that, didn't they? Yes, they seem to say that it was a mistake to put the letters in the book because they were so ordinary. And then there was a dash, but perhaps that's the point. And I just thought, this is the humanity of ordinary people, not a writer who, in a sense, is quite self-conscious, like I have to admit, you know, I've said how self-conscious I am in writing, thinking about the Odyssey and King Leopold, blah, blah, blah. But that here are ordinary people whose job is not to write, whose job is to care. And yet, well, not and yet, it's not and yet at all, they express that care through their words. And I was a bit distressed, really, to see that someone was saying that the writing was ordinary. There's nothing ordinary about that piece that I read to you. I mean, the idea that this is someone apologizing for shaving me, explaining what a track he is, because that's opening up this bit here, explaining to me, even though I'm inert, she's explaining it to me for, you know, maybe never, maybe it's for my relatives, because I'm not going to live. Or if it is me, that when I come round in six weeks time, get round to reading it. I mean, just behind that letter, there is so much. And even I'm laughing, but you know, she's in the bladder and bowel team. Well, I mean, that's so much about her life that here is somebody who's in the black and she's come over and dealing with us in this terribly extreme situation. And she goes home. And as we saw in the film that you've mentioned, Chris, you know, it got too much for them. They got too much. They went home and sobbed because and without even necessarily knowing because they didn't have the time or the, the experience or whatever it is to be able to, as it were, offload it, the deaths had been as it were dumped on them. And they, they, you know, I'm not saying Holly was like that. But, you know, it's just, all I can say, Michael, is thank goodness, we don't have performance related pay in the NHS. And we can keep that bill down, but you know, a pay rise down to 1%. I know I'm opening up a can of worms here as we're going to get terribly political, I know. And we've had a few minutes because I would love to open, open this up to questions. But just before we do, just to touch on the political, because I think both you and I are political animals in, in, in other sort of parts of our, our professional lives. How do you feel about the notion of a COVID inquiry, you know, actually learning some lessons from this, you know, I've heard it said that it's too soon. I've heard it said that, you know, it's, it's redundant because obviously it'll just be people exercising hindsight. How do you feel about, about that question? I think the nation has to have the possibility to know again how it unfolded, to know day by day what was being said, what was being done and what wasn't being done, what did people know, and then also what actual intentions were and what covert intentions were going on. So it's my view and all right, it is only one view that the government and some leading scientists were playing around with this idea of herd immunity without vaccination. And we know this from their appearances on TV, three top government scientists came on and said, we have to create herd immunity. And we know that key figures in the government were playing around with this idea that we shouldn't really do anything. I mean, Boris Johnson used the phrase that he was against market segregation. I know it's a bit obscure, but what he meant was that there shouldn't be government intervention in this thing. So let's piece this all together step by step what they meant. And did they understand fully that when they were going to bring in this herd immunity, which is bad biology anyway, that this would entail inevitably the deaths of thousands of people, those most likely to catch it who we've heard over and over again, the over 70s and those with underlying health problems, were we superfluous to needs in the minds of those people? Because if we were, then this is a terribly dangerous situation to be in because this is people in high places, thinking of sections of the population, not just one or two people, but tens of thousands of people as being unnecessary or too expensive to keep alive or a whole set of crude calculations like that. And if that's the case, we have to know. And we also have to know that what was this operation Cygnus, I think, or operation Cygnit, whichever its name was, operation Cygnus, I think, which took place in two or three years before the pandemic, which was a feasibility study, it was what would happen if a pandemic hit us? And why, if they, if that took place and there were these recommendations, why weren't those recommendations put in place? I think Jeremy Hunt has raised that question. Well, this has to be drawn together so that we know. So if there is any other kind of pandemic, we have to know, did people really think in high places that people like me were superfluous to needs? So I feel it personally, I feel it socially, I feel it politically. So yes, I think we need an inquiry and it must be done as forensically and as scientifically as possible. Keep people like me away if you like, I'll turn up and start ranting and saying, you know, I can't see with my eye and my toes and numb, that's not really going to help. But if I have to look at it in a documentary way and see what it is that people actually said on that day as the infection, as the virus took root, if you think, if you like, and we have to say, well, look, this is how we got to where we are, and we can compare it with other countries. Let's let's look at South Korea, Australia, excuse me, New Zealand, Thailand, let's look at them and see, well, could we have done something like that? Perhaps not, perhaps yes. Let's find out whether we could have done. Yes, I think so, Mike. I agree with so much of that. All I can hope for in a sense is that maybe some of the initial sort of thoughts about this were sort of couched in sort of lazy journalistic terms. You know, far be it from me to cast aspersions, but possibly we do have some leaders in our government with a journalistic background. And maybe they think in these sort of slightly sort of, you know, wide and sort of supposedly clever debating points. And that, I think, is possibly a worry. I was tremendously reassured, I think, when the Downing Street briefings started to come up with charts and started to talk about possibilities from a scientific point of view, up until then it all felt like this was just, well, we should be fine as long as we've got a sort of, you know, good stiff upper lip and all just sort of get on with it, you know. I think my problem is slightly different because there were some scientists talking about this thing, herd immunity. And it is actually rubbish biology because humans move about over the face of the earth, you know, we're not herds of cows confined to one farm or just several farms or even on an island. We move about the surface of the earth. And as we're seeing, if you let a virus rip, then it will mutate. And you never know how strong or weak the resistance is. And actually, in so far as animal groups get immunity, one way they get it is because we pass on genes from one generation to another, or the genotype as it's called, that is resistant to the disease. We've seen this, I mean, if you see rabbits, I mean, we're old enough to remember the terror of rabbits on the roadside with myxomatosis. And they were, as it were developing herd immunity. And there they were hopping along what we saw, you know, rows and rows of dead rabbits. And in the end, rabbits passed on some immunity generations. And of course, rabbits reproduce much, much more quickly than we do. So again, this idea that, oh, well, we'll get the herd immunity by the virus spreading through the population. And yet the biology of herd immunity involves passing on genes. And we take a bit longer than rabbits to do that, I've noticed. I don't know if you've noticed that, Chris. You've passed on your genes, probably not your Levi Strauss genes, that is. No, no. I have those as well. Of course. And it does take a bit of time, you know. And so I just think these were scientists talking like that. And no interviewer, I found myself thinking, no interviewer, didn't any of you do a level biology where we heard about that sort of stuff? Anyway, there you go. I do mention this in the book too, it's sort of, it's in my reveries as I was recovering. And I came across, you know, this immunity thing, and I found myself appalled by it. And then also, I read an article about bus drivers. And I got really upset that there were bus drivers in their cabs unprotected because nobody said protect, people got on buses, breathed on them because nobody said we shouldn't. And what do you know? A lot of bus drivers out of proportion with the rest of the population got ill and some died. And indeed in the film that we've mentioned, one of my co-occupiers of the intensive care ward was and is a bus driver. And he's recovered too. And so, yes, I just, and I've written about this that it was just so upsetting to sort of realize that people were treated as expendable, you know, bus drivers who take us from place to place, you know, felt terrible about it. Anyway, I think Chris has possibly had to leave us. I don't know if there's an emergency there. So maybe I'll, oh no, he is there. I am here. Very good. No, I thought maybe I heard a bang. And then I saw a blank piece of paper and a blank piece of paper means to me right on it. And to you mean something different. It does. Now, what I would like to do, I think for the next few minutes is just look at some questions, some of the questions coming in front. I would like to sort of do some drawings as we go. Now, I'm just, I can't see the question. So are you going to ask? I'm going to ask you. I'm going to ask you. I have some coming up now. Good. Now, I want to start with one from Jean Brandwood. And she asks, do you know if the nurses wrote diaries for all the patients? I think it's an amazing thing for them to have done, and perhaps also aware of them to deal with the daily horrors of what they're dealing with. Absolutely. Yes, they do. And I've spoken to intensive care nurses about how wonderful this diary was for me. And it's part of their training. So as I've said on the front, there's this note from the hospital. And it says the diary may help with the patient's post critical care recovery by providing them with information and insight into a time when they were not aware. So as many of the patients in intensive care as possible are given these diaries to enable us to do precisely that because, I mean, I've slightly missed it out from the talk is from what we've been saying is that Emma tried to explain to me what had happened. And at first, I couldn't understand her. And when I understood it, I couldn't remember it because one of the things that happened was I lost memory. And I lost some medium term memory, but also I'd lose the memory of something happened a bit earlier. So it was analogous to dementia, dementia, really. And so to be able to read this diet, read these diaries, read these diary entries was a way for me to understand what had happened because I mean, at one point, Emma said, you, you were in intensive care for 48 days. And at that point, I thought she meant being cared for intensively. I didn't understand that I was in a coma. And then when she said I'd been in a coma, I thought, when and then she explained to me, well, for April and most of May. And I remember just staring into the distance thinking, really? And I mean, so April and May had just gone and I didn't figure it out where it had gone to. And so this diary, and I think, in fact, the bus driver in the film that we keep mentioning, he says that he says precisely that. Raymond, I think his name is. And yeah, it's vital and they do it wasn't a special treat just because Michael Rosen was there and they thought, well, as he did bear hunt, we'll write him a diary. No, that's one of them to mention bear hunt. But yes, it's for all of us. It's impossible. I was very struck actually by that sort of the personal and I think in a very real sense poetic nature of writing messages to patients. I've just been sketching, you know, that we've become so used to the the current view, I think, of doctors nurses in this extraordinary array of equipment that sort of sets them back from us in some ways. And yet, that is an example, the diary entries that the writing is an example of how you can still be close to someone, even when you have to for your own protection and bears, protect yourself with with PPE at term we're now very aware of. There's another question here from Ruth Blue. What sort of dreams did you have? And if you remember any when you were in, do you remember any when you were in the induced coma? I've been very lucky. Some people who come out of the induced comas bring with them nightmares hallucinations delirium paranoia. And I've come out of it with two main dreams that I had over and over again. One of them is why the book is in part why it's called Many Different Kinds of Love, which I had a very strange weird utopian dream where a man appears and he's German and he's in a bib and brace suit with a 1950s tractor and his family beside him. And he's in a part of Germany where where I know this sounds sort of political and absurd, but where neo-Nazis are organizing. And he gives me a little lecture almost and he says to me in English but with a German accent, he says that we won't survive, we can't live with this kind of hate around, we need many different kinds of love, love for our lovers, love for our fathers and mothers, for our children, for people out there and even for people we don't know, he says, we need many different kinds of love or will be destroyed. And I kept having this dream and it even got to a point where I got distressed that I was having the dream because what would happen would be the tractor would arrive, he would stand next to it and I'd think, oh no, this dream. And then I got distressed that he, he was referring to a manifesto and I would say, I've got it somewhere in the house. And I remember talking to Emma in my dream saying, Emma, do you know what did I do with that? Where did I put it down? So that was one dream and then the other dream I had was of a German Christmas party. I don't know why these German things were cropping up. My background is not German, my great grandparents and so on were Polish. And we're at a German Christmas party which I've never been to and we're sitting around outside in the garden it's night and I've got a rug around my legs and I'm not admitting that I can't move. And we're on a bench and people are singing and someone comes up to me and says, what we do at Christmas is we have these little purple berries and they're called Waspiren. There's no such thing by the way. They said they're called Waspiren and we throw them up in the air and they burst. And when they burst we all sing. And so that's, they did that, all the people and the children and they were singing and there's some lovely songs, little German songs. And they were singing these and then they threw these Waspiren up in the air they exploded and I remember thinking how beautiful and how lovely. And then you see the distressing thing was the dream would come again and I'd know what it was and I would try to stop the dream and I couldn't. So I've put these in the book, these two dreams because I wanted to sort of put the sadness to bed, literally to bed, so that I'm not so saddened by it. So yes those were two dreams I had and I had another one, another distressing one that Emma and I were at land's end and there was a wall and it was the big cliff that goes sort of straight down to the sea and I think I was stuck on the wrong side of the cliff or she was one way or another and I'm stuck in the wall. So these things of course as often they become quite symbolic don't they and I either can't get through the wall and Emma's trying to pull me through or I'll fall down the cliff. So there was another dream that I had as I was recovering. Fascinating that there's another lovely question here from Polly Stanton who asks do you mention mythology but did any words or stories from your Jewish background provide a way of explaining your experience? Very often what happened were conversations with my parents and my father in particular spoke English but he would often sort of fill his conversation with bits of Yiddish. So Yiddish is the language that Eastern European Jews spoke and still do and it's in New York and it's in Mel Brooks's films and we've all got words that we know and I probably know about between 100 and 200 words and phrases but my dad probably much much more and he would just let them out and some of these are in the book so my dad when he got ill seriously ill in the last two years of his life I thought that in a way he it was very sad and I've written about this as well that he sort of shrunk from being someone whose landscape looked out on the world he looked out on the world and nothing was missed you know he would just draw on things from Russian literature, German, Italian, French you know he would talk about you know Shakespeare or Dickens or Thomas Hardy all this sort of stuff and he could sort of look out on the world and that when he got ill he kind of shrunk into his illness and he would say mustn't quench, mustn't quench you know quetcher is a nice word to mean mustn't complain but quite often when people say I mustn't quench what they're doing is quetching and so I started thinking of my dad as becoming Mr. Quetch like a new Mr. Man or in fact Mr. Mench, Mr. Mench books Mench means a good person in German it means just people but in Yiddish it means a good person so my dad would go Mench Mench and that would mean a good person or Zaya Mench he'd say that would mean be a good person and go to the shops for me Zaya Mench he'd say Zaya Mench and I started to think that maybe my dad had become Mr. Quetch and I think I've yes I know I've written a poem about that as the idea that I must try not to be Mr. Quetch so I tried myself in the book several times I tried myself not to pretend to be a doctor because I did try once to be a doctor and decided I couldn't and so another thing I tried myself for is not to be Mr. Quetch and so it's not exactly Jewish mythology it's more like kind of Jewish popular culture and yes I did draw on that and also now in the present tense I talk about well in fact I'll just read this one quickly two physios come over they ask me to walk across the room they say that's very good they ask me to push my legs against their hands they say that's very good one of them asks me what are my long-term objectives I stop and think what are my long-term objectives do I have long-term objectives should I have long-term objectives I would like to write a book about a French dog called Gaston le dog I don't say that I say that I would like to be able to walk to the Jewish deli on the corner and wield a shopping bag in our trolley the physio smiles she writes it down in her book I'm trying to say that going shopping and bringing it back seems huge much bigger than anything I can do now it feels like a long-term objective anything else she says live for a bit more I think and I've never bothered to pickle cucumbers I just buy them but my mother made lovely pickled cucumbers I would like to try that one day you're doing very well they say so again not chronic Jewish mythology but more like Jewish popular culture my mother's pickled cucumbers were really very very good and her mother my mother that's grandmother my mother I remember one time we went over there and my mum said I want to make pickled cucumbers just like you did and she said how to do it and then she said well how do I know how much salt to put in and Bubba said to taste just just to taste and she kept saying to taste and I've got this memory of my mum going home and trying to taste the the brine that you put the cucumbers in and going to taste to taste so making pickled cucumbers is sort of I haven't done it yet um someone gave me some Rachel gave us some very nice pickled cucumbers thank you Rachel if you're watching I'm a man of Spartan discipline and and very few sort of cravings but I have to admit Michael every so often I do have a particular craving and that is for pickled cucumbers so I've been delighted by the that that sort of renaissance of the Polish shop that that happened a few years ago where you just could go and buy wonderful pickled cucumbers and still can yes look out for the look out for the label Krakus k r a k u s let me recommend a correct yes I know them well um good now another question here which I think is rather lovely um this is from Acum who asks what music did your wife and children select for you right um they selected things that I couldn't hear that's because I was still in a coma so they did produce a lovely playlist which I've heard since and there's every possibility that it actually helped to wake me up but I have no memory of it I've heard it a couple of times and it had some of my favorites talking heads um same as it ever was same as it ever was you know the one what's what's it what's I forget what it's actually called someone will put that up on the chat room but it's where he says where David Burn goes same as it ever was same as it ever was water running over anyway um yeah uh you've got a beautiful wife and a beautiful home that one I think that yes I'm yes I know it and I'm struggling to remember the title yeah the title yes uh life life oh life's in the title I think they gave me some Otis Reading they know that I love that um some Otis Reading um I think they gave me that redoing of the the song uh it's a mad world which was uh done at the kind of top tempo back a long time ago and then more recently there was a beautiful slow version and Emma plays it on the piano that was on the soundtrack wasn't it of Donnie Darko I think that's right which my goodness yes what a wonderful sort of anthem in a sense you know I I think we can all endorse that and Emma Emma plays it on the piano she she hasn't for a bit because she's studying but I absolutely adore that and I think I think that was on there as well and also I think you mentioned in the book Django Reinhardt which that's right yes of course I love that sort of notion of wonderful jazz styling syncopated jazz signing sort of while you're in this other in this liminal state yes oh if anybody you know wants to just be revived then just go to youtube and find some Django Reinhardt it is just quite incredible music good for physiotherapy I would imagine and and also um a different route of jazz so it's just wonderful it's it's it's it's a kind of another branch of the jazz world I think um Michael we've got time for one more question oh right I might shut up yes I think it's a rather important one and it comes from Catherine uh bonus and she asks you spend lots of time in schools with young people what if anything will you tell children about the Covid year hmm that's challenging um I've had challenging questions in schools uh somebody said uh you look like Michael Rosen and um that was quite challenging there was another one where I said down behind the dustbin I met a dog called Jim he didn't know me and I didn't know him and this boy shouted out well how did you know his name was Jim then and that that that was a challenging one and I remember saying are there any more questions and somebody said yeah who won the FA Cup in 1971 um so you get I could answer that one by the way um and um yeah so what am I going to say I mean one of the most challenging questions I ever had was I just done my bit and somebody said oh what happened to Eddie in your poems and I had to say he died because I've written about Eddie when he was a toddler and they wanted you know were there any more funny stories and I had to say he died and that natural fact was the spur for me to then write a book about what did I feel about Eddie dying you see yeah four children the sad book um and so what will I tell children well some of them I've already doing virtual uh appearances in schools via zoom and so on and um I say to them I've been ill I tell them what's what's happened that I can't really see with his eye and I can't really hear with his ear um and children are very matter of fact aren't they I mean I remember when they asked me that question about Eddie there was a sort of pause and I said it and then the next question was sort of where did you live when you were a child it was just something that wasn't related and so when I say I was ill they go oh right oh so that's that was an ill person was it and so there's a lovely matter of factness a way in which we make these things into huge peaks and troughs and there's somehow or other that maybe it's just when it's me in front I don't know but there's somehow or other it sort of seems to be without the peaks and troughs so um yeah it's happened already um I've started talking about it and finding ways of saying it and well I mean as a book I mean it's I don't think there's anything in there that I don't think somebody aged let's say eight or nine plus uh couldn't read for themselves it wasn't intended for children that's to say at the very beginning it was just me trying to sort things out but any eight to ten year old 15 20 year old coming across it then uh I don't think there'll be damaged by it I'm sure you're right what a lovely note to end on Michael I think this book is is an incredibly special book it is a book because in a sense it is your experience and it is special because in a sense it's ordinary as well it it contains your experiences it it contains many different different kinds of love and I well I've been privileged to be part of it so I'd like to thank you Michael and thank you for joining us this this evening and it's it's been wonderful to to chat I would I would love to to chat more together maybe at a sort of cafe table with an extremely large jar of pickle cucumbers I love the idea I will take you up on that we will we will be there with the krakus wonderful pickle cucumbers uh yes and some Django Reinhardt in the background uh it's a date we've got it and thanks to the British Library for having us and thank you all for attending and thank you Chris for asking such lovely questions and talking so beautifully it's been my pleasure thank you thank you very much for joining us today and a massive thanks to Michael Rosen and Chris Riddell do keep an eye on the what's on pages on our website to see other amazing events we have planned for you please remember to fill out the feedback form thank you very much for joining us