Getting Better: Life lessons on going under, getting over it, and getting through it

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After Terry's death, James finds himself in reflective mood, comparing how he's doing in life to how his grandad was at that age.

Like many others, I grew up on Michael Rosen’s work, including probably his best known, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt. Be it as Nicky Hutchinson in Our Friends In The North, Maurice in The A Word, or his reinvention of Doctor Who, one man, in life and death, has accompanied Christopher Eccleston every step of the way – his father Ronnie. Combining stunning new prose poems by one of Britain's best loved poets and the moving coronavirus diaries of his nurses, this is a beautiful story about love, life and the NHS that celebrates the power of community and the indomitable spirits of the people who keep us well.Rosen is very straightforward about the fact that the things that helped him come back from extreme illness and grief will not work, or aren't available, for everyone, but even those for whom these things won't work will find ideas for things that will. I choose the only seat he isn’t about to occupy himself, something wooden and old and half-covered by a coat.

The effects of “long Covid” continue to plague him, however, including a debilitating loss of vision in his left eye, and of hearing in his left ear. And amid the mood of optimism that has come with the news of impending vaccination, Rosen remains angry about the fatal consequences of what he considers the government’s failure to impose a swift enough lockdown early in 2020, despite the clear and urgent warnings being issued by the World Health Organisation.I've always been fond of Rosen and his work, and experienced a big personal loss last year, so it felt fairly personal for me in a way that it might not for others. Not just for the necessary – asking for help – but equally important for the mind, writing how you feel, writing a poem, writing a love letter, writing a story. We’ve done lots of live children’s book events together, and sometimes he does funny drawings of me behind my back on stage.

This rich and varied anthology contains the radio productions of five of Lawrence's classic novels, and nine short stories and novellas. Rosen often takes to Twitter (now X) to spar with anti-vaxxers and Covid deniers, he feels it a duty, he says. It was interesting to hear about his life, ramblings, health, work, and his own development over time. Urzila talks candidly about her childhood with a great family, apart from her abusive dad, and about growing up in South Africa.What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you’d devoted your life to fighting against? His relationships and hobbies, and recovering from COVID, re-learning to do the most basic of things, such as walking, for the third time. This deals with the many emotions of comes when coming out of a coma, ‘Getting Better’ should be on everyone’s reading list this year. I was expecting some insights into what it's like to get Covid, how he got over it, how much better life is now.

Most people who are grieving, they quite often have those thoughts – that they must find a way to carry on. What if you woke up one morning and found you’d acquired another self—a double who was almost you and yet not you at all?From grief to trauma to writing, I learnt so much about how we can view the positive in the every day and how we shouldn’t take our lives so seriously as they can be taken from us in the blink of a moment. I can't say I had heard of Michael Rosen prior to picking up this book entirely by chance from my library app, despite being aware of the We're Going On A Bear Hunt story before.