IN A year of limited opportunity for theatre visits due to Covid, my highlight was A Taste of Honey at the Trafalgar Studios in London, which I managed to catch ahead of the first lockdown.

In the National Theatre staging of Shelagh Delaney’s best-known play, Hildegard Bechtler’s set brilliantly captured the sad and shabbily claustrophobic post-war Salford flat in which mother Helen (Jodie Prenger) and daughter Jo (Gemma Dobson) go into battle. It was possible almost to smell the dirty old town outside, with its noxious gasworks, slaughterhouse and canal.

The cast were uniformly excellent, delivering Delaney’s caustic dialogue with a tangible appreciation for its cadences and nuances.

Tom Varey as Helen’s spivvy boyfriend Pete and Durone Stokes as Jo’s sailor fiance, Jimmie, never overplayed their hands, while the art student played by Stuart Thompson — Jo’s saviour in pregnancy — presented a convincingly conflicted figure who craves love just as much as mother and daughter.

Praise too for director Bijan Sheibani, who successfully resisted any urge to take liberties with the characters, plot or script.

Proper live music was of course also pretty thin on the ground but out of the various livestream events available, my favourite was Stories & Songs, featuring British folk-rock legend Al Stewart.

Sitting in his Los Angeles home, Stewart told stories of his life while his backing band the Empty Pockets chipped in every now and then to play some of the musical highlights of his career.

An appealing and informative format, it worked both for the uninitiated as an introduction to Stewart’s work and for his long-established fan base as a nostalgic run-through of his songs and stories.

Enforced confinement did at least allow for more book reading than usual and for me the best new offering of 2020 was Another Kind of Concrete by Koushik Banerjea.

Set in the 1970s, its central character is a young boy called K who is born to Bengali parents but lives in London. There he tries to navigate his way around the various prejudices and cruelties placed in his way.

It’s a story told with a palpable joy in language, both English and Bengali, and is also evocatively multi-layered, shot through with subtle complexity as Banerjea flits in and out of the lives of its characters across geography and time.

A dazzling debut novel that brilliantly explores the interconnections between race and class, it shows us that cruelty is as corrosive to the souls of its perpetrators as to its victims.

One other highlight of 2020 was the British Museum’s Arctic: Climate and Culture exhibition, which opened — and then abruptly closed — just before the second lockdown.

Billed as “the largest and most diverse circumpolar collection ever displayed in the UK,” it offered a look at the cultural lives of the 40 different ethnic groups who inhabit the frozen north.

The most enjoyable elements were the short films, often soundless and rarely more than a couple of minutes long, which included shots of reindeer-herding in Yamal peninsula and an instructional video on how to pack a toddler into the hood of a parka.

Short and sweet, it offered an engrossing insight into a way of life we rarely see but which, if its curator Amber Lincoln is to be believed, will continue at the top of the world for centuries to come.

The good news is that it’s scheduled to run until late February 2021, so if all goes well then it will be available to visit in person.