ANDY HEDGECOCK picks out his cultural highlights of 2025
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A good enough death
JONATHAN TAYLOR welcomes a memoir that reflects on the economic inequalities that narrow the choices available in end of life care
Scottish Liberal Democrat MSP Liam McArthur (centre, left), alongside other MSPs, after publishing his Assisted Dying for Terminally Ill Adults (Scotland) Bill, March 28, 2024
Star cartoonist MALC MCGOOKIN finds lessons for today in the punch, and the economy of line, of an extraordinary generation of illustrators
LEO BOIX, ANDY HEDGECOCK and MARIA DUARTE review Dreamers, It Was Just An Accident, Folktales, and Eternity
JENNY MITCHELL, poetry co-editor for the Morning Star, introduces her priorities, and her first selection
HENRY BELL is sceptical of the notion that ‘progress’ is an ideology that the ruling class uses exclusively to camouflage appropriation
In search of political understanding, MATTHEW HAWKINS welcomes a critique of anti-semitism as codified by the Israeli state
BEN CHACKO welcomes a masterful analysis that puts class struggle back at the heart of our understanding of China’s revolution
Intervals
Marianne Brooker, Fitzcarraldo Editions, £10.99
IN MY 2007 memoir Take Me Home (Granta, now out of print), I suggested that “care is a kind of siege, a war of attrition.” A large part of caring, I argued, consists of biding time, waiting for something to happen: “for the symptoms to change, for … the pill cycles to kick in or kick out,” for the sick person “to capitulate … without input from [their] … own volition.”
But what, I wonder now, is the end-game here? What if caring is sometimes simply, in essence, waiting for the sick person to die? What does it mean for care, the carer and the sick person when the intended goal is death? Can the carer still then be considered a “good carer”?
These are the questions posed by Marianne Brooker’s insightful and important new memoir, Intervals. For Brooker, “the practices of care go on and on,” to death and “even … after someone has died.”
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