Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush — Tim Key

In March 2020, Tim Key started writing poetry and conversations about the first lockdown. At the end of the year he published these comtemplations in He Used Thought as a Wife, a book for these pandemic times, beautifully designed by his long time collaborator, Emily Juniper. The collection became a Times Bestseller and that would have been that. Except the United Kingdom got locked down once more, at the start of 2021. And Key started to write once more.

Here We Go Round The Mulberry Bush is a chronicle of Key’s life as the new lockdown took hold. Where the first book is set entirely in the confines of Key’s North London apartment, this one is its mirror. Every conversation, every glimpse of Key occurs in the outdoors. He has been granted permission to walk by the government, and it is in these moments that we see him. Each time, he is either on the blower to one of his allies, or, occasionally, exercising with a real-life friend. The whole time lamenting and processing the “new normal”.

And interspersed with these playlets, there is poetry. About the mad new laws, the mad law-makers, about bubbles, vaccines and variants.