Rosita Boland: Two things I am grateful for this year

It’s the end of the year, when we are meant to have important deep thoughts of reflection on the months gone by, and be assembling our ambitious resolutions for the next year. I had a high-minded idea about making a list of the many things I was grateful for this year, but they remained resolutely just two in number, and one of those is a commercial object designed by a multinational technology company.

In a year of a close personal bereavement, there was not much I felt grateful for. I didn’t have the spirit for it. Some years, we get into our boats at the beginning of the year and joyously seek out waves to surf. Others, we take our boats far out in the ocean, ceaselessly exploring. For much of this year, my own personal boat was shored up close to the beach, barely even in the water. I kept it afloat, and managed not to get swamped by some rogue wave, and that’s enough.

So. Back to the two things I was grateful for this year. One was the discovery of audiobooks. I don’t mean to say I discovered them in the pristine untouched wilderness of the internet and am the first to shout to the rest of the world about them.

Being read stories to is not something that should stop in childhood, I soon decided. I loved the experience more with every new book I listened to

A friend told me about Borrowbox. If you are a member of a public library (as I most proudly am), you can access this service free. You download the free app, put in your library card number and a couple of other things, and abracadabra! Up come lists and lists of audiobooks you can borrow free. They download straight to your phone and you can borrow up to five at a time. Reserving a copy counts as a borrow. Obviously, not everything is available all the time: popular and newly published books are often out on loan, or reserved for months.

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I started with The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz. It's a fiendishly delicious mystery about what happens when a washed-up writer turned creative writing professor steals a plot idea from one of his students. The experience of listening to the story unfold, hour by hour, as I walked here and there, or did the washing up, or any of the things you can't actually physically read a book while doing, was joyful and utterly absorbing.

Then I kept going. Being read stories to is not something that should ever stop in childhood, I soon decided. I loved the experience more with every new book I listened to. It was the best possible way to keep my mind from brooding on lockdown walks. I listened to John le Carre's 600-page complex, brilliant, thought-provoking, relentless quasi-memoir, A Perfect Spy, narrated by Michael Jayston. It made a huge impact on me: an impact that simply reading it myself would not have had. It was such a rich experience. I was totally bereft when the 21-hour recording ended.

The other thing I was grateful for this year was my new iPad Pro, with its witchy white magic keyboard. For most of the past seven years, apart from my phone, my sole piece of technology has been an iPad mini. I got it as a birthday gift, and bought an integrated keyboard to go with it. I wrote two books on it, thousands of emails, and all my articles since we started working from home, back in March 2020.

“Where’s your real computer? Your PC? Your laptop?” people would ask; astonished to hear that no, that this tiny thing – the size of a very small hardback book – was the extent of my entire kit.

My new iPad has inspired me to want to try to write something new; some new and different book; to try, at least

Then a friend came to stay overnight, and brought her own piece of kit with her. It was an 11 inch iPad Pro, with a black magic keyboard. I came into the kitchen and gawked with astonishment at how the screen seemed to float over the keyboard – it all works with magnets. She had some professional funding to buy a computer and had done serious research before settling on this one. It was speaking to me; yelling to me, in fact.

“Does the keyboard come in white?” I asked. I know very little about what goes inside computers, but I care a lot what they look like on the outside. Why yes, it did, and even better, the white magic keyboard keys were backlit and magically illuminated themselves once the light levels dropped. I did Tom Sawyer on it, and benefitted from all the research my friend had already done. I bought the same model, with the white keyboard.

In days of yore, new pens, fresh ink and beautiful stationery must have inspired writers to want to work on new books. My new iPad has inspired me to want to try to write something new; some new and different book; to try, at least. I am fully entranced with this piece of gorgeous design, how easy it is to use, and how those glowing white back-lit keys call to me.

I know we are meant to be all sniffy and world-weary about this Cupertino-based company. I can’t be. I am genuinely delighted to be the beneficiary of someone else’s considerable talents. There are possibilities in that magic keyboard, and maybe they will work some magic for me too. Between that and the audiobooks discovery, that’s two wonderful things salvaged with gratitude from a year I’d prefer to forget.