Five Essays from 'Present Continuous'

The five essays printed here are excerpted from Part I of *Present Continuous*, a book of prose written during the first year of the coronavirus pandemic between March 2020 and April 2021 in Lewisham, London. The essays in the present volume were written between March 2020 and June 2020: the movement from spring to summer, from the first announcement of a national lockdown to the Black Lives Matter protests sparked by the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor in the United States and the death of Belly Mujinga in the UK. Nearly two years on, following a seemingly endless series of virus variants and subvariants, an apparent shift from pandemic to endemic, and a kind of exhaustion of vocabulary and will, I hope they provide some sort of record, not just of where “we” were in 2020, but where “we” are – ​or might be – ​now. (David Grundy, London, January 2022)