
Michael Rosen’s Getting Better. Really Useful Knowledge for our times
On one reading Michael Rosen’s Getting Better could be described as a self-help or self-improvement book. He looks at ways of coping after various setbacks in his life.
There is a good deal of fascinating autobiography of a life lived on the left mixed in as well.
Many will know that Michael Rosen was hospitalised with COVID in 2020. He narrowly escaped death and still has some impairments from his experience. Here I can compare directly. I was in hospital for two months in 2022 with a lung condition. It wasn’t COVID indeed I found myself in a locked ward of the University Hospital of Wales, Cardiff specifically designed to keep COVID out. Four operations and at least one Lazarus moment later I was discharged and gradually recovered. Michael was kind enough to send my occasional greetings on social media during that time.
It leaves you, as he notes, as yourself but perhaps not quite your pre-illness self.
Rosen looks at the time when he was a BBC Trainee but ended up being sacked (encouraged to go freelance).He later discovered that the sacking was nothing to do with his competence but related to his left-wing politics. He was blacklisted. Yet the experience left him doubting for a time his capabilities and capacities.
A chapter looks at the sudden death of one of his sons, Eddie, and (it could hardly be a Michael Rosen book without this) a discussion of their love of Arsenal. The pain of loss is evident and yet it has to be coped with and points and actions taken from it.
He also looks at the researches he has done into his family history, a global diaspora as so many have, beyond the ken of politicians like Suella Braverman. She is noticeably cool about why its so important to remember and keep remembering the holocaust. Perhaps she should read the book and find out what happened to some of Rosen’s forbears
Michael Rosen has been a political activist at least since he went on CND marches in the early 1960s. Not really a party political person but a campaigner trying to make a difference. That is a key theme of Getting Better too.
The slogan the personal is political was common on the left in the 1980s and while the slogan is heard less the approach remains. It annoyed William Morris a lot in the 1880s and it remains an issue. Can you change the world by not eating meat, or dressing in certain ways or taking cold showers? Perhaps you can but the chance is that this will simply end with capitalism selling you things to help to achieve your aim.
Rosen is clear that while there are lots of things you do need to consider and do individually, doing things with others- collective action- is important. He talks about his membership of the UCU trade union and the battles there have been at Goldsmiths College where he lectures.
There’s a lot more in Getting Better. It is Really Useful Knowledge for our times, and well worth your time in reading it