This is the latest post in a series I started in late 2019, anticipating the twentieth anniversary of my bookblogging which will fall in 2023. Every six-ish days I’ve been revisiting a month from my recent past, noting work and family developments as well as the books I read in that month. I’ve found it a pleasantly cathartic process, especially in recent circumstances. If you want to look back at previous entries, they are all tagged under bookblog nostalgia.

The highlight of April 2010 for me personally was a school reunion in Belfast, 25 years on from our A-levels. I wrote a long piece about it at the time:

Not all of my group of close friends made it, but two did.

I was possibly a bit tipsy when talking to the classmate who is probably most famous in Northern Ireland, now a TV weather forecaster.

I had some other excitement on the trip too, but the party was a personal highlight for me.

Later in the month I went to Southern Sudan (now South Sudan) for a third time, with my colleague L (who now runs the Whitlam Institute in Sydney). We were stuck in Addis Ababa for two unexpected days on the way out, and to make matters worse this was the week of the Eyjafjallajökull eruption, so it was not at all clear how we would get home. (A colleague got home to the USA from the UK by going overland to Madrid and flying from there.) Eventually we made it to Juba just as the ash clouds were beginning to clear over Europe. The best part of the trip was meeting the famous Dan Eiffe