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I am reading a truly inspiring book. "Girl, Woman, Another” by Bernardine Evaristo. Bernardine Evaristo was born in London and is the daughter of a British mother and a Nigerian father. With this latest work she won the Booker Prize 2019 and was the Book of the Year for the British Book Awards 2020. It should be noted that she was the first black woman to win the Man Booker Prize. A passionate and impossible-to-stop book that rethinks the issues of identity, gender and class.

This comes regarding this new confinement - not that I am reading more than usual, and this new year of 2021 that insists on repeating the least good things that brought us 2020. Speaking of identity, gender and class, this crisis that when it comes to the virus it is democratic, but in the way that each one is going through it is not so much. We are not all the same. This crisis, like all others, affects the most vulnerable, the least qualified, those with the most precarious jobs, those in the so-called "front line”, teachers, women, those who work in culture and entertainment. 

And what does all this have to do with the book I am reading? It has everything. It is an attentive call to what each of us can do for the other and for society. And that every day, without discouragement or giving up. Like physical exercise, it is necessary to regularly repeat the exercises to maintain the shape you have gained. If we stop, for a little while, we lose shape, health, breathing capacity. That is, we must always exercise. Also, in caring for others, we must renew it daily and not let down.

This new confinement does not bring the novelty of the first, but it forces us to be more attentive, not to make exceptions, to comply with the rule of isolation, not to facilitate, in a word, knowing how to be in society taking care of others, those who are most unprotected. 

At .PT we have grown and continue to grow, we can all be on home office, we have the conditions to comply with the confinement and thus take care of interrupting the transmission chains and taking care, therefore, of others and, by the way, also taking the time to catch up on reading. This book is a suggestion, but there are so many.