On Christmas Eve, Meg and I watched the 1951 production of A Christmas Carol with Alistair Sim as Scrooge. It’s her favorite film rendition of the story, and is rapidly becoming mine.

But this year, it was different for us both. As Mrs. Cratchit and the girls sat in the shadows mourning Tiny Tim, the camera cut to the empty stool by the fire where he had warmed himself so often. We thought of all the homes with an empty place at the table or an empty chair by the fire because of covid-19. It’s sickening to think of how many died unnecessarily because politicians failed to take the disease seriously, encouraged anti-scientific thinking, and enabled bullies with thoughtless confusion between individual freedom and common sense. It’s appalling that religious figures encourage people to go without masks and openly spread disease. It’s disgusting to think of all the people who will die in the coming months because they believed anti-vaccination lies.

It is time to recognize that there is no such thing as a harmless crackpot.

Well, I’m lucky. I got to have another birthday. Many people didn’t–more than usual. I got some fabulous birthday presents: My wife made me a fresh apple pie and gave me the five books of Conn Iggulden’s Genghis/Kublai Kahn series. An agent sent me a rejection letter that was very encouraging. She had even given the book a second reading before deciding against it. And I received a similar rejection from Tor not too long ago. While it may seem strange to view rejection as hopeful, the tone of both rejections is telling me that I’m close. I keep reminding myself that a professional writer is simply an amateur who never gave up.

Speaking of aging, a quarter of a century ago I was studying French history and compared my achievements to Napoleon’s. At age 35, he had done so much more than I had. Then I stepped back and thought about how many million people I didn’t kill, so maybe I wasn’t doing so badly. Today, I can say that when Napoleon was my age, he’d been dead for ten years. Plus I’m happily married, have lived on three continents, once stood on the edge of the polar ice cap, and never, ever tried to put my children on the throne of the Holy Roman Empire. Not bad at all.

My heart goes out to everyone in the throes of the covid-19 crisis. I was “potentially exposed” recently and had to take the test–an experience best described as asking a long-fingered stranger to help me pick my nose. I wasn’t infected, but I have withdrawn more to my home since then. I try to cope by keeping the current tragedy in a bigger historical context. It isn’t a good strategy (phrases from Connie Willis’s short story Fire Watch keep coming to mind) but it seems to be the best I can do for now. And if you have never read Fire Watch, it’s worth your time.

Flying is difficult. I thought it would be about five times harder than driving a car, but it’s far more difficult than that. People think of cars as moving in two dimensions and airplanes in three, but that’s not the case: Friction keeps cars from sliding sideways, so most driving is only one-dimensional (along a non-Euclidean line). Even if you’re drifting, there’s plenty of friction unless you hit a patch of ice.

Boaters have a better chance of understanding the difficulty of flight because they’ve tried to sail or motor to a pier in a crosswind, aiming for a fixed point with thrust along one line, drifting from the wind along some other line, maybe drifting along a third line because of a current or tide, and rotating because the centers of mass, water resistance, and wind resistance are all in different places. Flying is more like that, with the added complication of being up in the air in defiance of gravity. And weather. That’s a topic for entire books.

I had imagined that most of flying was “pointing” the aircraft, but it’s more about maintaining a pitch attitude that gives the necessary speed and lift, understanding the effects of the weather, not getting lost, controlling the energy produced by the powerplant, dealing with the sometimes baffling gyroscopic effects, and managing the total potential and kinetic energy of a thousand pounds of steel and aluminum so that when you do get back to the ground, you ease from three dimensions back to one without hurting anything. Even birds are a pain because they are the armadillos of the air, just waiting to get whacked. The difference between armadillos and birds is that armadillos rarely require you to file paperwork with the NTSB.

Flying is a fantastic learning experience. I’ll probably have my first solo in a few weeks, working literally without a net for the first time. I’m looking forward to it.