Lots of small-time organisms growing on a wall.
Admin1 is reading Cold Water by Dave Hutchinson, the fifth book in his highly impressive and eerily prophetic Fractured Europe series. This is from the first volume, published in 2014:
The early years of the twenty-first century brought a symphony of slamming doors. Economic collapse, paranoia about asylum seekers — and, of course, GWOT, the the ongoing Global War On Terror — had brought back passport and immigration checks of varying stringency, depending on whose frontiers you were crossing. Then the Xian Flu had brought back quarantine checks and national borders as a means of controlling the disease; it had killed […] between twenty and forty million people in Europe alone. It had also effectively killed Schengen and kicked the already somewhat rickety floor out from under the EU.
Europe in Autumn, p27
This was written pre-Brexit, pre-COVID. There’s an interesting (if somewhat academic) analysis of the series in relation to Brexit here.
Admin2 is reading Babel by RF Kuang, but gave up halfway through because it was so stupendously bossy; with the author and all her characters lecturing the reader and each other on linguistics, racism, sexism, colonialism, imperialism etc. To be fair, it was set in a university (an alternative Oxford in Victorian times) so some characters were lecturers, but still. Show, not tell.
We ate roast chicken and squidgy chocolate pear pudding again and scored 11.5 on the GSQ. Bob was quizmaster and did pretty well.