While Britons are imprisoned, Austrians are encouraged to get out, stay fit, and soak up vitamin D
Cases have plummeted 90% in Austria, and without the sort of draconian rules Britain has adopted
The ski lifts are open
Credit: Getty
With the snow piling thick on the ground in Salzburg, I am amazed at two things in Austria which I do not think are unrelated.
The first is that neither temperature nor lockdown has in any way affected the average citizens’ visibility in the streets.
When I walk out of my front door on the Nonnberg, adjacent to the ancient convent where Julie Andrew’s portrayed a novitiate in The Sound Of Music, there are invariably locals tramping up and down the stairs and slopes, wading through drifts and sliding across ice, to stare at alpine mountain ranges in the middle distance.
NEW ENGLAND LITERARY NEWS
A new poetry collection about a Cambridge woman unjustly hanged as a witch, and new National Endowment for the Humanities grants for local writers
By Nina MacLaughlin Globe Correspondent,Updated December 28, 2020, 10:44 a.m.
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Verses of the accused
In Cambridge in 1650, a woman was wrongly accused and hanged for bewitching her friendâs child to death. Shortly after her hanging, it came to light that the child froze to death because his nurse left him in the cold woods during a loverâs tryst. Such are the facts that drive Cambridge poet Denise Bergmanâs taut and propulsive book-length poem âThe Shape of the Keyholeâ (Black Lawrence). The poem unfolds over seven days, from the accusation to the farce of the trial to the public hanging and the too-late truth. Nightmare and silence are powerful forces on the scene, and Bergmanâs examinations of the different wavelengths of fear â of the woman accused, her a