I did at first assume it would be a follow up from this book, documenting more about his recovery from COVID-19, and it is to a point, but it’s also about his life, the difficult things he’s had to go through and what lessons he has learned through them. There is a passage detailing how, alone and unmoored in his hospital bed recovering from Covid, he begins to play with different pasta names.

He also had a long-term illness for over a decade without realising it and Jewish relatives who he discovered died in Nazi concentration camps. For step-free access from the Queen Elizabeth Hall Slip Road off Belvedere Road to the Queen Elizabeth Hall auditorium seating (excluding rows A to C) and wheelchair spaces in the Rear Stalls, plus Queen Elizabeth Hall Foyer and the Purcell Room, please use the Queen Elizabeth Hall main entrance.

Also to add that I would recommend reading Many Kinds Of Love beforehand, as it may help with some of the context of Getting Better.

There is no fix, but he details the slow process of finding a voice that allows him to talk about Eddie, aided by a child asking him a question about his son at a talk. The anxiety became more intense, and I would wake up with the thought that I would have no option but to quit the course before I was put to the test. When he awoke, he was a different person: unable to speak or walk, and with foggy vision and hearing in only one ear.He explores the full range of definitions of ‘getting better’ and gives some really practical tips for motivating yourself. Maybe thirdly, I realised that the book I really wanted to read and still want to read is the book he refers to a number of times, Many Different Kinds of Love.

One thing I say to kids is, ‘If you think of a thought as a ping-pong ball in your head – your head’s empty, and there’s a ping-pong ball bouncing around in there like it’s in a bottle, bing-bong, bing-bong – well, can you get the ping-pong ball outside your head so that it’s not making all of that noise? No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. He takes challenging experiences - death, illness - and discusses different ways people manage, and how he has managed in those different situations. Exploring the roles that trauma and grief have played in his own life, Michael investigates the road to recovery, asking how we can find it within ourselves to live well again after - or even during - the darkest times of our lives. Rosen's This Is Not My Nose: A Memoir of Illness and Recovery (2004) is an account of his ten years with undiagnosed hypothyroidism; a course of drugs in 1981 alleviated the condition.Moving and insightful, Getting Better is an essential companion for anyone who has loved and lost, or struggled and survived. It was delivered with good heart and humour, whilst acknowledging life's short straws one occasionally picks. Unlike the children around them, Rosen and his brother Brian grew up dreaming of a socialist revolution; Party meetings were held in the front room, summers were for communist camping holidays, till it all changed after a trip to East Germany, when in 1957 his parents decided to leave "the Party.