Although 2020/21 was a year to forget, it is most likely to be a year we shall remember more readily than others. In private response to the new public covid reality which has coincided with a sense that politically, socially and culturally we have passed through a watershed year, Tim Cawkwell has written a sequence of poems, IN THESE TORRID TIMES. They are fourteen in number, ranging from poems of one page in length to others of several pages. They include two Covid Odes, plus ‘Three Ages of the Nation’, ‘Empire with Chinese characteristics’, a letter to Dominic Cummings, ‘In praise of Norfolk’, ‘Johnson, Our Chief of Men?’ and a cricket sonnet.