Characteristic humour courses through this emotional illustrated book about the writer’s battle with Covid-19

“Uh-uh! A cave! We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. We’ve got to go through it!” Like the children in his best-known book, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, Michael Rosen has been through it. With a writer’s ability to extract something from misfortune, he has become Covid-19’s frontline spokesperson, go-to survivor, man who nearly did not make it. It is not a role anyone would gladly choose. He has been interviewed on television, been the subject of Radio 4’s The Reunion, has written newspaper articles and now this book. Even at the beginning of the pandemic, Rosen was interviewed on Radio 4’s Today programme in reaction to a tweet in which he protested that older people’s lives were being undervalued. What he did not know then was that he had already contracted Covid-19 himself.

He describes what it is to feel like no one – reduced to a bag of bones, his hearing shot, his left eye not functioning