The speed reader in me completed this sentence with "with you" instead of "in your mind". So, yes, it came as a relief to realise it's just in my mind and I don't have to lug around any of the nice trinkets or whatnots that go for beautiful in my life right now.
Difficult times, yes and no. Repetitive, boring times more so for us. Slightly cabin feverish. But seriously, nothing to get worked up about. I had a bit of a row with a friend who lamented the trauma that #thecurrentsituation is inflicting on us. Really? I am not traumatised. Not by a long stretch. But the children, she cried out. Missing school, their career prospects, their social contacts, who will employ them in later life and so on.
Here is what I think. My father missed out on five years of school due to WWII. (Without internet access.) Instead, he was sent to dig air fields, harvest grains, bake bread and clean out stables. He stole stuff, he was often cold and food supply was poor. He also raised chickens in a broken shed, grew tobacco to sell on the black market and discovered his love for agriculture. After the war, he had to wait another year before school could start again. (Without internet access.) And without libraries or any teaching materials because all had been confiscated by the US army to check for nazi content - and why not. By the time he graduated from high school, he had to wait another two years before he could go to university because the returning war prisoners and refugees etc. were first in line. He spent these two years travelling from farm to farm, working and learning. He had a brilliant career as an agricultural scientist, a somewhat patchy one as a father and husband. He had his share of trauma but nothing compared to my mother, who also was an excellent scientist but a most disastrous mother.
When I asked him how his experience compares with what kids are living through right now, he was quiet for a while. I think, he said, I think we must always search for the lessons. There is always something to discover. Don't waste your time feeling sorry. And with that he put down the phone.
Don't get me wrong. I don't want to belittle anybody's fears and worries. I lie awake at night, too. I worry, I fret, I get angry. I am an expert at that. So here is my offer, try to carry something beautiful in my mind.
It was Johnny Cash's birthday last week. I have been a fan from early teenage years after I had stumbled on that recording of the concert in Folsom prison late one night when I had sneaked down to watch tv after everybody had gone to bed. In the 1970s, surrounded by serious Genesis, King Crimson, Led Zeppelin etc. fans, that infatuation was not something to share in public.
Oh. What we considered as troublesome then.
Whereas these days . . .
There's the vaccines, which seem to provide immunity of sorts - very hopeful first data - as well as mild disease course if infected and the potential - highly likely but too early to call - of limited or even halted transmission.
And then there's treatment options. Here is my brief and unskilled summary of a brand new publication on promising drugs to help those infected to recover.
SARS-CoV-2 is a novel coronavirus responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic,
in which acute respiratory infections are associated with high
socio-economic burden.
As a complement to the safe and effective vaccines against SARS-CoV-2,
the repurposing of existing drugs represents a pragmatic strategy for
the treatment of COVID-19 patients. Drug repurposing (drug repositioning) is advantageous in the face of rapidly-spreading emerging diseases.
Multiple ... clinical trials have been initiated in the search for effective treatments against SARS-CoV-2.
The individual drugs or combination treatments for these studies have
often been selected based on known activities against SARS-CoV, Ebola
virus, HIV or Plasmodium spp. ... However, the search for effective drugs against SARS-CoV-2 could extend
beyond known antivirals and anti-infectives ...
A team of virologists, microbiologist, pharmacologists, infectiologists etc.
... applied high-content screening to a well-defined collection of 5632
compounds including 3488 that have undergone previous clinical
investigations across 600 indications. The compounds were screened by
microscopy for their ability to inhibit SARS-CoV-2 cytopathicity in the
human epithelial colorectal adenocarcinoma cell line, Caco-2.
Cytopathicity is the ability of a virus to produce detrimental changes in cells. So here, over five thousand established drugs (compounds) that have been used and investigated for their efficacy in six hundred diseases were introduced, separately, to a specific human cell line. This cell line has been used in many drug investigation as it shows how and how fast a drug may enter the body via the small intestine. Basically, the Caco-2 cells are our stand-in in drug trials.
If you are not put off by detailed method descriptions of drug testing and the specifics of testing assays and all the technical stuff, this article reads like a thriller where step by step the villain is surrounded by the good guys.
First, anti malarial drugs:
Among the first group of drugs initially reported to show activity
against SARS-CoV were anti-malarial compounds such as chloroquine and
its close relative hydroxychloroquine,although larger ... trials indicated they were largely ineffective.
We found that ... other anti-malarial compounds ... were inactive ... whereas the chloroquine analog
mefloquine showed concentration-dependent activity at the highest compound concentrations.
Next, anti fungal drugs:
Our hits also included ... anti fungal compounds all showing ... effective concentrations ...
Then the HIV drugs:
Several drugs .. developed for the treatment of HIV ... suggesting a possible mechanism for inhibiting viral replication.
Then a couple of others:
(drugs used) ... for heart disease,
impotence, and psychosis, which also inhibit multiple strains of
influenza virus (and those) ... with anti cancer activity (and those) ... developed as oral drugs for the treatment of cancer or inflammation.
And, with stubborn dedication (my interpretation) they came closer and closer and - tada! -
...identified 258 hits that inhibited cytopathicity by
more than 75%, most of which were not previously known to be active
against SARS-CoV-2 ...
I don't have the first clue about what and how they did all this but I am beginning to love science.
As a side note, the promising drugs may include viagra. Not that it matters to me.
Any virus that can cause disease in humans must have at least one immune
evasion mechanism—at least one immune evasion “trick.” Without the
ability to evade the immune system, a virus is usually harmless.
Understanding immune evasion by a virus is frequently important for
understanding the (...) virus, as well as understanding
challenges faced by the adaptive immune system and any candidate
vaccine. In the case of SARS-CoV-2, the virus is clearly unusually
effective at evading the triggering of early (...)immune responses (...). It is plausible that much
of the nature of COVID-19 as an illness is a consequence of this one
big trick of SARS-CoV-2.
In an idealized example of a (...) viral infection, the (...) immune
system rapidly recognizes the infection and triggers “alarm bells”(...). This can occur within a couple of hours of infection.
In a SARS-CoV-2 infection, the virus is particularly effective at
avoiding or delaying triggering (...) immune responses (...) enough to result in asymptomatic infection (...) or clinically mild disease (“mild” is a COVID-19 clinical definition meaning not requiring hospitalization).
If the innate immune response delay is too long—because of particularly
efficient evasion by the virus, defective innate immunity, or a
combination of both—then the virus (1) gets a large head start in
replication in the upper respiratory tract (URT) and lungs, and (2)
fails to prime an adaptive immune response for a long time, resulting in
conditions that lead to severe enough lung disease for hospitalization (...).
These factors can be amplified by challenges of age, as elderly
individuals (...) struggle to make a (...) response quickly that can recognize
this new virus.
Although lung infection is a major component of severe COVID-19 (and
relatively slow), upper respiratory tract (URT) infection is important for transmission. Notably, a
vaccine that can prevent severe disease, or even most URT symptomatic
diseases, would not necessarily prevent transmission of virus.
The elderly present particular and important challenges for COVID-19
vaccines. Older individuals are at much higher risk for severe COVID-19.
One key feature of
vaccines is that immunization occurs well in advance of infection,
giving the adaptive immune system time to respond, expand, and mature.
Overall, the interim results from the two COVID-19 RNA vaccine trials
were virtually identical, with 94% and 95% efficacy and similar other
outcomes. The safety profile of the two vaccines is also excellent, with
a combined >70,000 doses administered and no serious adverse events.
. . . the biggest unknown now is probably the durability of the
vaccine-induced immunity. Because there is no licensed RNA vaccine, no
clear reference point exists for how durable immunity will be for this
vaccine. Are the antibodies durable? Is the T cell memory durable? Is
the B cell memory durable? Those are all important questions, and it
will take time to answer them.
And all of a sudden, spring. The blackbirds are singing their hearts out before sunrise and the woodpeckers are screeching and hammering. And there's what my father-in-law would call that good stretch in the evenings now.
All week the cranes have been returning and it's such a welcome sight and sound. This year more so than ever. When I heard the first flock, late afternoon on Monday, we ran outside to watch the enormous flocks high above in their V-shaped formations flying in from the southwest and I noticed that all the neighbours were out there with us and we all were gazing up and clapping and waving. I got on my bicycle and cycled along with them for a while. It was just the best thing.
In the garden it is winter aconite week. I found just the one snowdrop struggling between the thyme bushes, the last of hundreds which, according to the gardener, is due to shrews eating the bulbs and, according to my own humble opinion - which I wisely keep to myself -, due to the gardener digging up the bulbs because he is not fond of them, their messy green leaves taking up space after too short of a bloom. The gardener hates waste. We disagree.
There's just a bit left to harvest, like these fat fellows, which I roasted (cubed) with a bit of miso butter and honey.
Next will be crocus and grape hyacinth week and before we can take a breath, the full flowering orgy will be upon us. I have been reading about mast years and now have great hopes for the hazel and various plum trees this year after last summer's dismal harvest.
Meanwhile seed propagation is getting out of hand, we transplanted the first batches and they are now happy in the cold frame and the greenhouse but as always, there's more and even more and soon I will have to do a ring-a-round for takers.
The grandchild asked this morning, can you come to my house granny and granddad? And people, we laughed and held our breath for while.
18 February 2021
I keep trying to remember that all pandemics are finite. I wonder whether that's a consolation. So history shows that each pandemic ends one way or another. The Spanish flu ended in 1918, as WW I ended, because it was the war that got it going in the first place.
But it's a bit different with the covid. I read and try to understand and what I can figure out is that, yes, we need the vaccines, all of them, but we shouldn't put our hopes on that with a vaccine all will be well.
It doesn't help anyone in the wealthy North/West if we are all
vaccinated and the mutations then come to us from Africa because there
is a lack of vaccines there.
Most new infectious diseases are transmitted from animals to humans. In
recent years alone: Ebola, Sars, Mers, Zika. You don't need to be an
expert to see how this is due to the ongoing destruction of nature,
climate change, extinction of species, factory farming.
We humans penetrate ever deeper into the natural habitat of wild animal
populations. This increases the likelihood that new viral diseases will
pass from animals to humans. Even if the fight against this pandemic is
currently overshadowing everything, we have to face the larger
ecological crisis behind it at the same time.
This is a long-term epidemic, after 12 months, obviously so and it has and will continue to change society and daily life. That's a good thing. I read that the bubonic plague which killed at least a third of the population of Europe in the 14th century (??) is responsible for our concept of public health. Pandemic as formative event, so to speak.
People ask me what I miss most and I am at a loss. Travel, eating out, going to a bookshop, a museum, it all sounds so trivial and vain when I hear of terrible cases of long covid, of family members dying within hours of each other. Of course, I want to visit my daughter, my grandchild. But for much longer than this pandemic, we have been talking about how things were spiralling out of control, have been plotting ways and campaigns and actions to enable our children's and grandchildren's future on a livable planet away from the old destructive normal.
Because the old normal has put us here, I want to shout. Our silly arrogance, our superiority complex. Let's be a tad more humble here and take our place, our teeny tiny place on the planet with care and responsibility.
First the river flooded and it rained for ever an entire week, then the cold front moved in with an entire week of frost and sunlight and strong northerly wind. The house is pretty crowded with various potted lemon and fig trees sheltering indoors, the window sills are filling up with seed trays. We started six new varieties of tomatoes and a couple of peppers from a seed sharing group. This is what excitement looks like at the onset of year 2 with covid. On Tuesday, I had my first jab (Moderna). I admit that I was watching out for side effects but none appeared.
Yesterday, I just had to cycle, two no-bicycle weeks is a long stretch for me, and I wrapped up in very many layers but had to turn back after maybe six kilometers as my fingers were frozen numb and no amount of cursing and scarf wrapping and hood tightening could get that freezing wind out of my nose and face and neck. I never liked the cold. I don't even like the look of it, the godawful frosty sunlit crunchy lawn with all that stupid glitter.
My childhood winters were snowy and cold, long weeks of ice skating and tobogganing and skiing and snow ball fights. I didn't know it at the time, but I hated it. Truly hated it. What a miserable time! I was often the one who turned back first, walking home through the thick snow banks along the road, stumbling and crying. My feet white and numb, my mother sat me in front of two buckets, one filled with cold water, one with warm water, gave me her watch and I would stick my feet for five minutes first in the warm and then in the cold bucket and back and forth until they started to itch and tingle and come back to life.
While my siblings could not get outside fast enough, I welcomed every inkling of a sore throat or runny nose, any excuse to be allowed to stay indoors. Looking out into what my mother would call her winter wonderland garden, only let my heart sink. Still does.
I read somewhere something to the effect that we are confirmed, consoled and troubled by the landscapes through which we move in life and the places in which we live and have lived. About the ways our mood and our imagination and our identity has become influenced by the weather and the shapes and the textures and also the people, animals, plants, hills and shores (remembered and actual) of all the places we have inhabited.
It was always the sea I wanted. Even long before I knew much about it. It must have been from a book I read, maybe Pippi Longstocking's father in the South Seas, or one of those Sunday school missionary stories with pictures of children in fishing boats off the coast of Madagascar. Anyway, I would proclaim that I wanted to live by the sea. My parents were amused, what imagination she has and so on.
And then I lived by the sea, within walking distance to two different oceans, one after the other, one more spectacular than the other, for over a decade and it was just, well, normal. Then, I moved to this river valley, which was alien to me for so many years. Every aspect about life here was uninviting, the closeness, the dark hills, the way this big river cut across the landscape so carelessly, flooding and drying out in turn, messing things up. And for a while, occasionally even now, I so much wanted to be back by the sea, move away from what felt so claustrophobic at the time.
Yet, my parents and their parents, my grandparents, had no such longings. In their different ways, they were fiercely attached to a life that included forests and fields and orchards and riverbanks and carp ponds and vegetable gardens.
In her last years, when she was 100 years old, my grandmother, who then lived in a care home, would still oversee the apple harvest in her garden with angry instructions over the phone to my brother and cousins as to who would get how much and when and where to collect the windfalls for juice making. There were seven varieties of apple trees. I still know their names: Klarapfel, Gravensteiner, one early and one late Renette, Goldparmäne, Boskoop and Berlepsch. On one of my visits, the summer before her death, she scolded me for wearing flimsy sandals. Total waste of money, she told me, not made for walking and certainly useless for working in the garden. in other words, good for nothing.
Years ago, when I was very ill the summer after I had oral surgery, my father took me for a long drive through the hills and forests of Hohenlohe, an area just west of his Franconian homeland, where he had spent many childhood summers with relatives. As we drove through small villages with storks nesting on church steeples and past moated medieval castles, he pointed out the old apple orchards everywhere. See the wealth, the riches, he said. And he was not only referring to the soil that had produced such abundant trees for centuries. What he noted was the windfall apples. In fact, piles of it under every tree. There are so many apples this year, he told me, too many. The farmers won't harvest this year, not worth the effort, better to leave them rot, for the birds, the deer and the soil.
I could go on, memories of following my grandfather in his three-piece suit, his fob watch and walking stick with the shiny knobbly handle, while he walked deeper and deeper into the forest, pointing out adders and salamander skins, blue jay feathers and broken bird egg shells. My mother and her herb garden, her bean stalks and the way she could imitate bird song.
We are all shaped by the sound of wind, the slant of sunlight by streams of scent flowing faint or sharp in the larger ocean of air.
. . . in the pagan year, there is a ceremony or a ritual or something being
marked, every six weeks, across the year, and that that gives hope for
anybody who is currently suffering, because you are never far away from
the next moment when you can get together and when you can celebrate.
But also, it gives you a sense of time passing, which is really helpful
when you’re struggling, because time can begin to drag, and you can get
mired in hopelessness. But actually, you get a kind of marker of your
progress, so the next time that something comes up in the calendar, you
can feel how far away you actually are from the last time you
celebrated, and that that helps you to move through, and you can start
to look towards the next one, and a pleasure in the next one, perhaps,
as a way of dividing up those long months.
Time flies, Imbolc is past us. The German feast day on the 2nd of February is called Maria Lichtmess (Mary's candlemass), the day Mary blows out the candle that was lit by St. Martin in November - yet another pagan ritual customized by the churches. Godlovethem.
My Franconian grandmother would declare, an Lichtmess ich mein Brot bei Licht ess' (on the day of candlemass I can eat dinner by daylight). It is also my sister's birthday and we managed a polite phone call. Even laughter.
My year is usually split into quarter sections dictated by my health insurance. Every three months, I have to show my face and my insurance card to my GP to prove my existence and to collect prescriptions and referrals. And there's the one brief immunologist appointment every three months.
When I was first diagnosed with my shitty disease, I was in despair about this, waiting from one of these appointments to the next, the gap seemed enormous and so much could happen, what if I go deaf or blind or the kidneys pack it in or what if I die, until I finally accepted that checking on a chronic condition every three months or so is the way it's done. In between, nobody is holding your hand, you just have to make the best of it. (And you are supposed to keep a record of symptoms.)
So, you get quite blasé about it all after a while, you forget about the record soon enough, nothing life threatening happens, and by now you barely register the clumps of blood on your tissue every morning after your sinuses start to clear. Because even if it's a fair bit and has been going on for what, weeks, months (?), it's not a nose bleed, just lumpy stuff, and you know, it's crusts that count. Crusts, you have been told, mean vascular tissue damage, lumpy clumpy stuff is just plain boring bleeding sinus membranes.
Also, the digestive system can be far more variable than you were told to believe. Two weeks of painful bloating nausea is considered acceptable under the circumstances unless it's accompanied by constant constipation and, here we go again, blood. Don't bother to get alarmed.
And anyway, the date for the annual full colonoscopy/endoscopy is set (for June).
Fatigue? Brain fog? Rest is a good thing and don't expect too much at your age. After all, this is a chronic illness.
You scrape by, from day to day, to week to week, quarter to quarter. From Imbolc to Ostara to Beltaine to midsummer. On and on.
31 January 2021
My father now answers the phone with "And who is calling me?" and when I say my name and my greetings, he repeats my name, aha, Sabine on a Sunday, he calls out, and tells me his latest temperature and blood pressure readings. He has well and truly survived the covid infection without any of the expected symptoms. We proceed in the usual manner, he talks, I listen. This is his clever way to cover up the fact that he can no longer really hear what I say. When I make an attempt at conversation, shouting, whatever, he ends the call. Lately, he has begun to thank me for calling before he hangs up, which is most startling. I believe it's purely out of caution since he may not be entirely sure who has called him. Just to be on the safe side, could be someone else, someone important, not one of his children.
Many thanks for all the wonderful comments to my last post about decluttering. You have given me much to think about. The ideas of a bonfire send off was most appealing and I spent a few early morning hours setting the scene, but my family rejected my - already quite elaborate - proposal point blank as it would unnecessarily increase our carbon footprint.
I have therefore handed over all my grandmother's letters, the ones she wrote to
her children during the WWII years, to R for scanning. He has taken to
it with great gusto, archiving by year and month. He just informed me
that the letters from 1943 - 1945 appear to have been handled and
folded many more times than the ones after 1945. We speculate about how
many people may have read them and where and when. R wants to find
secret codes, suspects that my grandmother attempted to convey secret
messages to her two adult children, one a medical student working in field hospitals, the other about to desert his unit before walking
home across eastern Europe. I don't agree, this is not a war movie.
Here's hoping that his enthusiasm will not fade when I open the next steamer trunk.
Earlier today, we distributed another batch of books across the city's open public book shelves (?) or cases (?) whatever you call it. A friend had warned me that my books would not go to readers but that these places are "raided regularly by mean characters with the intention to sell donated books on the black market". Yikes! or rather, good luck, fellows! Whatever it takes.
It has been raining and snowing, today the rivers has bursts its bank. Not much but enough for headlines. On our way back from the book drop, we looked through the hectic wiper business into a grey and cold Sunday afternoon. A few more weeks, we reassured each other.
Maybe you should let be what has been, maybe you should let be what will be, maybe you should concentrate all your skills on what you have in front of you, on a few rust-red rocks, on a branch of that bush teeming with tiny lice that produce a bubbly, sweet sap?
For the past couple of months I made attempts at decluttering, not in the fashionable sense, I am not a minimalist or whatever, no intentions of creating space for new clear design ideas - the gaps here and there look quite hideous in fact. But for the time being, this is a lockdown space anyway. Who cares, I am not entertaining interior designers.
No it's all a precautionary measure after I read the story of the married couple dying of covid within days of each other. Plus the memory of the day, the morning, it didn't even take a day, after the old man across the road had died and the container which was placed under the balcony and two guys threw all the stuff, everything, sheets and books and china and the tv, into it, showing off their muscles. Also, my only child far away. Also, the virus restrictions. And more.
As of now, I am still at the stage where I take every item into my hands before it goes.
I sold a mountain of books I obviously will never read again, I immediately invested the money into food and wine, and just a few audio books. I donated another mountain of books to the various open access public libraries we have in parks and along the river promenades.
There are so many books left. I decided I'll give them a rest for the time being. In other words, I have reached the shelves with the poetry and the Irish authors and the German history (crime and popular fiction was easy).
Instead I am now digging my way through two large old steamer trunks (from my grandparents) full of letters and calendars and diaries. I found the big sheet of cardboard where R timed the contractions during labour and my breastfeeding diary with the weight chart of my premature baby. It's not an accurate record, just a jumble of sheets of paper filled with the scratchy handwriting of a overly tired woman in the early hours of nights spent nursing. I found the big fat sign we made when I started labour, the one I would read over and over and over again for the next 33 hours: "Rain after all is only rain, not bad weather. So also, pain is only pain, unless we resist it, then it becomes torment".
I am trying to figure out what to do with all that. The premature baby is long grown up and gone, with her own birthing and nursing memories.
This morning, I read a letter my brother wrote to me in the summer before my father did his disappearing act. I was far away on the other side of the equator then. He is not a man of many words, my brother, but there was that: "When she saw us arriving, she tried to walk out to the garden gate but tottered and fell on the way and my first thought was, run, but in the end, I put the kids back in the car and walked over to help her up. She stank of booze. Just be glad you are not here."
I put that letter back in the thick brown envelope where I had stuffed all his other letters, not many, but still.
Where should this go to? Paper recycle bin? Rubbish? Compost? I asked him, he doesn't want to have any of it.
. . . or as someone wrote somewhere on social media, finding solace in communal work songs of the perilous and beautiful sea.
12 January 2021
The living of life, any life, involves great and private pain, much of which we share with no one. In such places as the Inner Gorge, the pain trails away from you. It is not so quiet there or so removed that you can hear yourself think, that you would even wish to. That comes later. You can hear your heartbeat. That comes first.
Barry Lopez
As a follow up to my last post, which I wrote after reading that the writer Barry Lopez had died last month, I have been reading excerpts from his book Artic Dreams, which has been hiding under a layer of dust on our bookshelf.
And then I found these very moving interviews with him online. (Please be aware that in one of them he talks about being sexually abused as a child - and his recovery.)
In the beginning of the first interview, he mentions that he had just come out of the Grand Canyon where he had spent time with musicians. This is one of the pieces of music from that experience.
Evidence of the failure to love is
everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us
up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage
the havoc—ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government
corruption, endless war—we have to reimagine what it means to live lives
that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted
hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper
conversation about enchantment and agape*, and to actively explore a
greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas—the crushing
immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life-destroying belief
that to care for others is to be weak, and that to be generous is to be
foolish—can have no future with us.
*agape (ἀγάπη) means unconditional love, it stems from the Greek agapan(ἀγαπᾷν), which translates as greet with affection, receive with friendship
This came to mind when I read what Beth wrote a few days ago: "When we rise up against one another, with our righteousness, there is a darkness that overcomes us."
Let me list a couple of nice things that happened in the last week.
I called my top bosses on Thursday and told them that I want to work from home because, the virus and they said, sure, stay where you are. I have been working two days/week on campus since October because, morale and look what others are risking.
The grandchild has figured out that their name is connected to being an individual person and when asked - which we do ridiculously too often - who's that?, will reply matter of fact with full name and a slight shake of head as in, who are you to have to ask. Also, the repertoire of hand puppets has grown to include a baby owl. (Looks good on whatsapp.)
And this:
After AM sent me her 12 mandalas, I made them into a calendar with the help of an online photo service and today, this came in the post. It hang on the wall above my desk. The picture is shaky. It's a white background with a beige coloured frame. The size is A4.
Reasons to be cheerful. Stay healthy.
05 January 2021
It's grey, grey, grey and cold. We are arguing. About the same handful of issues that usually come up from time to time and have been around for the last 40 years. I banged a couple of doors on my way to the bike shed and cycled for 15 fast and furious kilometers along the grey river just before it got dark. Back home, my fingers were so numb, I swear I could have snapped the tops off and the bits of my hair that had escaped the hood were frozen.
There was tea waiting for me.
A week ago, my father was tested positive for the virus. When my brother messaged me, I was at work in my lonely office on campus, not a soul in the adjoining rooms, and for a second, I was afraid, I might die right here on the spot with no one to find me for hours, days. But only for a second, because I quickly realised once again that I am fully grown up, in fact, an adult for now well over 40 years and that he is a bully and a rude old man who walked out on my mother in the deepest night.
Anyway. He has no symptoms. He is 92 years old and lucky for him and us, one of the staff at his care home was able to replace the batteries of his TV remote control. So all is well. He is in isolation which means, meals are brought into his room and he does not need to roll himself to the dining area.
We set up a phone call rota but he immediately figured out that ruse - obviously - and told us to Get A Grip. Also, we cannot remember him ever being ill - apart from his collection of fractures after various falls in recent years and the odd upset stomach due to the wrong food/drink intake - no fever, running nose, cough, sore throat. Not him. He told me today that he certainly never missed a day at work, that sickness was for ninnies (like me).
I have been reading up on the virus mutation(s). As it stands, the vaccines will remain effective. And well, if you don't like the vaccine, try the disease.
We must slow the spread. Especially now as vaccines are rolled out. The more
transmission, the more opportunities for the virus to roam and mutate and evading immunity. And more mutations could mean less vaccine efficacy.
We are in a new phase of the pandemic. Much will depend on how well and how rapidly the vaccinations take place, but also whether we as a society manage to act in solidarity - masks, distancing, the whole taking care of each other shebang, and most likely, for months.
We have just been informed that the lock down has been extended until at least the end of January.
In the days before smartphones and tiny headphones for children's ears, our car travel with a child often involved all of us listening to cassette tapes of children's stories while we navigated our way towards or back from holiday destinations.
There was a lazy spring afternoon driving along the back roads between Siena and San Giminiano listening to the adventures of Bilbo Baggins, long hours on French motorways with James and the Giant Peach, and a dark rainy evening drive back from Dublin with The Wind in The Willows.
Now, The Wind in the Willows has charmed us all, but on tape, we only had an abridged version of "stories from" etc. which was good enough at the time but when S started to read she discovered with surprised outrage that we had "missed huge parts" of it.
Especially, chapter seven, which to this day, is omitted in some versions, too much mysticism.
What happens in this chapter is Mole and Rat searching for Portly, the youngest otter, who has gone missing. They search most of the night and just before dawn find him asleep at the feet of the piper at the gates of dawn. The piper is of course, Pan, the god of the wild, of nature and of all who roam in and upon her, humans, animals, alone or in herds.
You can read it here, it's just gorgeous. Or you can listen to the gentle voice of Mike Scott from The Waterboys here:
This is January 2021, we have work to do, people. Not just get the vaccine and keep our fingers crossed. Our home, our planet is on fire, we need to wake up. When my grandchild is old enough to read this chapter, I want to be able to say that I tried my hardest.
25 December 2020
Be Kind
Not merely because Henry James said
there were but four rules of life—
be kind be kind be kind be kind—but
because it's good for the soul, and,
what's more, for others, it may be
that kindness is our best audition
for a worthier world, and, despite
the vagueness and uncertainty of
its recompense, a bird may yet wander
into a bush before our very houses,
gratitude may not manifest itself in deeds
entirely equal to our own, still there's
weather arriving from every direction,
the feasts of famine and feasts of plenty
may yet prove to be one, so why not
allow the little sacrificial squinches and
squigulas to prevail? Why not inundate
the particular world with minute particulars?
Dust's certainly all our fate, so why not
make it the happiest possible dust,
a detritus of blessedness? Surely
the hedgehog, furling and unfurling
into its spiked little ball, knows something
that, with gentle touch and unthreatening
tone, can inure to our benefit, surely the wicked
witches of our childhood have died and,
from where they are buried, a great kindness
has eclipsed their misdeeds. Yes, of course,
in the end so much comes down to privilege
and its various penumbras, but too much
of our unruly animus has already been
wasted on reprisals, too much of the
unblessed air is filled with smoke from
undignified fires. Oh friends, take
whatever kindness you can find
and be profligate in its expenditure:
It will not drain your limited resources,
I assure you, it will not leave you vulnerable
and unfurled, with only your sweet little claws
to defend yourselves, and your wet little noses,
and your eyes to the ground, and your little feet.
Midwinter. We are entering the Rauhnächte, as they are called here. The twelve nights between years. The year of the moon has 354 days, ending on midwinter.
The year of the sun 356. These are the missing twelve days and for some mythologies, these are dead days, with the laws
of nature out of order and the borders to the other world,
the magic world of spirits, wide open.
I am not great on any magic, the spirit world has never been inviting. But there you have it, some things are bigger than what my tiny brain can come up with, I admit as much. The knowledge while here in the Northern hemisphere, we are struggling and trying to make sense of that on these dark cold nights, my grandchild picks strawberries and runs along a sunny beach in the Southern hemisphere, provides a different, cheerful magic. I can live with that. Gladly.
Just a reminder:
We cannot successfully contain the pandemic and save lives if we do not give up some quite a lot of things in our lives at the same time. And we all have to act in this way without having convincing answers to all of our questions.
The number of cases, the number of deaths and the amount of research on this have undoubtedly shown one thing: the fewer the contacts each individual has and the less time we spend in social settings, the sooner this pandemic will come to an end. It is not a matter of chance. It is in our hands. We are not the masters of our fate alone here.
Our capacity for denial is stronger than our capacity for belief. We
find it easier to not face the truth. We go on living our ordinary lives
while refusing to believe the overwhelming evidence that our way of
life is self-destructive. A prisoner of the past, we go on doing things
which we know are killing us. Worse, we believe that the inevitable
conclusion of all our deeds will not come to pass. We think that
somehow, at the last minute, there will be a miracle, a magical
solution. We possibly even hope that factors in nature we hadn’t
considered will somehow wipe clean the slate of our cultural and
environmental crimes.
Ben Okri
I could've done worse than read this story by Ben Okri (link here, go on it's excellent).
But only barely so. The title is inviting but seriously misleading for all of us who believe we are on top of things and superior to, say, the common fruit fly. Reading it did all sorts of things to me, I cried, I admit that much.
To counteract any feelings of hopelessness, I am listening to/watching a live performance by the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra directed by Daniel Barenboim. They are playing Beethoven to celebrate the composer's 250th birthday. Beethoven was born a few miles down the road from where I sit right now and this concert comes live from our city's opera house.
The musicians sit spaced safely apart, they all wear masks, apart from the woodwind and brass players. Daniel Barenboim plays the piano and does not wear a mask, he shed a few tears during the Largo (second movement of Beethoven's piano concerto no. 3).
I am not particularly attached to classical music (I wrote about why this is so here) but I like the idea of it being a freebie (thank you covid) and that I can do some editing, i.e. paid work, while listening.
And I also think highly of Daniel Barenboim.
We just had a break in performance and now Mr Barenboim is back with a mask on and we're off with the do do do doo at the start of the fifth symphony. In another lifetime, when I was just about to become a rebel, I had to write a school essay on the second movement of this symphony and the ongoing motif with its apparent sunny nature and its source (a Franconian folk song, I kid you not) in contrast to the fateful tone of the first movement. It all comes back to me now. Honestly, school! Now, today, I can finally use this knowledge. After all the trials and tribulations of the past almost 50 years. Here we are, thank you Beethoven, thank you secondary education.
Actually, the second movement is quite lovely to listen to.
11 December 2020
Do you remember the happiest day of your life? What about the saddest? Do you ever wonder if sadness and happiness can be combined, to make a deep purple feeling, not good, not bad, but remarkable simply because you didn't have to live on one side or the other?
Ocean Voung
We are entering the darkest days. The next six weeks, three before and three after midwinter. When I was a child, this was a time of silences, in the 1960s in Franconia, there was snow or sleet, dark forest, early evenings with advent candles, baking, lots of baking, no commercial xmas jingle bell clutter. Not yet.
This winter will also be a silent one as we are about to enter a hard lockdown, probably until mid January.
I don't mind the darkness of winter, I can cope with the cold, foggy weather. I am a grown up, I know it's really just a short few weeks. But I admit that we are tense, unsettled. Trying to find the right words to explain this feeling, all that I can come up with is that I am sad. We are living through the saddest days, the saddest time. And I don't just mean the pandemic. We are a hopeless species, really. Let's face it. We've made a mess of things.
While I was reading what Robin wrote today about kindness and the wonderful poem "Small Kindnesses" (here is the link to that post), two things came to mind.
The first thing is the ongoing research by Felix Warneken, professor of psychology at Harvard University, and Michael Tomasello, anthropologist and behavioral researcher at the Max Planck Institute in Leipzig, Germany.
They have been investigating altruism in human infants and compared it to altruism as shown by young chimpanzees and then developed this further to figure out more about altruism as a human trait or whether it's a learned thing and so on.
There are lovely videos online of their research experiments where they looked at how small infants react when faced with adults in a dilemma.
Recently, they carried out another, particularly impressive, experiment, examining the influence of extrinsic motivation, such as praise, on the helpfulness of young children.
They had three groups of small kids for another experiment where an adult showed that help was needed (similar to what is shown in the video above): the children from the first group received no response to any help provided, the children from the second group were thanked and the children from the third group even received a reward.
They did that a couple of times and then they repeated the test without giving any reaction or reward to any of the kids in the three groups. This is what happened:
The first group, the children who initially had helped and never received a response, continued to show a very high level of helpfulness.
The second group, the kids who had received a "Thank You", showed a minimally reduced level of helpfulness.
The third group, the kids who had been receiving a reward, showed a significantly lower level of helpfulness.
In other words: An unconditional willingness to help had turned into a conditional willingness to help. In technical language this is called the corruption effect.
But because most societies are convinced that children are not naturally helpful, it seems imperative to create an incentive - i.g. parents give their children money to help in the household or, believing that children are naturally lazy, pay them for bringing home good grades.
(I could go on about household chores, which are mostly repetitive, boring jobs we adults assign to kids because we think they are dummies who need to learn, but that's for another day.)
The second thing that came to mind is another study investigating honesty and selfishness in adults. This experiment was carried out in 40 countries involving 17,000 people and the results were published last year (here).
Briefly, "lost wallets" containing varying amounts of money were handed in anonymously by the researchers at various public and private institutions (hotels, libraries, banks, post offices, shops etc.) and then it was examined whether the recipients did in fact contact the owners to return the wallets.
In every country, whether in Asia, Europe, Africa or America, people were more likely to return the wallets that contained a higher amount of money.
The researchers concluded that these were "acts of civic honesty, where people voluntarily refrain from opportunistic behavior" despite "monetary incentives to act otherwise".
And on a final note: Occasionally, the university clinics I work for run low on blood plasma and we all receive emails encouraging us and our families and friends to donate blood. Several times people have suggested that if the clinics would pay people for this there would not be a shortage.
Not so, there have been many studies that have shown again and again that the number of blood donors will decrease if the donation is rewarded with money.
If half of us believe the earth is flat, we do not make peace by
settling on it being halfway between round and flat. Those of us who
know it’s round will not recruit them through compromise. We all know
that you do better bringing people out of delusion by being kind and
inviting than by mocking them, but that’s inviting them to come over,
which is not the same thing as heading in their direction.
Some of us don’t know how to win. Others can’t believe they ever lost or
will lose or should, and their intransigence constitutes a kind of
threat. That’s why the victors of the recent election are being told in
countless ways to go grovel before the losers. This unilateral surrender
is how misogyny and racism are baked into a lot of liberal and centrist
as well as right-wing positions, this idea that some people need to be
flattered and buffered even when they are harming the people who are
supposed to do the flattering and buffering, even when they are the
minority, even when they’re breaking the law or lost the election.
from one of the best essays I have read in recent times, more here: Rebecca Solnit
Our little Meyer lemon tree as of this morning. We have been harvesting for weeks and still no end.
And here, for all the fans of bitter plants belonging to the genus Cichorium, is the buttery heart of catalogna puntarelle di Galatina deep inside its rocket-fennel-liquorice tasting leaves. It's a bit of a task to grow and we are mighty proud of our harvest.
There are the three positive aspects that carry me through these strange times. One, I am an old hand at this, living as a social recluse more or less for the last ten years. Two, for many years, we, that is R and me, have developed the fine art of close (grand-)parenting, despite the vast geographical distance between our dinner tables. And three, my father is a staunch defender of - what he calls - civilised conversation versus wimpish physical expressions of emotions.
It helps. I am not at a loss, or at least not more than usually, when I think of my once weekly phone call with him, all properly civilised, while listening to a friend's tearful lament because she misses hugging her dad. And later, I mention this over whatsapp to my daughter, who nods her wise nod, while we cheer the grandchild jumping over sofa cushion mountains on the other side of the planet.
It's not ideal, but nothing is.
In the evenings, I wrap myself in a blanket and listen to the latest science podcast on the pandemic, to the eager voices explaining vaccine studies and virus mutations and protein sequencing and viral loads and it all washes over me like a soothing lullaby. In the early days, way back in spring, I would take notes and read through the scripts and references, trying to squeeze understanding into (out of?) my mediocre scientific brain capacities. Now, I just feel reassured that there are people who will not give up, who love research for the sake of it. And sometimes, I imagine these scientists coming home to their families after a long day, maybe playing with their kids for a while before dinner.
By now, admittedly, I just want us to make it through in one piece. There is one unconfirmed case in the care home where my father lives. The infection rate here is beginning to decrease ever so slightly now that we have completed our first week of the November semi lockdown, but it's too early and the number of Covid patients on the intensive care ward, two floor above my office, has tripled in as many weeks. Still manageable, but only just about.
"The pandemic is not an inevitable fate. We determine by our behavior whether the situation gets worse or better.
. . . personal freedom cannot be achieved in isolation from society. In order for the freedom of all to be maintained, it is in turn necessary that people stand up for one another and take responsibility for one another. The better it works, the less intervention and regulation is required.
The pandemic has shown how relevant this principle is. The more I act responsibly as an individual of my own free will, the less reason I give the state to intervene in social life. The more thoughtless and selfish I act, the sooner the state has to restrict my freedom in order to effectively protect the community as well as the well-being of other people."
There are several reasons presidents cry.
Anyone who has ever had one and been up half the night with it – or all
the night with it, night after night – can tell you this. Sometimes
presidents cry because they’re tired, sometimes they cry because they
need their nappy changed, sometimes they cry because they don’t want you
to leave them, sometimes they cry because they have a gnawing pain in
their tummy, and sometimes they cry because they’re just being
impossible that day and you should probably go to bed and leave them to
it but somehow you just can’t.
To anyone going through it currently: this phase will pass. Of
course, a crying president demands incredible amounts of attention, and
while you’re in the thick of it, consumed by this, it may feel like it
will never stop, or at least you won’t make it out.
For parents of small children, and also for anyone who has ever seen a
small child behave badly in the supermarket or the street, the thing we
are watching on TV now is extremely, totally, instantly recognisable
even to the very young. The big orange guy is angry because it is not
his turn any more.
When my brother called me early on that one morning in August 1999, to tell me that she had died in the night, I was relieved. Hugely relieved. It was over, I was free. Finally.
I have a memory of that day, of myself dancing, slowly swinging my body around by the open patio door, humming along to some imaginary music, raising my arms into the hot summer air. But maybe that was just in a dream. My boss at the time gave me a week off and warned me to take it easy, that no matter what, I would be shattered. It's the hardest experience, he warned me, the death of your mother. His words. Not mine. I wasn't shattered. Not then, not now, not once since her death.
There was no funeral, she had donated her body to science. She announced this decision the same way she always announced her threats, of starving herself to death, of jumping off the roof, in front of a train, down a bridge, swallowing ground glass, or sharpening the fruit knives. Nothing was ever without drama, nothing was ever normal. This one, she followed through. We did not stop her.
There was a short memorial service, siblings, a cousin, a neighbour from long ago, one of my brother's old school friends. As expected, my father didn't come.
For a child of an addict growing up is hard work. It marks you. It marked me, for life. Something sitting inside my chest that will never lift. Never allowing me to feel good enough. The smell of stale cigarette smoke coming from a woman makes me wish I could walk away. If I can, I run. But most of the time, I stay, try to be polite. Try to be good. Always trying to be good.
It has taken me years to understand that my mother had not simply been a careless addict but that she had been suffering beyond my comprehension. That all her angry rants, her harsh punishments of our never ending faults, her endless physical ailments, imagined or real, always headaches, back pains, colicky stomach, her inability to eat a proper meal while at the same time forcing us to finish what's on our plates, all her special diets and bottles of medicines on the kitchen window sill beside the full ashtrays, that all of that was part of something so much bigger.
I have no name for it, I cannot call it depression, sometimes I tend to call it PTSD. And under my breath, behind closed doors, I whisper, the war, the war. While just as easily, I could whisper, the nazi childhood, or, the glass ceilings all along her way, or, her 1960s unhappy housewife valium and martini days. Or. Or. Or.
But what I can say now, one month before my 63rd birthday, what I know with certainty is that it was not my fault. I played no part in it. I just happened to be one of her kids. And it has taken me, oh, so many years to understand and accept that.
Addiction is a disease. But
often we don’t see it that way. We see only the bad
behavior, the actions that wound and betray us. And yes, she did all that. And I admit that much. The wounds will never heal.
In sickness, you’re too much with yourself. The whole body burns with memory, the volume of sensation is turned up. You are filled with an excess of remembering. Your skin, wherever you touch it, says “I.” There are muscles here, yes, there are nerves here, yes, there is pain here.
Then the illness subsides and you go back to self-forgetfulness.
But for the chronically ill, this is what cannot be forgotten. Every square inch of one’s body is at all times crammed with "I," with self.
Teju Cole
I am an old hand at this, I should think. But it floors me every time something happens that triggers a flare up. Which is where I am currently finding my miserable self. The usual coping mechanisms are in place, dividing up the day into tasks and rest and floating in between these stages with equal degrees of anger and resignation. Autumn does not help, not my season, neither is winter. I could go on.
And I hate myself for it, this over dramatisation of the person I think I am and the futile attempts to pretend I am not. The anger that rises up inside my head when I watch someone about my age being active and fit. The futile attempts to pretend I don't care. That lesson in my childhood socialisation training, the one about cheer up and who do you think you are compared to others who are far worse, it sticks. I crawl to work and pretend I am superwoman.
As for the covid, it feels like an oncoming tsunami at times, despite the detailed information we receive. Numbers are climbing, even the shittiest tabloid has by now dedicated a front page to what exponential growth means and why it happens and what we need to do to keep it as low as possible - and why.
The virus only survives because we host it. It floats in the air because we send it there. It's a people thing.
The test came back negative, the head cold went into overdrive. I am getting better. I think. I cut R's hair today, I made breakfast. The numbers are climbing steadily, the city is quiet, I have been told.
Here’s the thing. If you buy into a false narrative that the body is
controllable, that illness can always be prevented, you better realise that you have reached a damaging, erroneous conclusion: the belief
that a person’s ill health is their fault. And regarding a pandemic, we better learn that this virus is bigger than what we think we can explain in our imagination and arrogance.
Anyway, this is for all the sorry sunshines in your lives:
This is Winston Peters, a very conservative, right wing NZ politician. Currently deputy PM but on his way out. Still, he got it.
As we walked through this sunlit forest, I once again felt such betrayal, such loss. How can we ever again call a forest like this one by its name? Beech forest, Buchenwald. (They chose that name for a reason. The monsters in their leather coats and shiny boots.)
That was two weeks ago. Now, autumn has arrived, I am looking for my cycling gloves and we turned on the heating. Autumn could be lovely if only it wasn't a gateway to winter.
I am unwell and eventually called the covid hotline, on a Friday evening, no less. In the past, this would have been a bit of a blocked nose, no fever, sore throat, headache, shivers sort of scenario. But apparently, I tick too many boxes. Now waiting for my test slot, while R hovers at a distance with cups of tea.
We’re all hurtling through our lives, and the planet is hurtling through
space without a seat belt. We have to discover successively more
freedom inside the terrible things that have happened and the terrible
things that certainly will happen, and the whole of it is also a
mysterious splendor, full of kindness, welcome, and cups of tea.
As for the other news, I leave you with this, because, whether he's ill or not, whether he knowingly passed the virus on or not (and in my humble opinion, he did), whether it matters or not that the news broke after the stock market had closed for the day, stay focused:
First, let me say that I am fine with Trump being called a fascist
because he is using fascist tactics, and it's a word that resonates with
the public. We need a wide, inclusive, and resolute American opposition
movement, and this word conveys the necessary urgency.
But I've
largely called him an authoritarian or autocrat instead of a fascist
because "fascist" implies loyalty to the state. A fascist wants to
embody and expand the state and usually has imperial ambitions. Whereas
Trump wants to destroy the U.S.: he wants to strip it down and sell it
off for parts to both domestic and foreign backers. His cohort's
ambitions are similar to what oligarchs and other hyper-capitalists did
to the U.S.S.R. after its collapse — which is not surprising because the
Kremlin and an associated network of plutocrats and oligarchs are the
prime backers of this operation.
If you vote the present monster out of the white house, we will play this at full volume for I don't know how long, and we'll dance in the street. And not just because we are old hippies.
Promise!
One thing I know—and this is the central paradox of COVID-19—is that
despite the isolation, we are not alone. The pandemic has brought about a
sense of shared human consciousness and experience. A friend emails to
say: “I find I’m beginning to tune out the politics of it and get more
into the humanity of it.” Maybe this is what COVID-19 means: a
referendum on humanity. A societal performance review.
This week has been somewhat tough, despite holiday rest. I did have that long overdue shingles vaccine on Tuesday because heaven forbid I catch a case of shingles while living in my isolation cocoon. But then again, R had it out of the blue this time last year and the friendly GP has been reminding me ever since.
So, with such splendid fatigue and a grand potpourri of aches and pains, I try to remind myself that, yes, this body is still my own.
Most days, I try to make a joke since after all, I have been working really hard to be one of those people who seem to live through all of this with courage and humour. And sarcasm. Don't forget sarcasm, that handy disguise of despair.
Anyway, don't try this at home, it doesn't work.
In the absence of any further cohesive thought from me, I will just paste a couple of things I have picked up along the way.
Half way through my two week September holiday - and still more to come! A week each in October, November and December. The beauty of German civil service regulations.
I don't miss a thing, apart from maybe a visit to the seaside. I mostly sit on the patio, R's voice drifting out of his office upstairs, explaining to some (un)fortunate final year student the intricate workings of cell membrane structures, around me the busy noises of the retired neighbours exercising their expensive gardening tools.
I crawl out of bed every morning in disbelief that this body is actually me. Morning stiffness is a glorious euphemism. This is when dawdling comes in handy. Slow dawdling.
And so I fill my time with pleasant useless stuff until eventually, my limbs begin to respond to my wishes, at least enough to push the bicycle out into the world and get a move on. I have slowly but purposefully increased my daily distance to a now staggering 20 km, which is still a crying shame compared to my healthy past self. Anyway, must take things as they are. By the time I am back home, triumphant and sore, inflamed tendons screaming, more dawdling awaits.
And thinking, trying to explain the world in my head.
In no particular order, this is what's swirling around:
1. The covid conspiracy theories - there are people I know, who really truly want to believe that the world is good at its core, that all power lies with nature. And now this evil nature dishes up a creepy virus. So it must be someone else's fault. I have given up any desire to discuss this. I admit I have avoided phone calls.
2. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through
our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that
democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.
(Isaac Asimov)
3. Garden. Here is one blossom from each of the currently flowering plants. As of today. We are inundated by wasps this year and we have completely surrendered one apple tree and most of the grapes. They feed on it in a frenzy for a day and end up dead on the patio stones. In other words, they are starving. It won't last much longer.
4. Sir Ken Robinson died in August. I was a great fan. Watching this talk always brings me back to my student days, when I still had dreams of changing the way children are educated - something I soon realised as utopian on a grand scale. Anyway, listening to him still makes me a tiny bit hopeful.
5. I had to agree have been told to reduce my home office work and, after this holiday, will have to go back working on campus for two days a week. My GP is not amused. In theory, there is a strict hygiene protocol incl. airing the room every 30 mins which I can just see happening in the winter months. Not.
6. I leave this here for general perusal (for source click here). When I am in my office, I'll be in the yellow. But currently, only 40 cases in my city.
Risk
of SARS-CoV-2 transmission from asymptomatic people in different
settings and for different occupation times, venting, and crowding
levels (ignoring variation in susceptibility and viral shedding rates).
Face covering refers to those for the general population and not high
grade respirators. The grades are indicative of qualitative relative
risk and do not represent a quantitative measure. Other factors not
presented in these tables may also need to be taken into account when
considering transmission risk, including viral load of an infected
person and people’s susceptibility to infection. Coughing or sneezing,
even if these are due to irritation or allergies while asymptomatic,
would exacerbate risk of exposure across an indoor space, regardless of
ventilation.
7. We are in for another heat wave, apparently.
8. This week's music is in memory of R's parents, who taught this to my daughter one day driving back from the beach.
