Reading distractedly these days, jumping from one book to another, I’ve been hearing echoes. One pair of books that talked to one another as I read them at the same time: Bush Runner by Mark Bourrie and The Mirror and the Light, the third volume in Hilary Mantel’s trilogy of novels about Thomas Cromwell. Both circle around […]
When I started a plague blog three months ago, I was aware that if nothing much happened, the blog might feel pointless. Writing online demands constant hits of drama, or at least brattiness, and I can’t be bothered being a brat. Too much work. Yet over the past three months, I’ve seen more than enough […]
“Graphite found in England was originally used to mark sheep. Called ‘wadd’ in Cumberland, it was found in exceptionally pure form in Borrowdale near Keswick, where the mine was tightly guarded and where miners tried to sneak out with a ‘wadd’ in their mouths.” “Early Greek mosaic by Sosus of Pergamon, The Unswept Floor, shows […]
“The Mayan deity Ixchel is the goddess of weaving, medicine and childbirth.” “In Santiago Atitlán (Guatemala), the weaving of the backstrap loom is ‘born’ while it’s ‘made’ on a treadle loom.” “The praying mantis is one of the insects mostly frequently kept as pets.” I’ve been cleaning out old files lately, and found a small […]
I’ve spent the past week and a half watching and listening to marchers around the world protest the murder of George Floyd, the black man who was killed by a cop kneeling on his neck in Minneapolis. More than that. They’re protesting 400 years of racism. “Get your knee off our necks,” Al Sharpton said […]
I got an email yesterday from the academic in England I wrote about earlier, the one who thought he might have COVID 19. We’d been going back and forth about a monograph he’d written when he told me pretty casually that both he and his wife were showing symptoms of the virus. His daughter is […]
I made yoghurt again on the weekend. Our new yoghurt maker produces very good thick Greek yoghurt. I have to make a new batch every four days to keep the bacteria alive, but we usually eat it up in a few days anyhow. Across town, my daughter-in-law made her first loaf of sourdough bread from […]
I’ve been resisting war similes, but I’ve started to feel that what’s going on in Canada these days is something like the Phoney War. That’s the eight-month period after England and its allies declared war on Hitler’s Germany in September, 1939, and nothing much happened. Nothing much in the context of what would happen. War […]
Then there’s my 2020 New Year’s Resolution: to try to pace myself. Cue the laughter in the second month in lockdown. But the funny thing is, it’s still a problem, even though the reasons are profoundly different. I made my resolution after taking on too many commitments over the past year or two. Maybe three. […]
My New Year’s resolution for 2019 is proving hard to keep during the lockdown. In 2018, I vowed to stop wasting food, and that’s been working well. In 2019, I decided to stop using single-use plastic bags, visions of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch dancing in my head. But here’s what happened in the drugstore […]
I made a New Year’s resolution in 2018 that’s proving useful during the current emergency: don’t waste food. In the kitchen, as I write, a pot of stock is simmering on the stove, as it does every week. A couple of years’ worth of resolution builds habits. I now keep a bag in the fridge […]
Our English friend with COVID had been moved to intensive care, but his family felt encouraged yesterday when he was able to make phone calls to both his wife and son. He’s been there for two days, and we hope the specialists have helped him turn the corner. As well as COVID-related pneumonia, our friend […]