Day 6 [21 March 2020]: COVID-19 Lockdown: Survival kits/Home-made Remedy [an extract from the diary]
I thought it may be useful to share this extract from my diary, as I have just made a second batch of home-remedy this morning – to boost the immune system. My parents and I have been ‘on it’ for the last two weeks!
Prevention is better than cure.
If you are a “gingerholic”, “lemonholic” or “honeyholic” – this is it! According to BBC – under the section of ‘Will honey, lemon and ginger ger rid of a cold?’ – “for those of us keen to keep our cold cures natural and delicious, a hot drink containing honey, lemon and ginger has to be top of the list.” The common cold weakens the function of the immune system – and one needs to keep it up now more than at any other times!
1. Ingredients
If you fancy doing it, all you need is:
– fresh ginger
– lemons
– honey
My proportions can be seen from the picture above: I do not follow a recipe – it is a word-of-mouth recipe – and I balance the proportions based on what I have available. This time I had approx half a kg (a pound) of ginger, 3 and a half large lemons, and there were about 7 large spoons of honey left in the jar. One could add more lemons and honey!
For the final result, I got out two smaller jars and a bit leftover, which I mixed into the honey jar.
2. Method
1. Peel the ginger with a potato peeler.
2. Use the grater – not for lemon (left-hand side in the picture) but for parmesan (my London one does not have the parmesan option, but I have a separate one for that – if not available, use the side you do Chedder grating. It will come out in bigger bits like my first attempt some years ago, but it was drinkable).
3. Grate lemon peel, and then squeeze the lemon.
4. Add honey to the mixture.
5. Put the mixture into jars, and store them in the fridge (the last time I did this stuff was 5 years ago and it was fine in the fridge for a month, by which time we drank it all).
3. Use
1. A teaspoon or two – depending on how strong you like it, as ginger has a burning sensation like horseradish – mixed with a glass of water.
2. We do one glass at breakfast time!
[P.S.]
And when in Rome, do as the Romans do.
My morning drink is matched by my mum’s home-made remedy (see below) every morning: a ration of one teaspoon of the ‘stuff’ as a leftover from 2 years ago, while she is preparing a new batch as an emergency relief! My parents and I started ‘this habit’ two weeks ago – at 10 am – but every day it gradually became earlier and earlier – today it was 8 am! It is a lockdown after all!
Such types of home-made remedies are prepared over the summer months – so that they are ready for consumption when colder weather comes in later on in the autumn! The ‘stuff’ is actually based on schnapps – the Germanic and Central European alcoholic beverage made out of different fruits as many people distil it at home! It is what people have been doing for generations! My parents buy schnapps from a local farm, but then they turn it into various medicinal liqueurs by soaking other ingredients in it, such as herbs, meadow flowers, fruits (blueberries), nuts (walnuts) or honey and so on. As in this one (below) – flowers and leaves of wormwood (Artemisia absinthium) are soaked in and exposed to the sun for a while before being ready. One makes anise-flavoured spirits out of this flower, like the French absinthe, but, in these parts of the Alps, it is very popular to produce home-made pelinkovec. Unlike the absinthe, schnapps and pelinkovec do not get beyond 40% alcohol (I think!), but the mixture, with wormwood leaves, is used as a home remedy for various medicinal uses, including indigestion and for infectious diseases!
Day 3 [18 March 2020]: COVID-19 Lockdown: Design/Why Fonts Matter [an extract from the diary]
I finally did some useful work today as I wrote a short review of Sarah Hyndman’s Why Fonts Matter for Amazon — this book is for everyone, for design professionals and those who are interested in visual culture and want to learn in a fun way ‘why fonts matter’!
I had purchased the book so that it could join other art material that travelled from London (just on time) by the kind help of my ex-colleague Marko – with the intention to have a sneak-peek into Sarah’s work while I was getting ready for my type-led workshops based on poetry in association with the International Day of Poetry (21 March), which was meant to take place today. Hopefully, we can find another slot, should I happen to be in Slovenia then!
Sarah Hyndman’s book is amazing! I’ve known about Sarah’s passion for and knowledge of typography since attending her Experimental Typography classes at the London College of Communication in the mid-2000s, and as I have recently been preparing two sessions of lectures and workshops on hand-made typography-based on poetry for school and university students, so I thought it was high time I got hold of a copy of this book.
I was more than eager to find out more about Sarah’s extensive research by experiment on how type can set the mood, reveal one’s personality and appeal to our senses. I was especially intrigued by Sarah’s innovative approach of looking at the type ‘sideways’, which is similarly how people respond emotionally to works of art through sensory perceptions without knowing the context. Who would have thought that type can cry, laugh, shout, smell, and can be sad or happy, or even aggressive or calm?
I love in particular the section on the edible type, as that is exactly the kind of idea my two workshops will emphasise: the importance of bringing life skills from all areas into the design process. I often hear kids asking, ‘why do I need to learn this or that, it’s of no use, it’s so boring, whatever!’ With such an excellent book on hand that shows everything from the punk and grunge to the neat and tidy, they may perhaps believe me when I say that design is important!
Day 0 [3 March 2020]: 13 Days before COVID-19 Lockdown: Albert Camus/The Plague/Human Behaviour [an extract from the diary]
There have been many plagues in the world as there have been wars, yet plagues and wars always find people equally unprepared. […] When a war breaks out people say: ‘It won’t last, it’s too stupid.’ And war is certainly too stupid, but that doesn’t prevent it from lasting. Stupidity always carries doggedly on, as people would notice if they were not always thinking about themselves. In this respect, the citizens of Oran were like the rest of the world, they thought about themselves, in other words, they were humanists: they did not believe in pestilence. A pestilence does not have human dimensions, so people tell themselves that it is unreal, that it is a bad dream which will end. But it does not always end and, from one bad dream to the next, it is people who end, humanists first of all because they have not prepared themselves. – Albert Camus, The Plague (1947)
When the Covid-19 was starting to come closer and closer to ‘home’ – as the epicentre moved from China to Italy in February – I must admit I started to panic! As of today – when I read this interesting article on Italy’s response to the coronavirus, titled “Epidemics Reveal the Truth About the Societies They Hit”, written by Anne Applebaum, and published in The Atlantic yesterday – the coronavirus is still being classified as an epidemic by the WHO [PS: the WHO declared it pandemic on 11 March]. Applebaum takes Albert Camus’s good and evil characters from The Plague and compares them to the current context of the coronavirus crisis:
‘A pestilence does not have human dimensions, so people tell themselves that it is unreal, that it is a bad dream that will end,’ Albert Camus wrote in The Plague. This, of course, very much describes the current situation: Many people cannot bear the idea that something invisible can change their plans. Published in 1947, The Plague has often been read as an allegory, a book that is really about the occupation of France, say, or the human condition. But it’s also a very good book about plagues, and about how people react to them—a whole category of human behaviour that we have forgotten.
The novel – the image (above) of the cover from Vintage edition of 1991 – is believed, according to Wikipedia, to be based on the cholera epidemic that killed a large percentage of Oran’s population, a small town in Algeria, in 1849, following French colonization, but the novel is placed in France in the 1940s.
The Plague is considered as an existentialist classic, similar to Kafka’s work, in particular, The Trial, where “individual sentences have multiple meanings, the material often pointedly resonating as a stark allegory of phenomenal consciousness and the human condition [Wikipedia].” Not only has The Plague been read as an allegorical treatment of the French resistance to Nazi occupation during WWII, but also how the world deals with the philosophical notion of the Absurd.
Camus wrote the novel about everyday life under quarantine for the inhabitants of Oran. It takes the reader through various questions related to the nature of destiny and human conditions. The book is a perfect display of characters as ‘human types’ – from politicians to doctors and holidaymakers to fugitives – all showing the effects the plague has on their psychology and how they respond.
Villains – like a priest – exploit the uncertainty of the humanitarian crisis as a tool for manipulation to enforce through their ideological agenda, where, for instance, the priest uses the plaque to increase his flock. As Applebaum says: “He tells his congregation that the epidemic is God’s way of punishing unbelievers.” She adds: “In modern Italy, the first person to seek to manipulate the anxiety created by the coronavirus was Matteo Salvini, the Italian far-right leader who immediately called for the government to shut the country’s borders, stop all public meetings and keep people home.”
Heroes, on the other hand, are, however, not the kind of heroes – superheroes or role models one finds in other fiction or movies – but are the doctors and the volunteers who help them, or even, as Applebaum says: “a civil servant, Monsieur Grand, who seeks to deal with the plague by recording it, measuring it, and keeping track of what has happened: ‘This insignificant and self-effacing hero who had nothing to recommend him but a little goodness in his heart and apparently a ridiculous ideal. This would be to give the truth its due, to give the sum of two and two as four.’ Grand, Dr Rieux, and a few others try to use science, transparency, and accuracy to contain and control the disease and to save as many people as possible, without giving in to hysteria or despair: ‘It may seem a ridiculous idea, but the only way to fight the plague is with decency’.”
I agree with Applebaum, who adds:
These are the kinds of people who will be the heroes in our era, too. The scientists and public-health scholars who immediately put out information about numbers and cases; the research teams that immediately began to work on vaccines; the nurses and doctors who immediately decide to remain inside quarantined regions, as many did in Italy, as well as in Wuhan, China. Not all of their judgments will be correct, and they will not always agree with one another: There is no precise way to determine which quarantines and cancellations are prudent and which are unreasonable, given the potential economic effects on the one hand, and the real desire to slow the spread of the epidemic on the other. In Italy, there have already been a few public squabbles among virologists who have different estimates of how bad the disease will be. … But at least they have the public’s interest at heart.
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