Seven Days in black and white.
Life Under Lockdown
Month: March 2020
Another slice of pangolin anyone?
Now I like eating meat. But over the last few years I have really cut down, particularly on processed meat.
Diving convinced me that eating fish is unsustainable and wrong and so despite loving it I have all but cut fish out of my diet.
Now this article has made me stop and think even more about this issue.
It’s a short piece about how eating pangolins may have been the vector for CORVID-19 between bats and humans.
It is not proven but it is interesting.
https://apple.news/AKepZ8wk9TXeXupN_yrmh0w
Now I don’t eat, crunchy on the outside chewy on the inside, pangolins and I bet most people I know’s first reaction is ‘that’s just weird why would you eat that?’.
(Well my friend John would and probably relish the thought, he sees the world as a culinary adventure and seems set on eating everything and anything providing the Chef has a Michelin Star or two but that’s another story).
The point here is not to judge, as honestly, is eating pangolin any weirder than eating chicken or goat or lamb or pig or cow?
Why is one animal ok and another not?
Cat anyone?
Where’s the line?
In the UK we were horrified to find we had been fed horse. It is better for you than beef and the French are not so squeamish about it.
Our views on this are just cultural conditioning!
My question is about the practice of killing and eating pretty much anything with a face.
And this is before we even start considering the horror that is the mass farming of animals and how they are slaughtered.
The mass farming that is the perfect Petri dish for breeding disease.
Keeping and eating pigs gave us swine flu, chickens bird flu, bush meat looks likely to have been the origin of HIV/AIDs, red meat is linked to cancer, over consumption to obesity and diabetes.
Mad cow disease anyone?
Eating bats, snakes or pangolin seems to be linked to our current pandemic.
Spot the pattern?
It really should make everyone stop and think.
It has me.
Just from a farming / environmental perspective the impact of mass commercial beef alone is insane the amount of water used to produce the meat for one hamburger is enough to produce tones of plants and beef farming has led to mass deforestation in Brazil all in the name of profit. The very air we breath!
Just watch this documentary about beef if you are not sure:
I am not against beef or beef farmers I just raise it as an illustration of my point. After all we transport lamb around the world, we keep chickens in horrific conditions.
I get that in the past we hunted or husbanded animals on a small scale because we needed the protein but there was a balance.
One that clearly no longer exists.
When we used to keep animals ourselves and took responsibility for their care when we killed and butchered them ourselves and did not eat meat for every meal, maybe it was better, maybe there was more compassion.
When you raise an animal and slaughter it yourself there is a connection. A respect. One that is missing as we open the plastic wrapped packaging of generic ‘meat’.
Mass farming and the commoditisasion of meat is awful. Our all consuming meat addiction is awful.
Before you tuck into that next slab of meat pop on a video of an abattoir in action.
Watch and enjoy while you eat.
The whole habit of eating meat has been carefully sanitised to make the horror palatable.
When was the last time you got blood on your hands?
Think about it, our meat is carefully exsanguinated to ensure it does not offend our sensibilities, to remove us one more step from that realisation of what we do.
Just ask a child where there dinner came from, so many have no clue.
Many adults are just the same, many are wilfully ignorant, choosing not to think about it. In the ‘West’ we have been socially conditioned this way for years.
Most of us have become so disconnected from what meat really is. By the time meat reaches us we have been so completely, institutionally and culturally brainwashed that we don’t even think about what we are putting in our mouths.
‘I like it’ is not enough.
The argument for eating meat is untenable.
We can after all get all the protein we need from plant based foods.
Poppy went vegetarian about six months ago and managed the switch really well, I think I shall join her.
Lockdown Store Cupboard Curry
Now I don’t mind admitting I’m pretty good at curries but tonight’s effort was soooo good and really easy:
Drain two tins of chick peas (you could use great Northern beans)
In a bowl mix:
one big glug of olive,
one finely chopped medium onion,
one small tin of tomato paste,
3 tablespoons cumin,
1 teaspoon turmeric,
5 tablespoons curry powder,
5 heaped table spoons of garlic powder,
a teaspoon of dry chillies (for more heat add a few more)
5 heaped spoons of crunchy peanut butter.
Optional: a knuckle of finely chopped ginger, a splash of lime juice and coriander to give it a Thai flavour.
Mix in the chick peas place in a large covered pot over a medium heat, add quarter of a cup of water or coconut milk/cream and let it reduce.
Serve on brown rice or with a naan bread dressed with a handful coriander.
It was easy but turned out oh so well and it all got eaten!
Lockdown
It has been a strange few weeks.
Like the rest of the world we have been gripped by the relentless spread of Corvid-19.
We have watched in horror as the virus has gone from an epidemic to a pandemic.
We have watched countries all around the world go into lockdown.
We have watched with morbid fascination as lives have been placed on hold.
We have watched hospitals and health systems overwhelmed.
We have watched as it crept closer. Until finally it was here and now we are going through the now familiar rituals of a society infected.
The pattern here has been a carbon copy of other countries first, hand washing, then social distancing, school closures, shops emptied and finally lockdown and life is paused.
This is the new normal everywhere and here.
Cayman’s schools have been closed for a week and look set to be closed for another six. 16th March until 27 April.
Teachers have been tasked with working from home. We have had to find ways to provide some continuity of education for our students.
The technological solutions adopted in many countries simply will not work here. Homes just don’t have the same technological infrastructure.
In some schools the levels of poverty means that the communities do not have access to the internet. Distance teaching through Zoom or Teams is not a viable option.
For other families, with both parents working from home, older siblings preparing for CXCs, Caribbean GCSEs, the youngest simply do not get a look in. They do not get computer time.
So we have a mishmash of work packs being put together. These are supplemented by WhatsApp and Facebook conversations with class teachers.
WhatsApp Web has been a Godsend, enabling teachers to interact with students and parents in real time sharing files and videos.
We had our first staff meeting by Zoom on Friday. It went well, lots of laughter, shared ideas and everyone glad to see each other.
But you could sense the worry that is a universal constant, another new norm.
Fear is everywhere you can feel it, you can smell it and if it wasn’t for the social distancing you could touch it.
Rumours and disinformation are rife, no one trust the government and conspiracy theories are fanned by verifiable behaviours. Stories straight out of the tale of Guy Fawkes!
Pubs, restaurants, churches salons, and shops are shut. Cruise ships are banned, the airport is closed. Everyone is working from home and social isolation is the order of the day.
It’s like living in a ghost town. The sea normally busy with floating cities is empty. The sky bridge to the world is silent, no planes arrive or depart. We are cut off from the world. Extreme self-isolation on and island wide scale.
In this new quiet birds sing and in the last two days we have seen an eruption of butterflies. Clouds of them everywhere with flights of swifts gorging on their bounty.
People sit and contemplate, books are read, music is played. We cook and bake turn our hands to new distractions.
Today James and I turned our hands to cutting each other’s hair. Well, the barber’s is shut.
Much talk among the church communities is openly of the ‘End Days’ and ‘Signs’.
Living in such a fervently religious community one fact of life is that the Bible is a living thing and provides a frame of reference for understanding daily and world events.
2020 has brought us environmental destruction, earthquakes, fire, the news of swarms of locusts in East Africa, famine and now a plague.
For religious minds it is more than reminiscent of Bible stories it is the embodiment of prophecy.
To those of a secular philosophy it is strange but here it’s part of life. Faith is lived, belief is reality.
It adds a level of complexity to the way people are responding to the events around them and at a time when so many believe we are living in ‘the time’ churches have had to close their doors.
One of the few things you can do, at the moment, is dive. The virus does not spread underwater or in highly salt saturated environments.
As you can imagine this weekend I have spent a lot of time underwater.
I have managed four dives in two days.
Perfect isolation and an antidote to the endless news cycle.
Oh and we had two earthquake both around 4.5mag.
The first on Sunday while we were underwater. We were at about 40 feet and the sea was crystal clear then for no apparent reason the sea suddenly went cloudy as the sand was stirred up it was quite spooky.
The second was Monday evening at 9:00pm.
Under an Endless Sky 