Sunday 25 October 2020

A Use for Fennel and Other Successful Kitchen Experiments

This blog is called the barbarians are hungry for a reason: I love to eat! Here are some new recipes I have tried over the past few months.

August

  1. Aloo Gobi from Masala
  2. Fennel and Pork Stir Fry from Chicken and Rice
  3. Gavurdagi Salatasi from Persiana
  4. No-Churn Rhubarb Condensed Milk Ice Cream from Chicken and Rice
  5. Banana Pancakes from Good and Cheap

To keep things interesting: in August, I took a lot of walks, and on one of these I met Bert. Must check what Bert is up to for Hallowe'en...

A skeleton wearing a white lab coat and holding a sign 'Bert says...Feeling' hot, hot hot!'

September

  1. Extra-Fancy Egyptian Ful Medames from Home is a Kitchen
a woman wades in the surf on a sandy seashore
In September I saw the North Sea for the very first time.

October

  1. Life-Changing Cinnamon Tahini Cookies from Sweet Potato Soul
  2. Jingha Sukha Pulao from Masala
  3. Cornmeal Molasses Pancakes from Heartland
  4. Lamb Raan from Dishoom
  5. Caucasian BBQ Flatbreads from Mamushka
  6. Apple Oatmeal Cookies from The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days
  7. Apple and Currant Oatmeal Bars from The Hummingbird Bakery Cake Days
  8. Potato and Leek Pizza from Good and Cheap 

Metal sculpture with a speech bubble reading 'Eeek'
Discovered a statue for our times in a park in my neighbourhood. Eeek indeed!
 
I've made the fennel and pork stir-fry at least twice since the first time I tried it, and recommend it highly. Don't go out of your way for fennel? Me either! I find it a tricky vegetable to use up when it appears in my biweekly vegetable box--I like it raw in salads, but haven't enjoyed it cooked, so I was delighted to discover it is delicious in the following southeast Asian-style stir fry.

 

Fennel & Minced Pork (Pad Ka Prao)

Minimally adapted from Chicken and Rice by Shu Han Lee. 

Serves 2-3 people.

You will need:
  • 1 small fennel bulb (I use both the bulb and the fronds, if they're attached)
  • 2 tbsp oil
  • 4 cloves garlic, chopped
  • 200g minced pork (aka ground pork, 200g is roughly a cup and a half)
  • 1/4 tsp chili flakes, or a 1-inch square block of chopped frozen chilies from the freezer (I've never made this with fresh chilies, but suggest you go by your own spice tolerance in deciding how much to add)
  • 1 tbsp fish sauce
  • 1 generous tsp oyster sauce
  • a generous pinch of brown sugar (it's fine without it)
  • a big bunch of basil leaves (this is supposed to be Thai basil, but I use the only kind I can find in our grocery stores, regular old Italian basil, and it tastes good. You could also try fresh coriander/cilantro.)
  • an egg per person (optional)

To make:

  1. Put rice on to cook--I typically boil my rice, using a 3-to-1 ratio of water to rice grains. For a meal and leftovers, I typically use a cup of rice and 3 cups of water.
  2. Wash your fennel and chop it into bite-sized pieces. I usually chop off the fronds, set them aside, chop the bulb, and then add the chopped fronds after the bigger and thicker pieces have cooked a bit.
  3. Heat your oil in a frying pan and add the chopped fennel bulb. Add chopped garlic, and fennel fronds if you have them.  Stir-fry until it all smells nice, just a few minutes. If using frozen chopped chili, add it here.
  4. Add in the ground pork, using a spoon or spatula to break it into much smaller pieces. 
  5. When the meat is just abut cooked, add in chili flakes (if using); then add fish sauce, oyster sauce, and sugar. Add about 1/8 to 1/4 cup of water, which helps make a nice sauce.
  6. Remove frying pan from heat and add in basil leaves. Mix them in until the residual heat from cooking causes them to wilt.
  7. If you are using ordinary white rice, and started cooking it before chopping your fennel, it should now be finished cooking. Dollop some on a plate and top with stir fry. Fry egg(s) in the pan, and top each plate with a fried egg.

Sunday 18 October 2020

What are wantos? An investigation of medieval mittens

Gentle reader, how are you doing? Is it cold where you are?

Here in the flatlands of England, it's been hovering around 10-12 degrees (the low fifties Fahrenheit) for the past few weeks--just a little bit colder and I'll be wearing mittens every time I leave the house. This week I'm trying to finish a review of Ian Wood and Alexander O'Hara's translation of Jonas of Bobbio's Life of Columbanus. Columbanus was a cantankerous seventh century Irish saint who spent his life founding monasteries, standing up to royalty, and deploring the state of Christian observance in Gaul (where he moved permanently early in his career). In this post, I want to leave Jonas' colourful and opinionated account aside, and focus on a question of true interest: is this the first medieval Latin text to mention mittens?

Our evidence from Jonas is the following:

Another time when he (the blessed Columbanus) had come to eat at the aforesaid monastery of Luxeuil, he laid his gloves, which the Gauls call wantos, and which he was accustomed to wear when working, on a stone which was outside the door of the refectory. As soon as it became quiet, a raven, a thievish bird, flew up and snatched away one of the gloves in its beak. After the meal, the man of God went outside to get his gloves. When everyone was wondering among themselves who could have take [the glove], the holy man declared that no one would dare touch it without his permission except that bird which was sent out by Noah and did not return to the ark. And he added that the raven would not be able to feed its young if it did not quickly restore what had been rapaciously stolen. Then, while everyone was waiting, the raven flies into their midst bringing back what it had stolen in its wicked beak. And it does not attempt to fly away again, but humbly in the sight of all and forgetful of its wild nature awaits punishment. The holy man instead orders it to depart. [Wood and O'Hara, Life of Columbanus, pp 126-7]

The thief! "Raven" by Sergey Yeliseev is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0

As Wood and O'Hara note in the footnote, the term they translate as gloves is literally tegumenta manuum ('covering for the hands'); they say that the local word, wantos, 'becomes the modern French 'gants'' and that Jonas remarking on this different shows 'that he was writing from an Italian perspective' (p 126 n 186). Jonas was a monk from the northern Italian town of Susa, acquiring the sobriquet of Bobbio as that was the monastery where he entered religious life, and later in his career he spent some time working as a missionary on the northeastern borders of the Frankish kingdom--so from his perspective Frankish vocabulary was new and interesting, and worth defining for someone who might not know it.

What exactly is he describing here? What are wantos?

Firstly, despite my initial excitement about mittens (I had just started knitting a pair when this passage caught my eye), Jonas probably isn't describing knitted mittens. There are two reasons for this. Firstly, Jonas never describes the specifics of the hand coverings. Clearly, it was something durable: the chapter this miracle is included in contains two other miracles, all of them concerned in some way with outdoor work: one of which involves the miraculous healing of someone who accidentally cut off his finger with a very sharp sickle, the second a man who was healed after being struck in the forehead by a bit of debris while splitting wood; and then finally the miracle we're concerned with, where the type of work isn't specified, but the fact that Columbanus left his tegumenta manuum on a stone outside suggests muck of some kind was involved.

Secondly, if the mitten was made of yarn, it likely wasn't knitted. As far as can be seen from archaeological discoveries of Viking-era and early medieval textiles, the most popular technique for making fabric out of sticks and string was naalbinding (or nålebinding), which uses a thick needle with a large eye and short lengths of yarn to form a knit-like fabric through looped needle netting. Below is an example dating from sometime between the tenth and the twelfth century.

Mitten made by naalbinding (looped needle netting) out of brown yarn
"Medieval mitten, National Museum of Iceland" by Lebatihem is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.

Jonas was writing in about 640--can we find a mitten closer to that date? The answer is yes--a woolen mitten dated from between 600 and 800 survives from Aalsum, in the Netherlands; and a mitten discovered at Dorestad, an important early medieval port near Utrecht, dating from between the seventh and the ninth centuries, was evidently deliberately felted to make it warmer and impermeable to wet and weather.

a brown woolen mitten

Mitten from Aalsum (Fries Museum, object nr. FM 33-374).  Picture from the Twitter feed of the archaeologist Annemarieke Willemsen, who has written extensively about medieval gloves and hand-coverings.


brown fingerless mitten from Dorestad

Mitten found in Dorestad (National Museum of Antiquities Leiden, object nr. WD375.3.1)

It's difficult to tell, but it looks almost like the Dorestad mitten has a top flap which might fold up over the fingers to allow the wearer greater dexterity. And there is a final consideration too: depending on the work Columbanus was doing, he might have found leather wantos rather than woolen ones a more comfortable and practical choice.

The waterlogged conditions at a sixth or seventh century Alamannic cemetary at Oberflacht, in southwestern Germany, preserved a wide array of wood, textiles, and leather--including, in the Grave 17, a set of leather gloves, described in William Wylie's translation of the 1847 German publication of the excavation,

No 17 contained a couch [wooden coffin]. In it were a singular pair of leather gloves, strongly laced on the back of the hand, and lined inside with a soft cloth, almost perished.

 Wylie's article is accompanied by engravings but the gloves are sadly not among them. For a few pictures of what they might have looked like, Tomáš Vlasatý's 'Early Medieval Mittens' rounds up some interesting images (here)

When I went looking for other uses of the word wantos in the Monumenta Germaniae Historica (a freely available collection of editions of late antique and early medieval Latin texts), I discovered that what few mentions of wantos there are also appear to involve stories of them being stolen. The word appears in the Life of St. Philibert of Jumièges, Ch 12, which seems to be from mid-eighth century; and the Martyrology of Wolfhard of Herrieden, Book Three, Ch Four, which dates from c. 895. Both stories involve the miraculous prevention of the theft of gloves. A further reference also gives the sense that wantos were valuable: the Constitutio of Abbot Ansegisus of Fontanelle, (c. 823/833), lists a pound of gloves (ubantos) as one of the items the abbot gave to the monastery.

We began with the question of whether Columbanus' wantos are the first medieval Latin text to mention mittens. The answer to this question is both yes and no. As far as I can tell, this is the first medieval text to use the word wantos--it clearly wasn't a common word, and all other uses seem to be later than c. 640, when Jonas was writing. On the other hand, it's not entirely clear whether wantos is best translated as mitten (or glove), as none of the writers who use the word reveal whether the hand covering has separate fingers. Surviving examples of early medieval hand covering suggest that it didn't, making it likely that Columbanus' wantos was a mitten.

One thing is clear from the unexpected theft and return of Columbanus' mitten (or glove). Like handknitted mittens today, wantos were valued, and it was a miracle indeed to have a missing one restored.

Further Reading

Elizabeth Coatsworth and Gail Owen-Crocker, Clothing the Past: Surviving Garments from Early Medieval to Early Modern Europe (Leiden, 2018)

Ferdinand von Dürrich,  and Wolfgang Menzel, Die Heidengräber am Lupfen (bei Oberflacht) (Stuttgart, 1847). Available from http://mdz-nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bvb:12-bsb10003615-7.

'Gloves and Mittens from the Past', Medieval Histories (12 January 2016) Available from https://www.medieval.eu/gloves-and-mittens-from-the-past/ [accessed 18 October 2020]
 
Satu Novi, 'Viking and Medieval Nålebinding Mitten Replicas', Katajahovi (2017). Available from http://www.katajahovi.org/en/viking-and-medieval-nalebinding-mitten-replicas.html [accessed 18 October 2020]

Tomáš Vlasatý, 'Early Medieval Mittens',  Projektu Forlǫg (19 January 2019) Available from https://sagy.vikingove.cz/early-medieval-mittens-and-gloves/ [accessed 18 October 2020]

Annemarieke Willemsen, 'The Geoff Egan Memorial Lecture 2013: Taking up the glove: finds, uses and meanings of gloves, mittens and gauntlets in western Europe, c. AD 1300–1700' Post-Medieval Archaeology 49:1 (2015), 1-36.

Ian Wood and Alexander O'Hara, Jonas of Bobbio: Life of Columbanus, Life of John of Reome, and Life of Vedast (Liverpool, 2017)

William Wylie, 'The Graves of the Alemanni at Oberflacht in Suabi' Archaeologia 36, (1855), pp. 129-168. (If you are interested in reading more about the Oberflacht gloves, I wasn't able to find a copy online, but Siegwalt Schiek's 1992 thesis Das Gräberfeld der Merowingerzeit bei Oberflacht looks like the best place to start).

For addutional roundups of archaeological discoveries, survivals, or depictions of medieval gloves and mittens, see the roundup at Medieval and Renaissance Material Culture (here); a shorter list can be found at The Viking Age Compendium by Gavin and Louise Archer (here)

And finally, because they're too amazing not to share, here is a pair of late medieval knitted gloves, made for a bishop in Spain.

Sunday 11 October 2020

The Value of Learning Latin from Medieval Authors

Three and a half years ago, when I was planning my first ever Latin classes, I stumbled upon Dorothy Sayers' essay about her struggles with learning Latin. I am an enormous fan of Sayers' erudite and readable murder mysteries, in much the same way that I am captivated by the novels of Dorothy Dunnett; there is something wonderful about an author who wears immense learning visibly yet lightly. Also, they're just good stories, full of the complexity of humanity.

Sayers delivered the speech 'Ignorance and Dissatisfaction' at the 1952 Summer School of the Association for the Reform of Latin Teaching; it can be found in various places on the internet now, but few people who post it acknowledge that Sayers was confessing her ignorance of Latin to an audience of Latin teachers, not the easiest crowd in front of whom to admit mistakes, then or now.

Statue of a woman wearing a hat and skirt suit, with a cat brushing by her legs
Dorothy L. Sayers, with friend, in Witham, Essex

Sayers began learning Latin at six years old, taught by her clergyman father, who had previously been a Latin teacher to the small boys ('small demons with angel-voices') at the school of Oxford Cathedral. Sayers' recapitulation of her childhood reactions to moving from memorising the declension of nouns and the conjugation of verbs into more advanced features of the language, is worth enjoying in full:

...the Active Voice, always friendly, except for a tendency to confusion between the Future Indicative and Present Subjunctive of the Third and Fourth Conjugations (the rot always seemed to set in at the Third Anything); the Passive Voice always lumbering and hostile ; the Deponents lurking meanly about, hoping to delude one into construing them as Passives; verbs like fero, so triumphantly irregular as to be permanently unforgettable ; verbs with reduplicated perfects of a giggling absurdity — peperi was always good for a hearty Victorian —and defectives, which were simply a mess. It is a nostalgic memory that I could at one time recite the whole table of irregulars without more than an occasional side-slip ; and I still remember at utor, fruor, vescor, fungor are followed by the ablative, when any more generally useful fragments of knowledge have slipped to Lethe and vanished.

By this time, of, course, the girls, the poets and the roses had upped into the background. We marched with Caesar, built walls with Balbo, and admired the conduct of Cornelia, who brought up her children diligently in order that they might be good citizens. The mighty forest of syntax opened up its glades to exploration, adorned with its three monumental trees—the sturdy Accusative and Infinitive, the graceful Ablative Absolute, and the banyan-like and proliferating Ut and the Subjunctive. Beneath their roots lurked a horrid scrubby tangle of words beginning with u, q and n, and a nasty rabbit-warren of prepositions. There was also a horrid region, beset with pitfalls and man-traps, called Oratio Obliqua, into which one never entered without a shudder, and where, starting off from a simple Accusative and Infinitive, one tripped over sprawling dependent clauses and bogged one’s self down in the consecution of tenses, till one fell over a steep precipice into a Pluperfect Subjunctive, and was seen no more.

As a young woman from a solidly middle class Victorian clerical family, Sayers had a governess and studied other languages as a child and teenager--German and French. She recounts that her growing fluency in reading and speaking these languages led her to prefer them.

To do a degree at Oxford in Modern Languages (women were only officially granted Oxford degrees from 1920 onwards, so Sayers' 1915 degree was awarded retrospectively), students of the first world war era were required to pass examinations in Greek and Latin. Sayers recounts managing to scrape through these experiences, and then starting to forget large pieces of the language in being preoccupied with other things. At the same time, though, her participation in choirs which sang medieval music left her with an awareness of

the shimmering, spell-binding magic of the mediaeval Latin

After twenty years of learning Latin, Sayers writers, she was left uncertain how to pronounce the language (having been taught multiple versions), unable to compose her own Latin prose or verse, and unable to comfortably read Latin, let alone distinguish the characteristics of different authors. And yet, she robustly defends the usefulness of Latin, for four main reasons:

  1. Latin Grammar teaches its students how languages work: they are consequently better able to write clearly, since English grammar is far from intuitive
  2. Something like half of English vocabulary has Latin roots, so someone who knows Latin has access to a wider and richer vocabulary
  3. Knowing Latin makes learning other Romance languages, or indeed any inflected language (that is, a language where grammatical meaning is conveyed by varying the endings of words) vastly easier; or as Sayers puts it: 'Why should a child waste time learning half-a-dozen languages from scratch, when Latin would enable him to learn them all in a fraction of the time?'
  4. It helps the reader make sense of allusions and Latin phrases she encounters in reading older European and English literature. (Or indeed, for the modern students, the formulas of exorcism on Supernatural, spells in the Harry Potter books, or memorial plaques in churches or public buildings...)

Sayers concludes her speech with a series of recommendations for teaching Latin in such a way as to avoid her own difficulties with the language.

Of these, the least useful is her ironclad insistence that students must begin Latin at the age of six or seven, an age where she claims they are interested in the work of memorisation that is the backbone of fluency in reading. I didn't start learning Latin until just after I turned twenty; most of my students have been at least this age if not older. While scientific research on language acquisition has only gotten clearer since Sayers' day--it is easier, faster, and of longer-term benefit to acquire multiple languages as a child--the arrow of time flies only one way.

Her suggestions for pronunciation, since this was her own insurmountable hurdle to the language, are helpful. In particular, she points to the fact that anyone who speaks a Romance language is likely to be guided in their pronunciation by the conventions of this language, and it gives the speaker something familiar to hold on to. Sayers discusses some of the practical difficulties (not very many) of English pronunciation for beginners, and suggests that the use of ecclesiastical pronunciation is the way forward. 

In my own teaching, I typically default to pronouncing Latin as though it were Italian, since this is the first foreign language I learned; occasionally I am influenced by Latin I've heard sung in churches. Some of the vowels are undoubtedly wrong, but it at least means I am saying each letter or syllable that I see on the page, which I personally find helpful. I find French a bloody nightmare to read or speak, since I can never keep straight which letters I'm supposed to say and which I'm supposed to swallow, never-mind what those letters should actually sound like...! Because pronunciation can be a sticking point for some people, I encourage my students not to worry too much about saying things 'wrong'; the important thing is to get them out aloud, and then we have something to work with. As Sayers advises, consistency is the main thing to avoid confusion.

Sayers is on to something with her recommendation that students start their Latin with texts that they can read comfortably--avoiding an immediate dive into Virgil or Ovid or other authors from the time of the emperor Augustus. Firstly, these authors are way too hard, and second of all, they are far removed, culturally, from anything with which students can reasonably be expected to be familiar. Sayers' suggestion, instead, is that the rich field of medieval Latin--over fifteen hundred years of literature, mind--is a sensible starting point. For one thing, it's closer to modern languages in sentence structure and construction, and particularly for adult learners, it simply makes more sense to start with the modern form of a language and then work one's way back to its ancient versions.

Sayers advocates for speaking and writing Latin as a way to learn it. As someone who is abysmally bad at crossword puzzles and could be beaten by a dog at Scrabble, this is the sort of mental gymnastics my brain flails at. But I was made to do it as an undergraduate, and make my students do it anyway--for one thing, it humanises the language, and for another thing, it is the best way I know to make one's understanding of grammar and vocabulary absolutely ironclad. Someone can come up with the correct Latin-to-English translation without really understanding what they're doing; it simply isn't possible to do the reverse. Plus, the sense of achievement it gives is unparalleled.

the metal base of a street lamp in Lincoln, painted green
A side benefit of learning Latin is that once you know it, you start to see it everywhere

 For students of Sayers' own generation, and the students of the teachers she was speaking to in 1952, language learning was a routine part of becoming an educated person. One thing I commonly hear from my students (especially British students) is that they just aren't any good at learning languages, as though one either has it the way some musicians have perfect pitch, or one doesn't, and without this gift access is forever denied. (One can see the ancestor of this thought in Sayers' speech, where she describes herself as someone with 'the gift of tongues.')

I don't like this thinking, not least because I consider myself to be in the same boat as those students. I am a native English speaker and can fumble reading or speaking five more: French, German, Italian, Latin, and Old English. And I wish I were better than I am at all of them. My issue is one that I expect actually lies at the root of many other people's insecurities about their linguistic abilities, a la this scene from Pride and Prejudice:

'My fingers,' said Elizabeth, 'do not move over this instrument in the masterly manner which I see so many women's do. They have not the same force or rapidity, and do not produce the same expression. But then I have always supposed it to be my own fault -- because I would not take the trouble of practising. It is not that I do not believe my fingers as capable as any other woman's of superior execution.'

Sayers emphasises this indirectly in her speech, although it is easy to miss since she is primarily talking about the benefits of daily individual tuition with a native speaker (the sort she got from having a French governess)--a key to language-learning is regular practice. One has to persist, even when it's confusing or boring. One of the things I address in my teaching is that a lot of students, especially ones who have never spent much time learning a language, don't know how to revise grammar or vocabulary.

I start by focusing on the value of memorisation. One thing I see with weaker students is that they insist on making sure to copy down 'the correct translation' of a sentence, so they can go away and memorise it for the exam. First of all, that memorisation energy would be much better spend on vocabulary of the sentence, and how the grammar works--this enables them to go away and read other sentences, not just regurgitate the one in front of them. Secondly, the idea that there is One True Translation is rarely if ever accurate--once one gets into translating sentences of any length or complexity, variations of the translation bring out different shades of meaning. And with really tough stuff, like the Life of Columbanus by Jonas of Bobbio or the Cosmographia of Aethicus Ister, that act of interpretation becomes an argument about what the author means and how the text works--which the reader can then take, leave, or challenge according to their own interpretation. Relying on someone else's translation as authoritative is deliberately choosing to see the world in black and white--you miss the richness of shades of colour and meaning. 

There are limits to this, and especially for beginners, striking a balance between accuracy (their translation has to accurately reflect the person, number, tense, and mood of the verb or it just isn't right) and flexibility (recognising that Latin words might have several English equivalents) can be a challenge. After all, medieval people spoke and understood Latin, and an overly literal translation turns Latin into a language it's impossible to imagine real people ever speaking or writing, which leads someone already feeling like they're drowning to stop swimming.  As Sayers rightly acknowledges, the right choice of reading is a great help--students are more likely to keep doing if what they're having to read is actually interesting.

When I was in high school, I played in the Rhode Island Philharmonic Youth Orchestra, which had occasional visits from an esteemed professional conductor, Larry Rachleff. At one point, when we were all playing something very badly, after repeated attempts to get us to play it right, he stopped us, took a deep breath, and said 'You all think I'm crazy because I care this much. I think you're all crazy because you don't.'

It's a perfect summary of what makes good teaching such a challenge--you have to think what you're doing matters, and you have to inspire other people to go along with it.

I love medieval Latin, in all its strange beauty and contradictions, and I hope that this year I will help at least a few of my students love it too.

 



 

 

Sunday 4 October 2020

So how's your pandemic going?

The coming week is welcome week at my university, so everything is at sixes and sevens and so am I. Sending every good wish for the physical and mental health of anyone reading this who is also preparing to go back into the classroom or is already there. The UniCovid UK site is both terrifying and helpful reading, and that is all I want to say for now about coronavirus and universities.

Instead, I want to offer a piece of writing that I found helpful. In the May 2020 the Letters Page, one of my favourite periodicals, published a lockdown letter by the Canadian writer Aislinn Hunter. The following paragraphs profoundly spoke to me:

I worry about the usual things: my students, the economy, this awful and unsettling loneliness, the future. But I also worry about the potential for a gulf in understanding to take hold on the far side of this pandemic. It seems almost impossible to imagine what it’s like to wake up to the news that another, and then another, of your neighbours has died, to lose elder after elder in a community, to lose a family member who worked the front lines because that’s what they were trained to do. And I am a writer who spends significant amounts of time in the imagination… I’m someone who recently lost a husband of twenty-five years, though he died in my arms and it was only our world falling apart at the time, not everyone’s.

There’s a feeling you get sometimes walking through a city marked by tragedy – it’s a feeling I had standing in the cathedral in Coventry, in some of the German cities I travelled through last October, in Portbou in Northern Spain where my husband and I spent time after he’d gone though radiation and chemotherapy for his cancer. I worry those who have lost loved ones to Covid – who weren’t able to say good-bye, who live in villages and cities where relations and friends and neighbours were taken in large numbers – will end up standing on the other side of a veil from those who come out of this with a greater remove from the situation. I worry that we won’t be able to meet through language across the two sides of this divide. This is why I think stories and new forms of remembrance will become so important. To witness one event is no small matter but to witness something that sweeps over all of us in an uneven storm will require new forms of empathy; active listening.

Experiences across the pandemic have been so different. Members of senior leadership teams, programme leaders, catering staff, associate demonstrators, trainers at the university gym--even within groups of people who hold the same sort of job, let alone people who work for the same university but have different roles, there has been such an incredible variety of experiences. As the only non-European member of my team, having my entire family an ocean away, and following the coronavirus and other disasters in my home country, has been a different experience from everyone else's. Such differences have at times made me feel extremely alone. As Hunter says, even for someone whose work is literally exercising the imagination, the divide between communities which have been severely affected and communities which haven't is profound.

My own steps to acknowledge this divide have been small ones. Finding myself helplessly enraged whenever I received an email hoping that I had a nice or fun or relaxing summer ('I didn't, but I hope you did' doesn't feel very polite), I have tried to stop beginning emails with 'I hope this finds you well'. In normal times, this seems like an expression of good wishes--in pandemic times, I worry that this assumes the person I am addressing is fine, which is not a burden I want to put on them if they aren't. Instead I try to write things like, 'I hope this finds you and yours well and safe', or 'I hope you are hanging in there', or even 'How are you?' I've moved from closing my emails with 'sincerely' to 'take care'. Another small step that helps me is calling staying apart 'physical distancing' and not 'social distancing'. This reminds me that my social connections are taking some new forms for now, but they are still very much there.

A Sock Update and Other Coping Strategies

Wildflowers in various shades of purple, pink, and orange

Colourful wildflowers growing at a local cemetery

The sun is setting much earlier now, and I don't know what the next few months are going to be like. (Other than, of course, darker. November through February in the UK is a long dark teatime of the soul even in a good year.) One of the joys of taking regular walks through my neighbourhood has been paying attention to changes in the natural world--every few weeks I walk through a local cemetery to see what their wildflowers are doing lately.

It also helps to knit and watch a lot of science fiction & fantasy television. Which brings me to a cheerful place to end--I figured out my second sock.

The top two inches of a dark blue handknitted sock, on wooden needles, rests on top of a completed sock
Second sock success!

Somehow, in a pattern which read:

Rounds 1, 3, 5, 6: knit

Rounds 2 & 4: Knit 2, Purl 2 

I came up with:

Round 1: knit

Round 2: slip 1, purl 1

Part of what took me so long to work this out is I had utterly no memory of slipping stitches, let alone doing so for the entire leg of a sock. 

 Take care.