Life in a Pandemic

A return to Taiwan, an island off the Chinese coast, and a story that's largely been ignored unless it's to do with the standoff with China itself, which still regards Taiwan as a renegade province, and subject to eventual reunification, peaceful or otherwise. The recent crackdown in Hong Kong has only sharpened the notion that this is no idle threat. So I've been staying in touch with an old journalism colleague, Joyce, who is a Taiwanese expat confined to its embrace since February because of the virus. We've caught up with her a couple of times, and each time I'm intrigued by the fact that I'm asking her quite different questions to those I'm asking friends in other places. I'm trying to figure out why Taiwan has been so successful in combatting Covid-19, and whether there are lessons we can draw. 

Manuela Saragosa, who works for the BBC World Service but was speaking in a personal capacity as a friend, tells us about life in London as a single mother and a published author, trying to write some fiction on the side. 

Another old friend, this time from university days, a guy called Johnny who turned doing lighting for our campus band to into a skill and a career. Johnny was out in Asia at the same time as me, and so we ended up actually living together for a while in the early 1990s in Hong Kong. He has since been married, had a kid who is now an adult, and lost a wife to cancer a few years back. I wanted to catch up with Johnny because he returned to the UK five years ago, and has since been diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's. I haven't seen him now for a year, and so I wanted to see how he was faring during Covid, and how it affected him. 

This week's podcast is another interesting one, for political but also personal reasons. It's another old friend, Alexandra Hall-Hall, whom I met when she was working at the British Embassy in Bangkok in 1991. I lost contact with her shortly after she threw me a farewell party at her home until I saw her name in lights last year when she resigned as Brexit Counsellor in the British Embassy in Washington in December 2019 after her position had become "unbearable personally, and untenable professionally." I reconnected with her over Facebook shortly after that and we rekindled our friendship. And a few months on, she agreed to chat from her home in Virginia. I wanted to hear about the resignation, but more about her life, about lockdown, about how this affected her. She very generously and openly shared it all. 

This episode is with Christine Bader, who I first met in Indonesia in the early 2000s. I remember her as a fixture in the Cinnebar in Jakarta. She was working with BP managing the company's relationship with NGOs. In those days I was a wizened cynical hack, so I didn't set much store by such things, but she was funny, open and interesting and did interesting things. We stayed in touch, even when she went on to become director of social responsibility at Amazon. After that she spent a year so in Bali, and now she's in Oregon, working on a storytelling project called The Life I want, about reimagining work. I wanted to find out what that meant in the midst of a globe-changing pandemic, both personal, and, well, globally.
http://christinebader.com

I reunite with my old bookselling friend Martin Latham, who I haven't spoken to in more than 30 years. He sounds the same, and has a book out, the tales of a bookseller. He is the kind of person you want to just sit and have a beer with, or ask for advice on buying a book from. Luckily I could do both for a while, and I try to capture some of that, and his book, and what it's like being a bookseller in a pandemic in this slightly elongated episode.  His book was published this week, and is totally worth a buy. 

We find out how Tim's former journalist and now pepper farmer in Australia, is getting on. Hear his back story in Season 1, episodes 2 and 14. 

We return to Susan, my childhood friend in northern England, to find out how she's coping, living alone and running an essential business and worrying about her mother. Hear her backstory in episodes 8 and 12. 

Jeremy talks to James, Japanese-Canadian CEO and an early entrepreneur in mobile health tech, who finds himself in mid-lockdown in Tokyo working the phones to help out friends and colleagues to fill some of the void in the international war on Covid-19. Indonesia watchers might be encouraged by what he has to say. But what about the implications: who, exactly, is manning the ammunition dumps and infrastructure to support our frontline soldiers in the Covid-19 war?