Van Badham's Postcards from Coronavirus, April 3, 2020

More Postcards from Coronavirus: April 3, 2020

 I’ve been channelling the apocalyptic tenor of the time into bursts of manic prepperism. Since the lockdown started, I’ve made pie-filling, brandy, tea, pickles, pesto and chutney with fruit and vegetables grown in our garden. I’ve also made my own yoghurt. And, today, my own cheese. In the kitchen, on the phone to our neighbour, Bec, I bragged that with the addition of a goat or cow to our backyard, we’d be self-sufficient.

Ben was working in the library but called out “We are not getting a cow or goat!” loud enough that Bec could hear him down the phone.

Do I tell him that I’ve ordered chickens on the internet? 

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We are watching the docu-series Tiger King on Netflix. Everyone on Twitter was talking about it. I’m not much of a joiner, but, man, I can’t live with unsated curiosity.

Ben and I usually watch a lot of genre stuff on TV – space or sci-fi horror is favoured fare. We are used to monsters, decapitations, possession the undead and brutal, brutal murders. This is a show about Americans who run private tiger parks.

But I have never watched something that made me grip Ben’s hand quite so tightly.

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Ben has introduced a new verb into our household vocabulary: “thunderdome”, meaning “to go full Mad Max at the supermarket”. Ben’s been doing the daily venture out of the house to buy groceries and having some interesting experiences at the IGA.

“There was this dude in there today,” he told me, “who clearly never does the grocery shopping in his household. He didn’t know where anything was. And you could see he wanted to ask someone where to find whatever he’d been sent to get, but was trying to maintain social distancing, and getting really frustrated. I went into another aisle. I thought If he doesn’t find the baked beans soon… He’s gonna thunderdome me.”

It’s been a matter of some frustration in this household that plain flour has been an unavailable product for weeks. Imagine my shock when Ben came back from one of his shopping trips the other day with a 12kg sack of the stuff slung over his shoulder, which he dumped on the kitchen bench. “Where did you get that?” I sputtered, “Did you have to thunderdome someone?!”.

He told me that he bought it from the local pizzeria. Twenty bucks. Some dark part of me was almost disappointed.

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My friend Sam is amusing himself and others by sending random packets of things to his friends in the mail. A couple of days ago, some fridge magnets arrived wrapped in an entry about Goete’s Faust that had been ripped from a children’s encyclopaedia.

I have repurposed the encyclopaedia page into a collage made from old art gallery promotional material, Who Gives a Crap? toilet paper wrappers and Clag glue, and intend to send it back to him. Two can play at this game, Sam.

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Four people I know have had coronavirus. A very close friend in London, who’s a doctor, is now working on a coronavirus-positive ward in an NHS hospital there. She posted a photograph of herself in her scrubs and mask this morning, and her eyes were so wide above the mask, I burst into tears.

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You can make a refreshing tea out of herbs that grow in the garden. Rinse a handful of fresh leaves from lemon verbena, lemon balm, thyme, balm of gilead, culinary lavender, mint or rosemary through a tea-strainer under the tap, then pop the strainer in a teapot with water boiled at 80 degrees. Let it steep for a while – maybe at least 15 minutes (you can always heat it up in the microwave). Then stir a teaspoon of honey through it. Maybe add a slice of lemon.

It is crucial to never brew herbal tea – or green tea – hotter than 80%. Fill the teapot with 20% of cold water before you put the leaves in, if you don’t have a temperature-control kettle. Boiling water singes the leaves and makes it taste like electrified horse wee.

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American friends have started to report on social media the deaths of people who they know. It feels like the virus is creeping closer – by degrees of familiarity. That 90% of Australians are apparently practicing social distancing provides some sense of local comfort. But I’ve got a lot of American friends, where disinformation about the virus is rife and the state response is piecemeal. Their situations are more vulnerable, and their fates are on my mind.

The brother-in-law of a friend of a friend over there, for example, chose to eschew social distancing, preferring to believe in the “herd immunity” theory of treating the virus instead. He’s a middle-class office worker, and the story goes that when one of his bros tested positive for the virus, he and the rest of the bros got together with beers and went round to the dude’s house to catch it, like a “chicken pox” party. What a laugh.

 The brother-in-law, of course, now has coronavirus. He has stopped laughing. He is coughing a lot, though.

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 Someone on twitter said last night “Watching Tiger King, I finally understand how Trump got elected.”