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?

Jeremy Wagstaff writes: As part of his Life in a Pandemic podcast series, Jeremy talks again to Susan, a childhood friend he spoke to a month ago. She's taking cover in her home in northern England, where she runs a company that makes colours -- for everything from paint to body bags. Susan, living alone and wrestling with trying to run a company deemed essential to the country, finds the virus coming a little too close for comfort. 

It's April, time to revisit Tim and his pepper farm in Braidswood, Australia.

Jeremy Wagstaff writes: My former colleague Joyce, still in her native Taiwan. Is the poster child of how to handle a pandemic still doing well, or have things, as she feared, slipped? Joyce is one of the several people who are sheltering in places that aren't where they supposed or necessarily want to be. Running to Taiwan was her idea when Hong Kong was on the verge of being overrun with the virus. When I last spoke to her she was worried, not about the government, but about her fellow Taiwanese. Were they being a bit too relaxed about the whole thing?

Jeremy Wagstaff writes: The latest in my series on lives disrupted by the coronavirus. We return to Dinny in Tana Toraja, the remote highland home her husband's Toraja people. Dinny is grappling with economic crisis as her company of weavers implodes under collapsing tourism, and with the more personal questions about relationships: Is Zoom just for chat, or should we be talking about something deeper? She finds surprises galore among friends she thought she knew.Dinny's company and campaign:Website: Toraja MeloInstagra: @torajameloFacebook torajameloHashtag: #WITTOCorona (Weaving In The Time Of Corona)

Jeremy Wagstaff writes: In this episode I speak to Joyce, a Taiwanese friend who was also for many years a journalist colleague at Reuters. Joyce is a straight shooter like any good journalist, but she has a soft spot for her homeland, and so it wasn't a surprise that she was proud of how her government had confronted COVID-19, despite of, or perhaps because of, it not being a member of the World Health Organisation. After a few months in Hong Kong Joyce was now back in Taipei, and wasn't as optimistic as those around her. Subscribe and get updates as soon as a new podcast episode goes live in BuzzSprout. We are also on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, and Stitcher.Email us at pandemic@cleftstick.com. Life in a Pandemic is produced by Jeremy Wagstaff and Sari Sudarsono for CleftStick.com.

Jeremy Wagstaff writes: This is Susan, a classmate of mine from primary school. We haven't actually seen each other in nearly a half century, and my last memory of her was in a sack race at my 7th birthday party. Facebook has brought us back together, sort of, but this was the first time we'd actually talked since she got second prize, if I recall, in the egg and spoon race. She now owns, or runs, or both, a company in Manchester, and a cottage with what looked beautiful views somewhere in the countryside far from where we grew up. I wanted to hear from her about what COVID-19 looked like. And, as ever, I learned that this thing affects everyone in different ways. Subscribe and get updates as soon as a new podcast episode goes live in BuzzSprout. We are also on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, and Stitcher.Email us at pandemic@cleftstick.com. Life in a Pandemic is produced by Jeremy Wagstaff and Sari Sudarsono for CleftStick.com.

Jeremy Wagstaff writes: This episode is about Dinny, an Indonesian friend who has a particular vantage point from which to watch the Coronavirus saga. She has long dumped the polluted streets of Jakarta for the highland life of her husband's Toraja homeland. Dinny runs a small company that employs local weavers. When I caught up with her she was in reflective mood: it was changing her compatriots already in startling ways, but was all this the fulfilment of a prediction not from the animism of her adopted homeland, but something altogether more recent? Subscribe and get updates as soon as a new podcast episode goes live in BuzzSprout. We are also on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, and Stitcher.Email us at pandemic@cleftstick.com. Life in a Pandemic is produced by Jeremy Wagstaff and Sari Sudarsono for CleftStick.com. 

Another conversation between Jeremy and his globe-strewn friends. This time it's Toby, a German he met in Singapore during time as a technology journalist with Reuters. A former concert pianist, Toby doesn't fit your idea of a startup founder, which is perhaps why he makes for more interesting company. But how is the lockdown affecting his battling business? Jeremy tracks him down to his mother's home in the German forests, where he has some surprising insights -- and predictions about Life in A Pandemic.Subscribe and get updates as soon as a new podcast episode goes live in BuzzSprout. We are also on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, and Stitcher.Email us at pandemic@cleftstick.com. Life in a Pandemic is produced by Jeremy Wagstaff and Sari Sudarsono for CleftStick.com.

Part of my podcast series on life in a pandemic. I first visited Afghanistan in 1996, shortly after the Taleban had taken Kabul - to everyone's surprise. At Kabul airport the Reuters stringer, Salahuddin, was there to meet me and by the time we got to the guest house we were both rolling around with laughter in the back seat of the taxi. Given the dire straits of the country it probably wasn't the best look but his dark humour and my silliness forged a tight bond between us. But there's never a fairy-tale ending for Afghanistan, and Salahuddin has stayed on when he could so easily have left, continuing to report on the country. When I caught up with him in March 2020, his laughter was still there, in the background, but Salahuddin fears Covid-19 may be one crisis too many for his country. Subscribe and get updates as soon as a new podcast episode goes live in BuzzSprout. We are also on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, and Stitcher.Email us at pandemic@cleftstick.com. Life in a Pandemic is produced by Jeremy Wagstaff and Sari Sudarsono for CleftStick.com.

The second interview in our series, where Jeremy catches up with a former student from China, who is studying in the U.S. but found herself separated from her husband on a family visit back to Kunming. Get updates as soon as a new podcast episode goes live in BuzzSprout. We are also on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, and Stitcher.Email us at pandemic@cleftstick.com. Life in a Pandemic is produced by Jeremy Wagstaff and Sari Sudarsono for CleftStick.com.

Jeremy talks to a former colleague, news photographer Tim Wimborne, who gave up the media life to realise a long held dream of running his own pepper farm in Australia. Little did he know what was coming. You can visit Tim's pepper farm business at https://www.mountain-pepper.com.Get updates as soon as a new podcast episode goes live in BuzzSprout. We are also on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, and Stitcher.Want to share your 'life in a pandemic' stories? Email us at pandemic@cleftstick.comLife in a Pandemic is produced by Jeremy Wagstaff and Sari Sudarsono for CleftStick.com.

Jeremy Wagstaff, a journalist based in Singapore, introduces a new podcast where he plans to talk to friends new and old around the world about their experiences as they live through the Coronavirus pandemic. He'll talk to friends from Canada to Timor Leste, China to Afghanistan, northern England to rural Australia, all of them caught up in various stages of the greatest shift in people's lives since World War II. Get updates as soon as a new podcast episode goes live in BuzzSprout. We are also on iTunes, Spotify, Google Podcast, and Stitcher.Life in a Pandemic is produced by Jeremy Wagstaff and Sari Sudarsono for CleftStick.com. Email us at pandemic@cleftstick.com