Years of diary keeping richer than any app

From therep.co.za

Sixty years ago, Evangelia (Angela) Anaxagoras took the advice of the late Dr Arnold Rosen, here in Queenstown SA, and started keeping a daily diary to ensure she remembered to take her epilepsy medication.

She never skipped a day, even writing the day’s record on a serviette if she happened to be travelling.

She is now in the process of condensing all her diaries from those 60 years into a single ledger that will capture the most important events of her family – and the town.

Mrs Anaxagoras lived in Queenstown between 1958 and 1998. She started each diary page by recording medical details. Very soon, with her natural discipline, she started capturing her daily activities, the news of the day, and even her emotions.

FOND MEMORIES: Evangelia (Angela) Anaxagoras, a resident of Queenstown 

between 1958 and 1998, has kept a diary for the past 60 years  Picture: SUPPLIED

She hopes the ledger will one day make it easy for her children to access their family’s history, with all the correct dates and details. The original diaries are packed in a special box, in case more detail from any year is ever required.

Says Anaxagoras: “My advice to anyone wanting to keep a diary is: take it before the last tablet of the night, in a place where no one can disturb you, when everyone else is in bed and sleeping. No one can pester you then.” She continues: “Every day I track what I eat and then I can reflect on it and see what suited my digestion.  There have even been times my own records were more accurate than my doctor’s memory.

“They have even helped me capture my feelings after my best friend (my husband) passed away.” They were members of the Greek community and together they ran a number of well-known eateries in the town, including the first restaurant where people of colour could legally eat during apartheid. These included The Rex Cafe, The Hexagon Fisheries, Charles’ Fruit Shop and Theo’s Snack Bar, the refurbished Waldorf Café, Charles’ Sweets and Charles’ Roadhouse. 

“Friends and family are always surprised by how I remember everyone’s special occasions when I am not reminded by social media apps. It is because at the beginning of every year I write the names of people who are celebrating birthdays, Greek Orthodox name days and wedding anniversaries at the top of each page.”

https://www.therep.co.za/2021/03/17/years-of-diary-keeping-richer-than-any-app/ 

 

Plague journals and the need to capture time

From vox.com

Why do we preserve the scary, endless pandemic days?

The five young filmmakers of HBO’s Covid Diaries NYC refuse to put a happy face on the pandemic, and honestly, that’s a relief. When the coronavirus slid from headlines into their very real lives last spring, they picked up cameras and started recording what was happening around them. With the aid of a Manhattan nonprofit, the Downtown Community Television Centre, the five directors (ages 17 to 21) capture the well-grounded fears of essential workers and their families, the mental health tolls of isolation and dread, and the impossibility of escaping a virus that has reached pandemic proportions.

That very act — recording what was happening, as it was happening, from their points of view and narrated in their voices — makes them part of a long history of catastrophe diarists. For centuries, shattering events of epic proportions have provided a reason for people to pick up a pen, or a camera, and start recording. It’s the first draft of history. And it’s more raw, less prone to moralizing, more resistant to neat little narratives of triumph. What you get in a diary is not just events, but the rush of emotion that accompanies them.

In Covid Diaries NYC, the results are harrowing. Each roughly 8-minute short film, compiled into one collage-style feature, was shot from roughly April 2020 through the early summer, when unrest following the police killing of George Floyd added a new layer to the anxiety for some and provided others with an outlet for pent-up energy.

We meet Marcial, who lives in Manhattan with his grandmother. Marcial’s grandmother is a building super who spends even more time hauling trash around for the building’s residents now that they’re at home all the time. “That’s the only way for us to live in Manhattan,” he says. “We’ve gotta pick up garbage for rich people.” 

There’s an urge to keep a diary during a plague — and that’s nothing new.

HBO  

High schooler Aracelie was diagnosed with mental health conditions just before the pandemic and now, cooped up and separated from her friends, she’s struggling to remain afloat.

Camille’s father, who works at the MTA fixing train doors, watches friends get sick and then gets sick himself; Camille and her mother hole up in the basement and listen to him cough through the ceiling. 

Shane is the only white participant, which means Covid Diaries NYC mirrors Covid-19’s disproportionate effect on New Yorkers of colour. His mother, a preschool teacher, sees her worst fears materialize when she’s furloughed. And his family, barely squeaking by already, discovers that the change of scenery that comes with driving west toward his father’s home state of Wisconsin doesn’t change their collective panic.

And Rosemary watches in anger as people who refuse to wear masks board the bus that her father drives. Her parents tell her of their struggles to make a better life as immigrants. By the end of her segment, the family is watching as Covid-19 creeps in on their friends and family. Rosemary’s grandmother has tested positive, too.

None of the segments provide snappy conclusions — or, really, any conclusions at all. We are left hoping these five are okay, all these months later. I hope Camille’s father and Rosemary’s grandmother got better, that Shane’s family found a way to get back on their feet, that Marcial has found an outlet for his energy, that Aracelie is stable. Covid Diaries NYC leaves us wondering.

But that is what it’s like to read a diary, which doesn’t, and can’t, wrap up neatly. It starts when the diarist decides to start, and ends when they finish or, more likely, lose interest. There’s no clear-cut and easy conclusion to a diary. Which is, when I think of it, a lot like a pandemic.

In their most basic form, diaries are simply a way to record what happened and what the diarist thought of it, to make sure time doesn’t simply slip away. I’ve always been terrible at keeping diaries on paper, but I know people who’ve done it for years, and I envy them. They regard it as a kind of therapeutic practice, a way to work through the day’s emotions, informational intake, and events. To process existence, really.

In this pandemic, the diaries have proliferated, too. For some people, they’re a way of simply taking things one day at a time. Ben Goldberg, a renowned jazz clarinetist, started releasing daily, dated improvisations on March 19, 2020; though they are no longer a daily practice, he is still posting new ones on Bandcamp a year later. Sometimes they’re dedicated to someone who has died or who’s having a birthday, or bear cryptic names. Goldberg calls the project “Plague Diary.” 

The Portuguese novelist Goncalo Tavares did the same thing in his own medium for a while. The New York Review of Books published several installments of “Pandemic Journals” from notable writers, though that endeavor petered out, too; the last one was in May 2020. Early in the pandemic, many other publications followed suit.

People sometimes just keep diaries for themselves. But there’s always the feeling that they’re also for history. And given the nature of our contemporary plague — the way it has kept us away from one another and changed every communication into something awkward and screen-mediated - the need to make those musings public felt like more than just an option. It’s also a service to humanity. When it still seemed like the pandemic would last a manner of weeks or maybe a few months, the notion that we might forget what it was like to live this way still seemed like a possibility. (Were we ever so young?)

But to historians and librarians, the goal of a diary is less to preserve the experience for ourselves than for future generations. The New York Public Library, for instance, was among the institutions that started collecting pandemic diaries in audio form, soliciting entries from anyone who wanted to contribute as a way to ensure “that people today, along with future generations, can better understand our world and each other.” It's still collecting them.

At schools, colleges, and universities all over the country, teachers encouraged or required students to keep diaries. At UC San Diego, a final project in professor Claire Edington’s history of public health class required students to keep plague diaries, which will be archived in the university’s library. Edington noted in an interview with UCSD's newspaper that the diaries were a way to make clear the social conditions that often surround pandemics, and how those narratives play into creating a more just and equitable world moving forward.

The diaries of Samuel Pepys chronicled, in part, the Great Plague of 1665.

Samuel Pepys/Wheatley, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons 

The Covid diary keepers are just the latest iteration of plague diarists, of course. During the Great Plague of 1665, nearly 100,000 people died just in London, and Samuel Pepys was there to journal the whole thing. His entries are a mixture of fear and just going about his daily business, which feels more than a little familiar to us now. They’re so detailed that they’ve become a basis for historians of 17th-century England trying to reconstruct the milieu now. And in 1722, Daniel Defoe published A Journal of the Plague Year, a fictionalized journal purportedly written by a survivor of that same 1665 plague; it’s so deeply researched that people still argue about whether it should be considered something other than fiction.

Such journals give us an insight into the blend of the mundane (I had yogurt for lunch) and the terrifying (the sirens haven’t stopped for days) that make up the unending, anxious tedium of plague times. They resist the tendency of narratives that may be woven later, both by artists and by powerful people seeking to bend the story in their own direction, to tie the tale in a neat bow. Or to extract a triumphant tale of victory over death. Or to disregard the daily beats of life in favor of some other meta-narrative. Diaries remind us that our lives, our long years, are made up of days and events and emotions — even in a pandemic.

Watching diaries arise during this pandemic year, I found myself thinking of something that isn’t strictly plague-bound: the artist On Kawara’s Today series. I’ve seen pieces of it in various museums around the world, and it’s always striking. Starting on January 4, 1966, Kawara made a painting every single day, consisting simply of the date in white painted onto a solid dark background. He varied the language and grammar of the painting depending on what country he was in that day. The colors varied at times, too, and each is hand-lettered. The pieces are mostly quite small, but occasionally he made them huge (as in July 1969, when the moon landing occurred). If he couldn’t finish the painting on the date depicted, he’d destroy it. Ultimately, he made more than 1,000.

Whenever I look at the paintings, I am reminded that while a little information about them comes through in each painting, for the most part I don’t know what that day was like for Kawara. The meaning largely resides in the maker, who might look at it and revisit the day’s emotions, activities, and epiphanies. Even the plague diarist can’t record everything that happened and everything they felt on a given day. The diary is itself an object that evokes something different for everyone who looks at it.

And Covid Diaries NYC is no different; having lived through the same time the filmmakers are chronicling, I remember where I was, too. When Aracelie cries on the phone to a friend that “I feel so many things and nothing at the same time ... it’s like I won the lottery of bad luck,” well, I know just what that feels like. I remember that day. (It’s still here, sometimes.) That we may look back at these moments and count ourselves lucky or even raise an eyebrow at our former selves doesn’t make that experience less real. The plague diaries we’ve all been keeping, in one way or another, are a record for history — but they’re also for our future selves. Not to remember something we can’t forget, but to recall that life happens, and then, it keeps going.

https://www.vox.com/22321942/covid-diary-plague-journal-hbo

3 techniques to try if stress is keeping you awake at night

From t3.com/news

Expert advice from an occupational therapist

There's plenty to be stressed about at the moment, and it has had a knock-on effect on our sleep habits, with many finding it harder to fall asleep and get a good night's sleep than usual. There's actually a scientific reason why being under stress makes it harder to fall asleep. 

"When you are under a continuous level of stress it keeps your sympathetic system active, triggering your in-built 'fight-or-flight' response and providing your body with a burst of energy so that it can respond to perceived dangers," explains cardiology specialist and occupational therapist Pranita Salunke. "In this state, you are unable to activate the parasympathetic nervous system, or the body's 'rest and digest' response that calms the body down after the danger has passed. Of course, the latter is also associated with helping you to enjoy restorative sleep, and a lack of good quality sleep can lead to issues with obesity and a host of metabolic conditions."

If you're finding stress is stopping you from getting a good night's kip, read on for three of Pranita's top tips for how to shift your body from sympathetic to the parasympathetic system.

• Upgrading your bed can make a big difference: here are the best memory foam mattresses
• The best weighted blankets to calm you down and tackle insomnia
• Promote a healthier wake-sleep cycle with one of the best wake-up lights

1. Create a sleep diary

To make you more aware of what's going on, try creating a sleep diary to track your sleep patterns. "Are you having difficulty falling asleep, or is the problem maintaining sleep for the entire time? If you get up in the night, is it easy for you to get back to sleep? Are there any recurring dreams or nightmares you are noticing? How do you feel after waking up, rested or drained?" says Pranita. 

"Next, note important events of the days (what you did, what you ate etc.) and how they influenced you positively or negatively. Is there any association between sleep interruption and those events? Once you bring more awareness into your thoughts-events-sleep habits, you are in a much stronger position to make positive changes."

2. Try stream-of-consciousness writing

"Try sitting down and writing, in longhand, ideas or thoughts from your stream of consciousness. It can be any thoughts or minor niggles that are disturbing you. Racing thoughts can make it difficult for you to relax, but writing free hand in a journal to express any anger, frustration, worry, sadness can have a cathartic effect," says Pranita. "You might find it difficult to talk to another person, but once you empty your thoughts on the paper and write down exactly how you feel, you will notice the difference in the clarity of your mind."

The next step to overcome your worry is to jot down three practical steps you can take in the next few days. These should be things that are in your control. "Set a timeline: this way, you are putting your brain at rest, knowing you have a plan to overcome obstacles," she adds. 

3. Calm down your evening routine

Tempted to pop on the latest blockbuster before bedtime? Bad idea, says Pranita. Avoid consuming any particularly emotionally taxing content in the late evenings, as it will impact your mental state. "The time for blockbuster action movies is very early in the evening, not just before your bed-time!" she says.

In fact, it's best to avoid anything exciting before bedtime – that includes intense exercises. Instead, opt for something gentler. "Practice yogic poses, such as the child pose, and do gentle stretches before bedtime. These relaxing poses enhance blood supply to your brain, calm your mind and prepare your body for a deep and rejuvenating sleep," Pranita suggests.

• Try these stress-relieving breathing exercises
• Pick up one of the best yoga mats 

Pranita Salunke has more than twenty year's experience as a Preventative Cardiology Specialist and Occupational Therapist. Her new book, Vitality: A Healthy and Happy Heart is out now.

https://www.t3.com/news/3-techniques-to-try-if-stress-is-keeping-you-awake-at-night 

 

 

 

 

Write yourself well: How keeping a journal can heal mind and body

From stuff.co.nz

At the end of every day, Suraya Sidhu Singh sits down to write in her journal.

What the Taranaki-based writer and artist puts down isn’t meant to be profound or insightful – although sometimes, with hindsight, it is – more often it’s a simple record of her life: what she ate, who she spoke to, what she did, where she went and what she thought about it.

“I think when you have a creative background, it feels like a journal has to be amazingly perfect and wonderful, insightful and beautifully written all the time.

“But if you can spend an hour, or if you have 10 minutes here or there, to capture your day, one day that might be really meaningful to somebody. I don't know who. I just thought, 'yeah, I can do that',” she says.

“I come from a family that doesn't really talk much about feelings, and I think a lot of people do. So I thought, 'well, at least there is some kind of record of the person that you were’, even if you're not delving [into your feelings], or keeping a mood journal, necessarily.”

David Le Fleming/Supplied

Suraya Sidhu Singh has kept a daily diary since about 2015, as a way of connecting with the future, and examining her own life

 

BACKED BY THE SCIENCE

There was a period in the late 90s when journaling as a means of self-discovery got something of a bad rap.

That’s unsurprising when “hardening up” was still how we dealt with depression, and pouring your feelings onto paper was considered an ‘emo’ excuse to write bad poetry.

Haters always gonna hate, but in the 2000s and early teens, several studies backed claims that writing it out significantly eased the symptoms of mental illness, even when that illness was chronic.

In her book 2001 book Painfully Shy: How to Overcome Social Anxiety and Reclaim Your Life, US psychologist and anxiety expert Dr Barbara Markway wrote, “there’s simply no better way to learn about your thought processes than to write them down”.

Only once you know how you think, can you tackle the negative self-talk that’s often the root of the problem.

The first study to look at the effects of expressive writing on Major Depressive Disorder (MDD) in 2013 found just three days of pouring their hearts out into a journal lowered participants' MDD scores significantly, as well as alleviating symptoms of the disease. 

Anecdotally, writing works for more mild, every day emotional turbulence, too.

Curious about the nature of memory, Sidhu Singh started dipping back into her journals and discovered just how fallible and prone to reinforcing negativity, memory can be.

“Every time I read [an entry], it was either something I’d totally forgotten – I think it’s interesting, because once you've forgotten something you don't know you've forgotten it. Journals are the only way to recover those memories in a way – or I remembered it differently from how I had recorded it.”

By re-reading her diaries she could see that “life is made up of these continual moments of nice reinforcement that happens to us, even if we have memories that make us cringe and keep us self-conscious”.

As someone with “a tendency to lay down negative memories, more than positive ones”, Sidhu Singh found that valuable, even liberating.

Physical health can also get a boost from the act of writing your feelings.

A Kiwi study from Auckland University's Department of Psychology showed that expressive writing helped older people and women actually heal wounds faster.

At the time the paper was published, author Dr Elizabeth Broadbent told Scientific American that “writing about distressing events helped participants make sense of the events and reduce distress”, that in turn lowered cortisol levels, and helped participants sleep better, giving the body more quality time to heal.

University of Rochester medical centre in upstate New York, responsible for the health and well-being of more than 11, 000 students, advises students to take up journaling to manage the anxiety and stress of studying at a top-tier US school.

“Keeping a journal helps you create order when your world feels like it’s in chaos,” the centre’s website says.

It also gives you a place to offload your woes, so you can get on with more important stuff, like learning and creating.  

CREATIVE RECHARGE

"I just began writing because it was the way to start actually organising my thoughts,” says artist Denise Durkin, who’s kept a “creative journal” since she was training at polytech. A sort of external brain dump, where she can offload all her ideas, inspirations, and emotional baggage, keeping a diary leaves her free to explore her creativity.

"We'd be given a project on the big layout pads. Other people would start sketching thumbnails, but always started with writing.”

She would write "free flow", pouring out pages of ideas about the project, before drawing anything.

"Something about the cognitive process of writing words really helps you not only think, but come up with ideas. You don't know what you're going to think until you actually write it down."

Durkin’s process is reminiscent of self-help guru Julie Cameron’s Morning Pages, from the best-selling book The Artist's Way..

Cameron’s process involves writing absolutely anything and everything for a solid hour as soon as you wake up, getting all the mental detritus out of the way, so you can get on with the more important business of being creative.

While Durkin hasn’t heard of Cameron or her creativity bible, her notebooks have a similarly mentally freeing effect. But they’re also a repository of creative inspiration.

"I've gone back to them and created an art work that I wouldn't have remembered it if I hadn't written it down exactly. I also get a lot of titles for my artwork out of that.

"It stops me spinning my wheels, it really does. The act of sitting down and just writing and focusing on something, you get things in order, you can see it, and you pick something and get on with it. It's a very vital way to organise your day."

One thing she doesn’t use journaling for is recording her feelings because she’ll “end up looking for what makes you sad”.

"I realised what you really need to do is look at when were you happy.

“You’ve got to think about what you're focusing on when you're writing it down.”

The link between the physical act of writing and boosting memory is long-established. There’s a reason rote learning works.

Durkin’s practise of writing everything means that, when she makes extensive notes for the drawing classes she teaches, it down solidifies her lessons in her mind, so she seldom has to refer back to her notebooks.

"I've never encouraged [my students] to actually write because it's a drawing class, and I'm always encouraging them to draw, but it is the same. It's a cognitive manual skill that really helps with thinking, that I think we're losing in the digital world.”

THE LIFE INTENTIONAL

Writing by hand, rather than tapping it into your tablet or phone, where it's usually quickly forgotten, is a cornerstone of the Bullet Journal Method created by US designer Ryder Carroll.

Originally designed as a way to organise and optimise his professional life, Carroll quickly discovered a Bullet Journaling could be used to identify and achieve other, more nebulous, goals.

“There's a huge difference between what you should want and what you do want. I didn't realise that until I had I launched my own company after years of working on it, and it didn't matter. I didn't care.

“I think it was the first time in my life where I realised that I don't know what I actually want.”

Rather than panicking or throwing in the towel, he took all the tools he designed to achieve someone else’s idea of success, and "directed them inward", to "figure out what was going on in there".

"This is the foundation of the Bullet Journal method. It's not about what you're doing, it's about why you're doing it. It's very circular, it's like an ecosystem.”

Once you understand your motivations, you have all tools to help you take your insights, and put them into action.

RYDER CARROLL/Supplied

It starts with lists, but the real power of journaling comes from refection and consideration.

It starts with bullet point lists, which give this type of journaling its name, the rapid off-loading of everything in our heads, from ideas to feelings, errands to important dates, deadlines to insights.

“It’s a great start,” says Carroll.

"If you're anything like me, these lists are never ending and half the time they actually become a great source of anxiety and sometimes shame. And then we abandon these lists, or we hold ourselves accountable for all these things we could never possibly get done.

"But a big part of bullet journaling is not about keeping never ending lists. It's about writing things down and then re-engaging with those things."

He calls this "daily reflection", a time to revisit your lists and re-assess them every day, every week, every month. Doing this "we study the substance of our minds, of our thoughts, of our emotions, to learn from it".

You might start to see you’re really stressed by some activities, or that you dislike working with a certain person, or that a certain type of project really gives you joy.

You get in the habit of “reading the story of your own life”, and in so doing, you’ll start to see what you want more of and what you want less of, “the things that give you energy, the things that take energy away from you”.

With that knowledge, you can start to plan accordingly.

“Over time, you only bring forward the things that add value to your life – not just that make you happy, that add value to your life. Things that add value don't necessarily make us happy, like paying rent, paying your insurance,” says Carroll.

“You're cultivating both your curiosity in, and your awareness of how you're behaving, and how you're feeling. And you're taking that information, and you're regularly putting it into action. Like, I feel incredibly lonely now, what am I going to do tomorrow? Tomorrow, I'm going to call my friend, I'm going to go spend some time with my parents.”

It’s all about living intentionally, instead of getting steamrollered by life.

LIVING RECORD

For Sidhu Singh, that opportunity to track and assess your feelings, combined with the power of writing doesn’t come without caveats.

"Doing something because it makes you feel good, that you believe in the importance of, that's reinforcing your own values, is great. It's had unexpected benefits for me, and I don't see any downsides,” she says.

"But I'm aware that if you dwell on worries, particularly in your journal, I think it magnifies them.

"So I would say yes, it does help you remember and clarify things more, but I think it's important to use that power wisely.”

https://www.stuff.co.nz/life-style/well-good/124262135/write-yourself-well-how-keeping-a-journal-can-heal-mind-and-body 

The diaries of the rich and famous are the perfect lockdown read

From telegraph.co.uk 

By Jane Shilling

The featureless monotony of recent weeks has made me avid for non-fiction accounts of life as it used to be – full of incident and variety  

The publication of an unexpurgated edition of Sir Henry “Chips” Channon’s diaries may just be the answer to my current pressing anxiety.

I say “pressing” but, like many people over the past 11 months, I have had to construct an elaborate hierarchy of concern. At the top of the list are the worries that haunt me in the small hours: shall I ever see my ninetysomething father and aunt again? Will my son, crossing London daily by public transport for his work, be safe?

These are questions whose answers lie entirely beyond my control: I write letters to my father and aunt, send WhatsApp messages to my son about trying not to breathe more than strictly necessary (and get eye-roll emojis in return).

Meanwhile, I try to concentrate on more manageable problems, such as what am I going to read next? In the past year, more than 200 million print books were sold – the highest number since 2012, confirming that along with baking and cross-stitch, an awful lot of us were turning to comfort reading to beguile the locked-down days. At the beginning, I was happy to read novels: the publication of Hilary Mantel's great Cromwellian doorstopper last spring couldn’t have been better timed. But with the renewed incarcerations of winter, fiction lost its consoling charm.

The featureless monotony of recent weeks has made me avid for non-fiction accounts of life as it used to be – full of incident and variety. I could have turned to the diaries of Pepys or Boswell, Woolf, Waugh or Julien Green, but I knew them too well; instead, I ordered James Lees-Milne’s diaries, acclaimed as one of the great journals of the 20th century. The character who emerges from these pages is in equal measure dislikable and fascinating – a posh Mr Pooter with an eye for disobliging detail. But, like all the best diarists, he turns that beady eye as harshly on himself as on his contemporaries (many of whom were bitterly offended by his mordant descriptions).

Approaching the last pages of the final volume (where he is, at 91, still keenly noticing the “curtain of rich, pea-green moiré silk” in his guest bedroom at Chatsworth), I find myself reluctant to part from this preposterous and touchingly flawed diarist who has been my companion since the new year. But perhaps, with the prospect of some freedom soon to be restored, it may be good for me to stop living vicariously through other people’s journals.

There is a sense in which we are all diarists now, dutifully recording the detail of our lives, from sourdough loaves to divorce, on social media. But while the diaries of the pre-internet age may have been written with half an eye on posterity, they were not composed, as our own carefully curated posts are, for instant publication and a gratifying harvest of “likes”.

The historians of 2071 will find a fascinating record of this latter-day plague year in such posts. But anyone seeking solace or companionship will surely struggle to find it among the artfully filtered images and beatific hashtags.

WH Auden wrote that “Private faces in public places / Are wiser and nicer / Than public faces in private places”, but he hadn’t foreseen the internet. Public faces in the private places of their journals may not be wise or nice – but they are great company in hard times.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2021/02/21/diaries-rich-famous-perfect-lockdown-read/?WT.mc_id=e_DM1339980&WT.tsrc=email&etype=Edi_FAM_New_ES&utmsource=email&utm_medium=Edi_FAM_New_ES20210222&utm_campaign=DM1339980 

 

 

 

John Gadd: Pig expert and avid storyteller

From pigprogress.net

In August 2020, long-standing contributor and columnist John Gadd passed away at the age of 90. Up until his last month he continued to write for this title in a monthly column. In this article we look back to a remarkable character, whose contributions reflected his many passions.

Only once did I have the privilege of meeting John Gadd in person. It was on a beautifully sunny day in April 2007. Just months before I had started in my position as editor for Pig Progress. At the time I thought it would not be such a bad idea to get to know all the expert contributors in the international pig industry personally. After all, John had been writing for the title Pig Progress for many years already, so in terms of content I could definitely consider him to be one of the founding fathers of the title. 

British pig expert John Gadd loved to write - not only was he a regular columnist for Pig Progress, he also kept an illustrated diary for decades. - Photo: Adam Gray | SWNS.com

At his request, we met in the historic Half Moon pub off the A350 in Shaftesbury, Dorset, England. Together with his wife Barbara he lived in a cottage in the nearby village Fontmell Magna; for him, it was an easy drive. I happened to be on a short holiday to Wales and England, so that was an easy place to meet.

Of the lunch meeting itself I do not remember too much – just that I was quite nervous. He was one of the world’s well-known pig experts, and I really had just entered the scene. John must have been 77 years old at the time. I remember him being very knowledgeable and kind; I was relieved that he had an open mind and did not dismiss me for not knowing much about pigs. We chatted for almost two hours.

Over 300 columns for Pig Progress

I’m grateful that Pig Progress was able to count on that open mind for another 13 years, as he became one of my trusted colleagues-at-a-distance. According to his own calculations, John started writing columns for Pig Progress early in 1990. With at least 10 columns a year, he achieved over 300 columns for the title, a contribution of monumental size. 

A bookcase full of the diaries of John Gadd at his home. - Photo: Adam Gray | SWNS.com

 

Pig management issues

No doubt his specialty was pig management issues. In his long career he had seen countless swine farms in the 33 countries he had visited professionally. He kept a close record of everything he saw on farms, of what he advised and what he learnt. With that, he could write about dos and don’ts, about things that can go wrong and things that should be improved, in an easy-to-read style, combining a joke with hands-on advice. How to find the best age for weaning, how to optimise ventilation in farms, how to do appraisals – every time a pig-related question included “how”, John surely knew the answer. Quite appropriately, his column series was called “What the Textbooks Never Tell You About…”.

National and international magazines

Dorset was also the place where he started his long career in pigs, when he became a manager of Taymix, a large pig farm, after having graduated from Aberdeen University, where his interest in agriculture began. He then worked for RHM as well as Dalgety Spillers, before deciding to stand on his own legs as an independent consultant from the age of 53. Besides finding a monthly job as columnist with Pig Progress, he also contributed to a wide range of other national and international magazines, including the British title Pig World. Again, according to his own calculations, he topped 3,000 articles on pig production. Apart from that, he wrote four textbooks about pig production, some of which were translated into Chinese as well.

A passion for writing

The vast number of publications already reveals it: Becoming a successful and lasting contributor to many pig journals requires something else apart from a deep interest in pig production. John continued to write for Pig Progress until the end – his last column arrived in my inbox about a month before his death. His daughter Alison once explained to me that writing was his “lifeline”, and there is much truth in that. He had a quality which is not found in many pig people – it’s that of the storyteller.

Diary

It could be seen in virtually every aspect of John’s passions outside the world of pig production, most notably in the daily diary he kept during many years of his life, which he called the “Omnium Gatherum”. The diary, complete with an index, eventually came to consist of 170 volumes with at least 36,000 illustrations, mostly photos, and approaching five million words. The British newspaper The Daily Telegraph once called it “very probably the longest illustrated diary in the world”.

I started off my aide memoir, to remind myself of who I met in business

A short video on YouTube, shot in 2013, zooms in on the “why” of his diary. John is filmed saying: “I started off my aide memoir, to remind myself of who I met in business. I was meeting then perhaps 400 or 500 people a year. And I forgot who they were, so I noted these down. That was quite important, because most people keeping a diary give up after the first year. It’s just like swimming, you are very keen to start and then it gets to be a pain and you give up. These aides memoires kept me going and got me through that wall of resistance.”

Storytelling

Now storytelling is not only about telling, but also about the stories – about listening to them, about curiosity, about experiencing, imagining and collecting. No wonder then that history was a place where all those passions came together – from prehistoric subjects like Stonehenge to modern-day events – and from the author T.E. Lawrence to local archives, each subject had his entire interest. John had a particular enthusiasm for the Great War (1914–1918) and he made various journeys across the Channel to track the events that had taken place at the battlefields. And as may be expected, these trips were also documented in detail.

Always an informed opinion

Even at the age of 90 he held well-informed opinions about more topical issues, like for instance Brexit or Covid-19, and would not hesitate to share those in our email correspondence. Though he did not contract the virus, it was as if he knew what was coming.

About Covid-19, he wrote in mid-May 2020: “If I do catch the virus it will be from those carers who come in weekly, as they look after lots of other ‘oldies’. I’m not worried – what will be, will be. I have had a wonderful life and 62 years of a marvellous marriage; my dear wife’s ashes under an English oak sapling in the corner of a wood 400m away. I will end up too, next to her, and what is left of us will be together again for all time. A fitting end to one of life’s great love affairs, as it has been.”

John leaves behind a daughter Alison, who kindly volunteered to assist putting this review together. He also leaves behind, among other things, a 170-volume diary, which can be viewed in the Dorset History Centre, Dorchester, UK.

https://www.pigprogress.net/Home/General/2021/2/John-Gadd-Pig-expert-and-avid-storyteller-702326E/

Royal Free consultant on 12 months since first Covid patient admitted

From camdennewjournal.com

The intensive care doctor kept a diary of his hopes and fears during the first coronavirus 'wave'

A ROYAL Free intensive care consultant has reflected on the fears that were felt by staff on the front line, one year after the first Covid patient was admitted to the hospital in Hampstead, London, UK.

Dr Mike Spiro has been keeping a diary of the most challenging period of his career and this week spoke to the New Journal about the importance of PPE (personal protective equipment), innovations in treatment and new variants of the virus, while thanking the army for sending in personnel to help out.

He revealed some encouraging signs with new patient admissions down and some non-emergency procedures starting-up again for the first time in several weeks.

Dr Spiro said: “I kept the diary in the first wave and it makes amazing reading. I had written about how terrified I was intubating that first intensive care patient, which I did with one of my colleagues.”

The first Covid patient was admitted to the Royal Free in Pond Street on February 9, 2020. “I remember travelling in and the fear I had about my own safety, and if my own family would be ok if I was to contract this illness, which we knew very little about,” he said.

“I have young children. Was there a risk I could transmit it? Would the PPE work? Was this something I should be doing?”

Despite being “im­mersed in a sea of Covid” for 12 months, Dr Spiro has not tested positive for the virus. He puts this down to the effectiveness of good quality PPE, adding: “Looking back in my diary, there was a great fear of running out of PPE. We are all very grateful we didn’t. That would have been a disaster – a disaster on top of the disaster.

“PPE makes everything more difficult. Whether that is communicating with a mask, being unable to see facial expressions. Back then we had two pairs of gloves, then we put another pair of surgical gloves sterile gloves over the top. Doing any procedure like that – well, it was a shocking way to work, a huge change from normal practice.”

Changes to the way patients are treated in intensive care now compared to back in February last year include better monitoring of potential blood clotting and being “careful about the way we ventilate patients so as not to damage the lungs”, said Dr Spiro.

While he did not get sick from Covid, many other hospital workers have done, leading to severe rota shortages particularly in nursing. With all London hospitals stretched, there was no way of bringing in extra staff.

The New Journal revealed last month how more than 70 army personnel had been sent to the Hampstead hospital to help, with 40 working with the Intensive Care Unit.

Dr Spiro said: “You have to think we have gone from having 34 patients when we’re really full, to having, at the peak, 95 intensive care patients. That’s a 300 per cent expansion without any ability to increase staffing very much.

“The army has provided some support. They are not intensive care nurses, but we are phenomenally grateful for any assistance.”

He added: “We are no longer seeing a large number of admissions, but we still have an awful lot of patients in intensive care. That’s because people are in intensive care now for weeks, not days. We are busy, very stretched particularly from a nursing perspective.”

On the rollout of vaccines, he said: “We can’t honestly answer whether there will be a strain that comes out that is resistant to vaccine. We know that social distancing and hygiene and masks reduces the spread of the disease.

“The mistake is to be vaccinated and think you are immune and stop being careful.” Dr Spiro’s specialism is liver transplantation, a crucial field that he said had been “very badly” affected by Covid because there were no beds free in intensive care and because so many potential donors had Covid.

He said it had been “wonderful” that two liver transplants had been carried out this week at the hospital in Pond Street, as the service took small steps to starting up again following the current wave of coronavirus infections.

Asked how he calmed down after a shift, Dr Spiro said: “In the first wave I’d go home and not be able to sleep. I’d be mulling over the events of the day, worrying about what the following day would hold. “This wave, I have been able to sleep better. I’ve found physical exercise is important and family time is my release, so to speak.

“Children keep things simple. That’s very refreshing when you come back from a high intensity professional life. The kids are like: ‘yeah but we’re still going out on the bikes aren’t we?’”

And he added: “We are all being reserve teachers in our days off, and doing homeschooling. I’m not sure which I prefer: home schooling or my intensive care round. Both are equally stressful in many different ways.”

http://camdennewjournal.com/article/royal-free-consultant-on-12-months-since-first-covid-patient-admitted