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When I was at uni, I took an Aesthetics class. The Philosophy of Art. I don’t remember much from that course except for a couple of essays on Plato and Tolstoy.

Plato was keen that when educating the young men of his Republic that their art be censored and that the youth should only consume art that promoted nobility. So poetry shouldn’t be about loucheness and hedonism, rather they should be about promoting bravery in battle and moral uprightness.

I was reminded of this recently after binge-watching a series of Mindhunter on Netflix, a show about the FBI’s profiling of serial killers in the 1970s. This is show that goes deep into the minds and motivations of deeply disturbed people, and it’s very entertaining and very compelling. We watched this off the back of Unabomber, another Netflix show, this time about the hunt for another serial killer, Ted Kaczynski. Again very entertaining and compelling.

The question I had was: “is this type of show good for me? Is it making me a better human?”

You might say “lighten up mate, it’s just a show”.

But is it just a show? Say that you watch 2 of these series. That’s nearly 20 hours of dark subject matter. Are we really saying that this has no effect on your brain, on your neural pathways? By exposing yourself to the fetishes of psychopaths, is your own mind becoming corrupted or infected? What are you consuming to offset this? What positive, elevating content are you consuming to counteract this negativity?

Let’s look at what Plato might recommend for our viewing consumption.

Say you watch one hour of TV a day after work. Instead of Netflix, imagine that for one month you watched TED Talks. A TED Talk is around 15 mins, so that’s 4 TED Talks a day. That’s 120 TED Talks a month. How much more elevated do you think you’d be on this diet as opposed to on just consuming Netflix?

We can do the same with our other channels of consumption. Take Instagram. If you wanted to lose weight, replace the photos of burgers and huge pizzas with buddha bowls and salads. Make your feed one that is congruent with your overall goals.

Who knows how long we’re going to be in lockdown for? But we could make the best use of it possible. Instead of bingeing Narcos, then Narcos Mexico, maybe we could watch Roma, an Oscar-winning piece of world cinema? Instead of being glued to the news, we could listen to long pieces of the greatest classical music.

One of my best mates who’s currently in lockdown in Rome asked his parents for some musical inspiration to listen to during the Easter weekend. They came back with Handel’s Messiah and Bach’s St John Passion. We listened to the Messiah on full whack yesterday, which was elevating, and reminded me of a goal I’ve had for years after reading an interview with Emmanuelle Beart who blared out classical music in her country house during the interview (maybe that story doesn’t travel well!).

During this lockdown, we can read the great books we’ve put off, or listen to the full Ring Cycle (18 hours), or watch the greatest films in the world, do 1,000 pressups, take virtual tours of the world’s greatest galleries (like the Rijksmuseum) and museums online and using mobile phone apps. Do things and consume things that elevate and edify.

Right off to listen to the St John Passion. Why don’t you join me?!

I’m a creature of habit. At home, we eat the same food all the time: a bit of protein always like steak, salmon, fish cakes, some carbs (generally pasta), and some veg (we’re very partial to broccolini as it cooks so quickly).

In lockdown, however, I crave foods I’d never normally cook as I can get them in restaurants or by a takeaway. Deliveroo doesn’t have that many options as many restaurants have shut completely.

I wanted duck pancakes, so I bought ingredients that were closest to them. We had some hoisin sauce already (but no yellow bean sauce, which is the main flavour in duck pancakes). I bought some duck legs ready to be roasted from Sainsbury’s, and some Mission small tortillas (for the ‘pancakes’), some cucumber and spring onions to be finely sliced.

I also craved a proper burger, and bought some beef burgers, lettuce, white onions and soft white bread rolls, I couldn’t find any cheese slices but it was still excellent. Since making these, I found another great video by Sam The Cooking Guy on his ultimate burger:

Next, I’ve got the ingredients to recreate a dish my mum used to make: cod or haddock, braised with lots of garlic, onions, and tomatoes.

Plus a butterflied small leg of lamb for Easter Sunday, which I’ll do either as a roast or as a curry (but leaning towards a traditional roast studded with garlic).

On my next shop, I’ll get the ingredients for making wor tip potstickers following this recipe: https://steamykitchen.com/41178-best-chinese-potsticker-dumplings-recipe.html

It’s a great time to actually go through the cookbooks we have, like Polpo (some beautiful meatball recipes and salads) and Barrafina (croquetas mmm) and Jerusalem by Yotam Ottolenghi, and actually knuckle down and make them.

What are you cooking during the lockdown?

I started working from home on 17th March, and I started showing symptoms of Covid-19 on 19th March. I’d been out shopping that morning. Sainsbury’s was busier than I’d ever seen, with queues for the checkout going to the middle and the back of the store. I decided to go to Waitrose instead, which was only marginally less busy. I thought I had hayfever so I went to Boots to stock up on medication, and I went to Poundland to stock up on household essentials like washing liquid and bleach. At this stage, there was talk of a lockdown for London, but nothing firm. There was a rumour in the FT that the lockdown might involve the army, and start on 20th March, but this was squashed by ministers.

That afternoon of the 19th, I started to feel achey, and by the evening, I began to feel cold and shivery. I thought I probably had the flu. I didn’t think I had Covid-19. I went to bed at 9pm and even with two duvets and a hoodie, I felt cold. The next morning, my temperature was up around 39 degrees, and I felt like I couldn’t get out of bed. Two doctor friends from NCT thought it was strongly likely that I had Covid-19. I felt terrible. Achey, cold, shivery, feverish, extremely lethargic, and I had an inability to hold a conversation. I couldn’t even concentrate on a TV programme and even going to the toilet and going for a shower was difficult to muster the energy for. I was in bed for most of the day and night. My smell and taste buds also changed, as anything with vinegar in it such as tomato ketchup smelled and tasted like ammonia.

The online 111 advice was to self-isolate for 7 days and for Angelique and Zach, to self-isolate for 14 days. This wasn’t easy in a one-bed flat but luckily we had super-helpful neighbours who helped us take our bins down to the communal bin area so that we didn’t have to leave our flat. We had enough food to see us through 14 days of self-isolation and one of our neighbours brought us some banana bread and others bought us some lemons and ginger.

The lockdown itself came on 23rd March and it made the self-isolation easier in that everyone was now basically self-isolating. We couldn’t leave the flat to go to the shops or take daily exercise, but apart from that, our experience was now the same as everyone else’s.

By day 9 of the Covid-19 (28th March), I still had a high temperature and developed a horrendous cough. The cough was so bad that it stopped me sleeping at night. It was so loud and frequent that it woke Zach up. It drove Angelique crazy. I didn’t start to feel myself again until around day 13, much longer than the expected recovery by day 7. The cough will linger for a while longer. It’s the 8th of April now and I still have a bit of a hacking cough but I’m just glad that I didn’t have any shortness of breath. That was my big fear, particularly as it went past 7 days with Covid-19. What if my body couldn’t shake off the virus? What if my immune system was just overrun? Shortness of breath would have meant a trip to the hospital, which would have been a bad day because it seems that once you go to the hospital, there’s a reasonable chance that you don’t make it out. There’s a lot of terribly sad stories of people going into hospital, and their loved ones can’t visit them, and they die in hospital with none of their loved ones around them. 

We’re allowed out for infrequent trips to buy groceries and medical supplies if needed, and we can go out for an hour of exercise near us. I went to Sainsbury’s on Monday 6th April, and there was a queue outside with around 20 people all spaced 2m apart. It didn’t take long to get in and once in, there was a civilised atmosphere, with people mostly observing social distancing rules. In contrast to before the lockdown, there was a lot on the shelves. I managed to get some chicken, some noodles and even some toilet paper.

We’re lucky to have a balcony and we get sunshine in the mornings until around 12.30pm. We’re also lucky to have a nice park on our doorstep to take an hour’s walk around.

Hey there!

This week I’ve been reading

a corking article about US Air Force Pararescuemen (also known as PJs) who are the guys that Navy Seals call when they’re wounded and need help behind enemy lines. PJs are elite combat medics who can provide expert medical help and rescue in the most hostile environments.

The article is: The Savior Elite: Inside the Special Operations Force Tasked with Rescuing Navy SEALS They are the military’s “guardian angels.” They are trained paramedics, paratroopers, and combat divers. This is the story of one such airman, and the mission of a lifetime.

It tells the story of a civilian vessel hundreds of miles from the nearest port and hospital which had had an explosion that left several sailors with horrific burns and life-threatening injuries. The surgery that needed to be done in tight, fearsomely hot confines is compelling and just another of Esquires’s excellent long-form reads.

From the Esquire article:

The seven airmen rise. At the next command—“HOOK UP!”—they clip their parachutes’ red static lines to a steel cable running over their heads.

Fifteen hundred feet below, their target: the Tamar, a commercial shipping vessel two thirds into its voyage from Baltimore to Gibraltar. Earlier that morning, there had been an explosion onboard, some unknown ignition that had set fire to four sailors working inside the hull. In his distress message, the ship’s captain wrote that the men had been burned from head to toe. They were in the middle of the Atlantic; the nearest land—the Azores Islands—was over five hundred miles to the east. They were out of range of both U.S. and Portuguese Coast Guard helicopters as well as rescue boats. The men’s injuries were severe, requiring expert attention. The captain’s message was routed from Lisbon to Portsmouth, then to Boston, and on to the airmen in Long Island. Within hours of the explosion, two of the sailors died. The two other men—charred, skin flayed—wait now without pain medicine.

(image taken from the Esquire article)

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I also read an excellent primer to Nassim Taleb’s idea of Antifragility (Nassim Taleb: A Definition of Antifragile and its Implications). The main idea is this: the opposite of fragility is not ‘robust’ or ‘resilient’; its opposite is actually ‘anti-fragility’. Something ‘fragile’ breaks under stress and volatility. Something that is ‘anti-fragile’ becomes stronger under stress eg. the mythical Hydra, which when one head was cut off, two would grow back in its place.

From Taleb (and quoted from the Farnam Street blog):

Some things benefit from shocks; they thrive and grow when exposed to volatility, randomness, disorder, and stressors and love adventure, risk, and uncertainty. Yet, in spite of the ubiquity of the phenomenon, there is no word for the exact opposite of fragile. Let us call it antifragile. Antifragility is beyond resilience or robustness. The resilient resists shocks and stays the same; the antifragile gets better. This property is behind everything that has changed with time: evolution, culture, ideas, revolutions, political systems, technological innovation, cultural and economic success, corporate survival, good recipes (say, chicken soup or steak tartare with a drop of cognac), the rise of cities, cultures, legal systems, equatorial forests, bacterial resistance … even our own existence as a species on this planet.

Here is the ‘triad’ of antifragility (taken from Farnam Street blog and in turn taken from Taleb’s book):

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Eating more veg and less meat

I’m trying to eat more veg and less meat and this is a cracking video from the NYT Cooking channel on how to do so:

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Make your own finger-licking Banh Mi

I had a hankering for Banh Mi yesterday so I had to make it. Never done it before. YouTube offered this corker from one of my favourite cooking channels, (Sam the Cooking Guy):

Instead of pork, I used a rotisserie chicken from my local supermarket, and shredded it into rough pieces. I used a soft giraffe baguette, and lots of coriander, lime juice, fish sauce, white vinegar, Kewpie mayo, and siracha. Definitely try this!

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Movie this week

Angelique wanted to watch Booksmart. I was a bit skeptical at first but it was really good. (Think Superbad updated for the 2020s. (Can you believe Superbad was released in 2007?!))

Booksmart is whip-smart funny, warm, kind-hearted, and has two great performances from the two leads, (Beanie Feldstein as Molly Davidson and Kaitlyn Dever as Amy Antsler). Check it out on Amazon Prime Video.

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Quote for the week

“If my mind can conceive it and my heart can believe it, then I can achieve it.”

Muhammad Ali

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Have a great week ahead!

Best, Ed