Life in a Pandemic

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

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.

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.
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Life in a Pandemic is produced by Jeremy Wagstaff and Sari Sudarsono for CleftStick.com.

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.

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.