Ethic – Page 7 – Deborah Makarios

January 15, 2021January 15, 2021

Of Hamsters, Lavender, and Immigration

I freely confess that I had not realized how much the general “What Even Is This” of the last year had affected me until I came to start actually writing this new novel. It turns out that I now have the attention span of a hamster who has slurped down three large mochaccinos. A rather stressed and easily overheated hamster, moreover, with a long to do list.

However.

I have been trying to get into the garden lately as a way of reducing stress, and it has been teaching me some lessons. (#1: There are Always More Weeds.)

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December 24, 2020December 24, 2020

The Post of Christmas Past

Or rather, the posts. This is my eighth year of blogging, and I have amassed eight Christmas posts. You might think that this means one Christmas post per year, but you would be wrong (except in a purely statistical sense).

Here the assorted eight are, collated for your convenience:

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September 23, 2020September 23, 2020

Of Politics and Poo

“Medicinal rhubarb was commercially grown from 1777 in Oxfordshire. It had been valued as a purgative and laxative for many centuries: a bag of rhubarb was considered sufficiently valuable to have been listed in the will of Marco Polo, and in the mid-nineteenth century the Chinese official Lin Zexu, unaware that it was, by then, a familiar feature of the Victorian vegetable garden, threatened Queen Victoria with a complete ban on the export of rhubarb. His intention was to bring a constipated nation to its knees and thus to end British sales of opium in China.”
from The Silk Road: Two Thousand Years in the Heart of Asia by Frances Wood.

Personally, I wish Lin Zexu had been successful in his quest to stop (or possibly stop up) that giant pusher the British Empire and “eliminate this poison once and for all and to the benefit of all mankind.” You can read more of his letter here. It’s powerful stuff, and even today, there are those to whom it could well be posted.

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