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Published: July 11th 2020
Craig and Ross in….ISO.
Episode 1 (Saturday July 11, 2020).
It was dear Shell Greyhound (aka Michelle Edwards) who put the idea into my head. She missed my travel blogs this year and suggested I blog about my time in isolation. Hardly riveting reading, I thought at first. But then I mulled over it and decided it would be a fun thing to do and, if nothing else, it would give me some amusement during ISO_2.0. So, here goes….
Living as we do in Melbourne, Ross and I have become old hands at this COVID-induced isolation thing (ISO). We have been more or less house bound since mid-March. All face-to-face teaching at the university had ceased, and lab-based research significantly wound back as well. I had not lost my job and had been lucky enough to be WFH, in COVID-speak. Our dining room had become my office. Ross had bought a lovely new dining table only two months prior. The vase of flowers made way for my desktop computer and peripherals. It now features a sporadic array of chocolate wrappers, coffee mugs, memory sticks, bits of paper with notes scrawled on them, books on genetics, a
bottle of eye drops, and seven large pegs. (Yeah, I don’t know why either.) Since March, I’ve sat here working - day in, day out - putting my entire course online, thanks to COVID-19. Through the lead-light windows of our dining room, I would watch the changing weather as the days rolled by and the academic year pressed doggedly on. As March turned into April, it was obvious I would be unable to see my dear parents and friends in NSW over Easter, as I usually do. Instead, I spent the whole of Easter devising curly questions for the mid-semester exam in my course. Like many people, I sat through endless Zoom meetings during the initial nation-wide lockdown. At least I could stop the video while I went to the bathroom, or shave my nose hairs during a particularly tiresome monologue from someone. Most afternoons, I was able to get out on my bike, clearing my head, getting some exercise, and re-connecting with the world.
I spent an inordinate amount of time dreaming up and implementing creative ways to teach online. Meanwhile, Ross spent an inordinate amount of time dreaming up and implementing creative ways of making
cocktails. The two seemed to match! By the end of semester (June 30), I had managed to get through the entire course without seeing a single one of my 98 students face-to-face. This was, of course, disappointing to me. I love the usual engagement and interaction – especially in practical classes. Yet I’d seen most of the students via Zoom, popping in and out of online practical classes run by our extremely competent tutors, or making some grandiose video announcements like some sort of presidential address. It all went very well in the end, and I had wonderful student feedback. The online (open book) exam went well too. It was challenging indeed to devise questions that students could not readily look up, but we did it. I was very impressed with all the students’ answers. Marking exams can be tiresome, although occasionally punctuated by an amusing answer. In years gone by, I had encountered funny answers to questions. During my PhD years, I tutored first year uni students in the evening at an all-male college at the University of Sydney. I once asked the class: What is the name of the nerve that controls the nose?
“The sneeze nerve,”
said one guy with apparent confidence.
On another occasion, I asked for the definition of the PMZ. This is the Posterior Marginal Zone, a part of the early chicken embryo. Someone said it was as the “Partially Melted Zone”.
On another occasion, I drove to the college at 7:30pm for the weekly tutorial, only to learn that they had won the Varsity rugby that day and were out celebrating. I wish I’d been told in advance, so I returned to my car to drive off. Someone had decided it was a good idea to let the air out of all four of my tyres! I stood waiting in the rain for the NRMA, cursing my students – though I never actually knew who did it.
During the easing of lockdown restrictions in Victoria - around late May, I guess it was – I started going back into the lab periodically. My staff and students did same, observing the required distancing. Standing oddly distant to each other as if one of us had halitosis or something, while chatting about work. I love being in the lab. Teaching was coming to an end for the semester and
so the opportunity to get back into the lab to do experiments was tantalising. My non-science friends sometimes ask: what is it about being a scientist that is so attractive? This is easy. For me – and for many of us – it is the innate curiosity of the natural world. It is an incredible thing to do an experiment in the lab and realise you are the first person on this Earth to make a new observation, however incremental. No one else has discovered what you – YOU - have just observed. Nature has coyly revealed one of its secrets to you. It never ceases to amaze, inspire and drive us as scientists, and indeed as educators too. Call us nerds if you like, we don’t give a shit. I often have to pinch myself – I’m being paid to potter about in the lab, doing what I love. Pig. Clover.
So, anyway, one of my tasks back in the lab was to cut tissue sections on the cryostat for our Honours student. The cryostat is a piece of equipment with a chilled chamber that allows you to cut very fine sections of frozen embryonic tissue, and then
mount the cross sections on microscope slides for later staining. The cryostat in our department is located down on the ground floor. There is a log book that you must fill in whenever you use the cryostat, or Irene, the facility manager, will disembowel you. You must state your name, date and any “comments” that relate to the proper functioning of the instrument.
Other people always wrote relevant but prosaic comments like:
“The cryostat was functioning as normal” or “The chamber temperature was set slightly too warm, at -17 degrees.”
I wrote:
“Had a wonderful time, will come again.”
Luckily, Irene shares my sense of humour.
As May transitioned into June, we had an uncharacteristic run of mild and sunny weather, week after week, here in Melbourne. As many of you know from my Facebook posts, Ross was always cooking delicious dinners during this period. While eating his wonder Larb Gai one night around mid-June, I said:
“There is something going on in Victoria.”
“What do you mean?” he said.
“Well,” I replied “we never have a day of only one or two cases of COVID-19 here in Victoria.
Even NSW now has consistently only one or two cases each day. Melbourne usually has double digit figures. 15 or more. I mean, look at the Cedar Meats outbreak, and those cases at McDonalds.”
Ross shrugged his shoulders.
But – in my typical way – I was a little edgy.
Around this time, Mark and Ross upped and moved to Queensland. In retrospect, their timing was exquisite and I don’t blame them. But this meant our conduit to dinners and parties was a bit torn and we have not been out and about so much. Anyway, Ross was still recovering from the DVT he got back in January after Cambodia, and I was very busy with work. By early July, I realised that my edginess was justified. It had become clear that COVID cases were increasing in Melbourne, and a lockdown of local hotspots was required. Pre-empting this, I had actually e-mailed both the premier, Daniel Andrews, and the State Health minister, Jenny Mikakos, urging such lockdowns. I felt they acted too late. (They never replied. Sure, they must get a gazillion e-mails daily). By mid-July, the excrement had hit the cooling device and a
full metropolitan lockdown was imminent. Everyone knows I’m a Labor/Greens voting leftie, but I did feel that the state Labor government in this case should have acted much earlier. (The go hard, go early mantra.). However, at the end of the day, it was stupid people not following the rules that tipped the balance. Now we have full lockdown again across metropolitan Melbourne, with rona all over the place and it is a case of bitter déjà vu. So, Ross and I have had to cease those heaving parties, open-slather orgies, voluminous dinner parties and riotous BBQ’s (not). It’s another six weeks - at least – of Lockdown 2.0.
It seemed essential to us that we had access to You-tube, Netflix, Stan or other such mechanisms of distraction during this second bout of otherwise mind-numbing isolation. Having exhausted everything that was even vaguely nature-related on Netflix, I recently came upon the series called “World War II in HD Colour”. We have really enjoyed watching this, restraining ourselves to one or two episodes per night of the 13-episode behemoth. After animal documentaries, I guess I enjoy history documentaries the most. I am particularly intrigued by World War II, its origins,
it’s battles and geopolitical consequences. There is lots of incredible old footage that has been colourised in this series and lots of cool information about strategies used by both sides. Did you know that the Brits stationed many inflatable tanks and other props in Southern England to fool the Germans that they were about to invade Calais in France, but they had in fact, chosen Normandy? Anyway, the final episode of the series features victory in the Pacific, when the USA ended the war with Japan in the cataclysmic way that we all know. While watching footage of the Japanese foreign minister dressed in smart black coat, top hat and white gloves signing the surrender on that US battleship, Ross turned to me and said: “He looks like the banker from Monopoly.”
Everyone knows my obssesive love of animals. Namely, wild animals. I decided to start photographing animals spotted around our home during ISO. Here in suburban Prahran, inner South-East Melbourne, there is wildlife to keep me happy. We have ring-tailed possums in the camellias along the fence-line, or running precariously along electrical wires out front. We also have brush tails possum in the trees, growling during the night
or belting the shit out of each other in our roof at 4am. There is a lone tawny frogmouth that pops up now and then and even a barn owl seen one night (well, at 2am). We have crows in the backyard, along with little honey-eaters and red honey eaters in the grevilleas, tiny flittering thornbills and sliver-eyes, and occasional butcher birds. Lately, I have enjoyed seeing currawongs, with their sharp, dextrous flight, and haunting late-afternoon calls. Rainbow lorikeets and corellas fly past, though never calling in. Rarely, we see beautiful yellow-tailed black cockatoos passing overheard, with their slow, almost laboured way of flying, and those characteristic “creaking-door” calls. It’s an unmistakable sound. We also have (imported) blackbirds, pesky Indian mynah birds and more sedate turtle doves. The latter are a couple. I assume they are a male and female, but as I said on Facebook, they could be gay. Who knows? It is Prahran. At dusk, I can stand on our back steps and watch large fruit bats on their evening trips to pillage and plunder orchards somewhere further afield. On occasion, I can make out the very high-pitched squeaks of those consummate echo-locators, the micro-bats. Lastly, Ross one
day saw a brazen urban fox, mucking about on the neighbour’s roof (he snapped a quick photo with his iPhone– attached). So, quite a few critters around here.
The crows, in particular, are interesting to watch. (Or Australian ravens, for the pedantic.) They are rather smart. Out cycling one day (yes, I’m allowed to do that), I watched a crow sitting on top of a bin out front of my old workplace, the Royal Children’s Hospital. It used one foot to hold on to the black bin liner, then used its other foot to pull the liner up and grab it, freeing the first foot to then pull more bin liner up. Repeating this a few times brought the contents of the bin up to the top and yielded a smorgasbord of food. Some discarded McDonalds chips, an apple core, a sad sandwich and a half eaten Cheese-burger.
Yesterday, I walked down to “Alma Village”, a small cluster of shops on, you guessed it, Alma Road. I saw some wattle in full bloom. I thought this was impertinently early. Is that right, Andrew Grundy? And further along, some creative soul has affixed gorgeous little doors to
the base of several council trees along the median strip. (See photo opposite.) Like Alice, I really do wonder where those doors might lead? Into a COVID-free world, perhaps, where people sing and dance together, kiss and hug, and hop on planes to international destinations.
We have now been told to wear face masks while out and about in Melbourne city. I’m off to hunt some down. As Bryan Monk has suggested, Ross will likely adorn ours with sequins and tinsel.
Cheers for now,
Craig (and Ross).
P.S. The PM has just said we need to practice social distancing even at home, behind closed doors. So, I must keep away from Ross. Filthy creature that he is.
PPS. There may be more photos below. (Click on any photo to enlarge it.)
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RENanDREW
Ren & Andrew
ISO 2.0
Hi Craig, I really enjoyed this post. I'm from Melbourne (living in Tassie) and have been feeling the pain of all my family and friends having to go through this six week stage 3 lockdown thing all over again. I know Dan and the Department of Health / Human Services could have done a better job, but they can't be held responsible for the entitled, selfish, stupid idiots who live among us :( And now it looks like NSW might be going down the same path. Thanks for the descriptions and photos of the wildlife, they are a welcome distraction. I love the photo of the fox on the roof! I haven't lived in Melbourne since 2007, but fox numbers seem to have risen quite a bit... Take care and good luck with the hunt for masks. Cheers, Ren