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Post by kathryn on Jun 8, 2020 17:20:46 GMT
*sigh*
Scones with jam and clotted cream are one of the few things I really miss since giving up dairy.
You can sort-of do a dairy-free/vegan scone ok (they are not quite the same) but I’ve not yet found a good replacement for clotted cream. Cashew cream is no-where near close enough to satisfying thick creamy texture.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 6, 2020 9:39:39 GMT
Oh, forgot to say, my address was randomly selected for an antibody home testing study run by Imperial College London and Ipsos Mori.
They sent me out a home testing fingerprick test with instructions and then asked me to send the results and complete a survey as to how easy it was to use. They stressed that the test is not validated and to ignore the results as they might be wrong - they were interested in how easy it was to follow the instructions and read the results.
I guess they are sending out a couple of different designs of test.
Did feel a bit reassured that the result said negative even though it might not be accurate. I haven’t had symptoms or anything but the worry that I might have been asymptomatic and could have inadvertently infected anyone I didn’t stay far enough away from was playing on the back of my mind. There was a kid in the park the other day who obviously was too young to understand social distancing ad came right up to me!
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Post by kathryn on Jun 6, 2020 8:25:20 GMT
Aren’t most theatre costumes rented? I know The National re-use and rent theirs out to other productions and films, etc. So there’s probably not huge stores of costumes at most theatres.
I actually wonder if Hiddleston had been given it as a souvenir of the production, and has offered it up for sale. He’ll be familiar with the movie memorabilia market from the ComicCon circuit - he’s been doing quite a few of them in the past couple of years and they’re obviously a nice little earner.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 6, 2020 8:15:44 GMT
People arent all going to be able to afford N95 masks, or get hold of them even if they could. I realised the other day that I actually have one. Bought a ‘pollution mask’ for my trip to India last year, which I didn’t need to use in the end, and it has languished forgotten in the front pocket of my suitcase ever since. Found it when I took my suitcase down to dust the top of the wardrobe. Now I’m feeling guilty about having had it all this time. And worried that if I actually wear it in public I’ll get hassle from people for taking PPE from NHS workers.
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Post by kathryn on Jun 6, 2020 7:55:20 GMT
Unusual for theatre, but they obviously need the money and don’t need the costume any more.
It’s more common in the film world to sell this kind of stuff. Usually to serious collectors of memorabilia or museums, rather than individual fans.
I don’t think it’s creepy. I’ve been to plenty of exhibits and museums that had film costumes and props - even restaurants like Planet Hollywood! Got to hold and pose for a photo with an Oscar at Universal Studios.
If there’s people with the money to buy it and it helps keep the Donmar running then why not?
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Post by kathryn on Jun 1, 2020 18:25:02 GMT
1) Roughly how old were you when you first grasped the idea that diseases are caught from other people? 2) Roughly what percentage of adults in Britain is it reasonable to expect not to understand that diseases are caught from other people? 3) What level of education is required to understand that diseases are caught from other people? A levels? A degree? Or primary school? I have a friend whose father has just turned 70, and has not been following the lockdown rules. Just can’t seem to grasp that he shouldn’t be popping round to his mate’s for a cup of tea, or having family and friends over for a BBQ (there ended up being about 12 of them in his back garden for his birthday). He doesn’t use the internet or pay much attention to the news. Her mum died last year and he was totally reliant on her for many things - they’ve had to teach him how to write a cheque and use the oven. He’s not stupid, he’s just very set in his ways and finds it hard to learn new things. And it has to be said that there are very basic, obvious health messages that may people do not follow, even though they know them. How many men wash their hands after using the loo? I know someone who said their son’s school had to actually put soap in the boys’ bathroom as a result of the Coronavirus - they hadn’t bothered to even provide it before.
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Post by kathryn on May 28, 2020 20:51:19 GMT
We are governed by incompetent ideologues whose one skill is manipulating the media via appealing to their vested interest, that’s why they don’t have a proper plan for anything beyond spin.
Sadly the net effect of the Brexit saga has been to remove anyone competent at the job of governing from government.
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Post by kathryn on May 28, 2020 15:58:59 GMT
And the reason the government is trying so strenuously to encourage us not to compare the death toll here with countries like Germany is that those countries have been able to deal with the pandemic more effectively than we have (granted, that's not a high bar) in no small part because there was more spare capacity in their healthcare systems to begin with. I think it's more that the government decided to try the herd immunity approach first, allowing the disease to spread unchecked until experts finally got through to them that we didn't know whether natural herd immunity works with this disease and that it's not just people with existing health conditions who can die from it. That delay means that throughout we've had to deal with an order of magnitude more cases than if they'd acted promptly. Even our austerity-impaired resources could easily have handled the situation if we'd deployed them a week earlier. I’m not convinced that they didn’t change tack as much because businesses were making that decision for themselves, and not locking down started to look politically irresponsible. My company sent us all to work from home the week before lockdown started and I know many others did too.
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Post by kathryn on May 28, 2020 11:10:29 GMT
If we don't get back to normal for routine treatments and early stage investigations quickly then that figure for cancer will be the one going up. Life in that respect should never have gone on hold for coronavirus. I’m afraid that the impact of long-term austerity policies and an obsessive drive for ‘efficiency’. With no spare capacity in the health system - indeed, a health system already over capacity - dealing with an unexpected public health crisis meant routine treatments had to be put on hold. With an infectious disease you absolutely have to deal with it as a matter of urgency. A health system with space capacity - and I’m not just talking about Nightingale hospitals being thrown together, because you can’t build an emergency doctor in a week the way you can build an emergency ward - can treat the unexpected health crisis and keep standard services going at the same time. But the government were not willing to have spare capacity in the health service because that is ‘inefficient’.
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Post by kathryn on May 28, 2020 6:53:50 GMT
Made me curious enough to Google - 2019 figures say on average 450 people died a day from cancer, which was the leading cause of death.
So we are only *just* getting Covid-19 deaths down to the level of all cancers. And cancer doesn’t have an exponential growth curve to worry about.
Lest we forget, that is why we went into lockdown - the risk that the peak we experienced of 1000 deaths a day would then become a peak of 2000, then 4000, then 8000, etc, if left unchecked.
It’s not like we get to choose between Covid-19 and cancer - we have to deal with both at the same time.
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Post by kathryn on May 27, 2020 9:10:47 GMT
betty you are confusing the general lockdown advice about exercise with the isolation rules. The former were a lot more flexible than the latter, for very good reason. Exercise within your local area was explicitly allowed - the hour limit was a suggestion to try and avoid parks etc becoming crowded. If you could socially distance effectively you could exercise for longer than that. The isolation rules for households where anyone was symptomatic were absolute, and the advice was for non-symptomatic members of the household to socially distance within the house. Sitting in a car together for hours was in itself ignoring the guidelines.
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Post by kathryn on May 26, 2020 22:15:05 GMT
Cummings' ego and Boris enslavement to it is the real reason this story, this huge, dangerous distraction in the midst of a pandemic, lumbers on. Indeed, this story is as much about Johnson’s woeful lack of decisive leadership as it is about his advisor’s behaviour. When the advisor becomes the story, when they detract from the ability of their boss to do the job of leading the country, the advisor had to go. Regardless of whether their actual behaviour was justified or not. That Johnson cannot follow this cast-iron rule of politics is a sign of his weakness.
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Post by kathryn on May 26, 2020 15:53:27 GMT
No, the isolation rules were NOT about applying common sense. Because ‘common sense’ is remarkably UNcommon and people can find justifications for all sorts of daft things if left to their own devices.
Because of the extraordinary public health emergency, the isolation rules were absolutes, they were not open to interpretation, they were not about finding a loophole that allowed you to do what you want as long as you were careful.
What’s more as an advisor to the Government that created not just rules but LAWS severely restricting our liberties, it is more serious that Cummings disregarded them at that the government is now trying to justify it by claiming that acting on ‘instinct’ and ‘your own judgement’ was ok. It was not, and that was made abundantly clear by the messaging. Which is why the vast majority of people in far more extreme circumstances did not.
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Post by kathryn on May 26, 2020 15:47:53 GMT
But at the point when he left anyone showing up at his house to protest would be arrested for breaking lockdown.
Although we can be sure they didn’t, because if they had people would have found out a lot sooner that he wasn’t there!
It’s a post-hoc justification designed to manipulate your sympathies. It would never have occurred to them to suggest it as reason if that video hadn’t shown up this weekend - which is why it wasn’t part of the original story.
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Post by kathryn on May 26, 2020 15:31:32 GMT
He lives round the corner from me, and I regularly walked along his road during my daily exercise. There had been no crowds and no harassment until this weekend. I absolutely don't approve of it now, but to suggest that the scenes on TV now were a regular occurrence leading to his decision to leave London is not the case. Would it have to be a regular occurrence? Lots of female MPs reported feeling threatened after being targeted with unpleasant remarks and heckling, not always sustained. (And they were right to speak out about it, by the way. I think it’s wrong, whichever side of the political spectrum you’re on.) It would need to have happened once to be a genuine reason. It quite obviously hadn’t - if anyone had shown up at his house they would have been immediately arrested for breaking lockdown.
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Post by kathryn on May 26, 2020 15:29:28 GMT
@jeanhunt you are twisting yourself in knots to try and come up with reasonable justifications for Cummings’ explanations.
It’s difficult to do that even taking those explanations at face value, isn’t it, given the simplicity of the guidelines that we were all given, and that he helped write.
Give yourself a break: entertain for a moment that the reason the explanations are so ridiculous and hard to justify is that they’re not true. They were made up after the fact, to fit the irrefutable evidence provided by eye witnesses, with the help of a lawyer (which is why it reads just like a witness statement). It has been designed to manipulate your natural sympathies.
Don’t forget, in his wife’s original account of their experience in the Spectator none of this was mentioned. That account describes them emerging out of isolation into a locked-down London.
We know they’ve already lied about what happened once.
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Post by kathryn on May 25, 2020 20:01:02 GMT
It’s not surprising that they think the public will swallow a load of obvious lies and that they can brazen this out with no consequences - that’s practically business as usual for this lot by now.
I find it disgusting but it seems many people are happy to be lied to and treated like a mug.
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Post by kathryn on May 22, 2020 21:21:27 GMT
I’ve been using my spare time to practice my juggling - I learned how to do a 3-ball cascade 20 years ago at uni but hadn’t really tried anything else since. Been learning some(very) basic 3-ball tricks and trying to learn to juggle 4 balls.
Yesterday I received a surprise package containing new professional standard juggling balls! I still don’t know who sent it - it was my birthday last weekend so I am guessing they are a belated birthday gift from someone. Can only be one of 3 or 4 people but none of them have dressed up yet.
A lovely surprise!
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Post by kathryn on May 5, 2020 20:48:45 GMT
I try not to snap at people because honestly social distancing just isn’t natural behaviour and we all have our absent-minded moments when we’re not paying enough attention. But it is hard! I did have to say something to a trio of people who didn’t even pause to let me get down a flight of stairs - the stairs are only a meter wide, you can’t distance properly on them even in single file, and they came up 3 abreast.
I was near the bottom so they’d literally only have to wait 30 seconds for me to get down and move to the side.
Then there was the chap who told me ‘it’s ok I don’t have it!’ when I backed down the stairs and move on to the side to let him pass. Mate, you don’t know that!
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Post by kathryn on Apr 28, 2020 13:12:47 GMT
Ugh, that all sounds horrific.
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Post by kathryn on Apr 25, 2020 10:08:48 GMT
My god! Weeks without ice cream! 😱 How have you managed?!
That reminds me - ate the last of mine (dairy-free) last night, must add it to the shopping list. Discovered the other week that my local corner shop has a Roar brand of vegan ice cream that has hemp seeds in it - chocolate brownie flavour, proper tasty, can’t get it in Sainsbury’s.
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Post by kathryn on Apr 23, 2020 22:22:40 GMT
On my morning walk in the park today I saw 3 ducklings swimming with their mama on the pond.
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Post by kathryn on Apr 21, 2020 13:56:54 GMT
It's not the familiarity of the face, it's the affection the audience holds them in.
I was totally unmoved by Glenn Close in Sunset Boulevard at ENO. I left after about 5 minutes of the standing ovation she got - it probably went on for another 5 minutes after that! Her fans were having some kind of spiritual experience seeing her perform. I had a similar experience with Glenda Jackson's Lear - absent that connection to her as a performer I found it totally flat, but you'd never know it from the way others responded.
An audience connection with a particular performer enhances the material being performed, even if they are past their prime. That's why people still turn out for performers who they loved in their youth even though they can't possibly perform on the same level any more. In music, the nostalgia circuit relies on it.
Theatre geeks will always turn out to see Judi Dench and Ian Mckellan, or Maggie Smith. They could be reading the phone book and we'd go, because it's experiencing that affectionate connection that is rewarding.
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Post by kathryn on Apr 13, 2020 19:51:15 GMT
It's one of those noises that isn't intrinsically annoying but becomes infuriating because I don't know what it is and start worrying that it might be something important that I have to deal with. Oh I know what you mean. I’m having a version of that right now. I got myself one of those robot hoovers last week. You charge it up overnight, press a button and off it goes, trundling around all the flat space it can reach until it runs out of battery, in a seemingly random pattern. And then it returns itself to the charging station. Lovely. So I set it off this morning and let it do its thing in the living room, hallway and my bedroom while I showered, got dressed, made breakfast, etc. It had re-docked itself in the living room to charge by the time I noticed a smear of liquid on top of it. Not much - just a drip’s worth. Which means there must be a leak somewhere in the living room, hallway or bedroom. A drip, coming from something that the little hoover passed under. Can I find the damn drip? No, I cannot. *sigh*
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Post by kathryn on Apr 12, 2020 10:49:35 GMT
I have a trip to New York booked for late September (and then on to Canada) and if the situation is improved enough to allow travel and the theatres are open I’ll definitely be going.
And I’ll be back in the theatre in London too. Streaming/NT Live is just not the same.
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Post by kathryn on Apr 7, 2020 19:27:32 GMT
Farewell TheatreMonkey!!
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Post by kathryn on Apr 4, 2020 21:17:54 GMT
I spent a couple of hours tidying up my front yard this afternoon. It was rather lovely to see the older folks living in the old alms houses across the road having a socially-distanced gossip from their respective front gardens.
Not so lovely to see my downstairs neighbour heading out the house to buy cough syrup for his wife. I heard her coughing this week, and chatting (through the window) to her this afternoon she admitted to having been ill and just starting to feel a bit better. I am sure he should be self-isolating still. If he’d asked I’d have gone to the shop for them to get whatever they need.
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Post by kathryn on Apr 3, 2020 21:17:10 GMT
Have we seen "Christine" in anything else? Or do we reckon part of her contract was to never take another acting part ever again to keep the mystery alive? Did the "candelight dinner" suggestion happen at every performance? Her name’s Polly Conway. She was in Doctors once but I don’t think I’ve seen her in any other stage productions. According to her Twitter she runs her own shop now, so I don’t think she is acting much any more.
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Post by kathryn on Apr 3, 2020 21:15:46 GMT
Sorry to ruin it but every bit of "audience interaction" was staged - I saw it twice and it was exactly the same each time! I think the idea was that by offering a sandwich the audience member undermined the fact that Francis was starving and desperate for food. It even got to the point we’re actual audience members offered sandwiches. When I saw it at the Aldwych and a second guy shouted he had one Corden said “you’ve seen the show before haven’t you”. He did the routine, took the sandwiches, chucked it off stage and Oliver appeared briefly munching on a sandwich And when the fake audience member offered his sandwich corden said “oh not again” and repeated the routine And I think when he said later on we’re over the running time he gave the real audience member the glare A lady walked to the front of the stage and handed offered Corden a cheese sandwich when I saw it at the NT. It was early in the run and may have been the first time it happened - Corden spent a good five minutes improvising with her, it was hilarious, but stopped the play dead - in the end he had to call for someone in the wings to come on in order to get it back on track. It was glorious.
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Post by kathryn on Apr 2, 2020 21:14:41 GMT
Ah, what tremendous fun that was. Takes me back to watching it in the actual audience at the Littelton.
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