Chatterbox - still talking nonsense

I've gradually been getting more and more cross with the commentary on Heartstopper's lack of sexual content.  This comes up in all media, but I am particularly looking at Trixie and Katya's otherwise very entertaining review on Youtube, and the mainly glowing review from the podcast Chucky , as well as multiple print and online reviews which choose to excuse it, rather than consider why such choices might be made. I'm just going to have a mini rant to get it off my chest. The graphic novel series was conceived and has been delivered as a young teen suitable story about love, in itself a highly valuable exercise in providing a different kind of representation to young LGBTQ+ teens beyond the often quite sensationalised and graphic representation of teenage relationships in general. The scene in S2 Episode 6 of the tv series where Nick says he is not ready to do more than kissing, has caused the most amount of disbelief and in some cases scorn and so I am going to use t...

Just need to get this off my chest, so feel free to scroll on by if you aren't interested in this (not very) important issue. I'm back from spending some time in what was overall, a very nice hotel, but with the standard attitude to mirrors.  It actually doesn't matter whether it is a grotty B&B or a 5 star luxury hotel, the same issue appears each time.    I'm a person of a certain age who needs to spend some time with makeup, mirror and hairstyler before going out in public, and almost every hotel I have ever stayed in ignores this basic need.  In the latest hotel, they moved me to a new, much fancier, room but still the same issues. The obvious place to put makeup on and dry my hair would be the bathroom.  But, no plugs for my own hairstyler, misted up mirrors placed too high up the wall so that you need to stand (yes, even if a stool is provided), and harsh overhead lighting means that this isn't an option.   So, what about that dressing table/...

Day 1 - Flying….  I don’t love flying, it’s such a faff and always a bit stressful, having to have the right bits of paper and bags in the right place at the right time.  But, apart from being an hour late, this was ok, with a happy baby playing peep-bo most of the way.  We flew across Gozo on the way in and my first impression was Arabic rather than European… possibly because everything is so dry.  Lots of a beautiful coloured rock and stone but very few trees.  And not much green already (it’s only May..).   We stayed in Sliema which has an 80’s seaside town vibe, and none the worse for that.  Lots of noisy bars and incongruous sightings of M&S and Mothercare.  Not sure if I was on the Isle of Wight at times.  But the people we met were friendly and the first impression was of cheap and frequent public transport so we knew we definitely weren’t in the UK anymore.   Day 2 Valletta and TarxienTemples Our first hiccup was that the wea...

  Tonight I went to see About Us at the Tower of London. A half an hour light show with music, taking us from the beginning of the universe, right through the bit of a mess humans have made of things, it was a lovely way to spend the evening (we saw it twice!).    I went with a friend I had met on the internet, someone I would never have met in t he olden days.    For all its faults, life is still better in so many ways now we have the opportunity to reach out through the airwaves to find our ‘tribe’.     I count among some of my best friends people I met on fan forums for Green Wing over 15 years ago now.  I was thinking about a    different type of connection earlier though and the great algorithm challenge of getting out of the box that systems have allocated for you.     As a theatre going lover of literature, the arts and classy dramas and a rapidly ageing music collection, I was being presented with plenty of th...

Just a quick note picking up on some of my thoughts today.  Late last night on Twitter, one of the lovely  young men from Heartstopper felt obliged to out himself following some appalling bullying around his authenticity for the role he had played.  Made me very sad that something so joyful has led to such personal traumas for these talented young people.  Of course, the nastiness of human nature has always been there ( See The Crucible! ) , but the scale and immediacy of the social media age makes it all so much sharper.  While many many people have leapt to his defence, the damage has been done, not to his reputation which I am sure will be unaffected, but for his wellbeing and for future actors thinking about taking on groundbreaking roles.  There is so much still to do if a teenager feels pressurised to reveal stuff that is no-one's business but his own.    Then today, one of his co-stars was revealed to have got a starring role in a new Marve...

I've fed wild birds for years, and although I only rarely get more exotic visitors, I love watching the sparrows, robins, blue tits and occasional finch snacking on the offerings, the starlings squabbling between themselves, jackdaws working out how to get food out of the feeders designed to stop them, and even the doves and wood pigeons scoffing food down and bringing their growing families to visit. In 2019, after reading an article about the decline in hedgehog numbers, I decided to follow one of the 'top tips' on how to help. Physiological - Food and shelter According to the article, all that was needed was to leave out kitten food for hedgehogs during the month of October which is the main fattening up period before hibernation.  Seemed simple enough I thought, commit to one month of a bit of faff, with the benefit that I would have cute visitors dropping by in the evenings.   Three years later I realise I had no idea what I was letting myself in for.  In that f...

  Yesterday I joined a Rejoin march.    Previous protests have had up to a million attend, and this was a bijou c50,000 instead.      Full disclosure I could only get there for the final bit, but it was good to see that it was still a very civilised and enjoyable experience.     One of the things that struck me though was the older demographic.   Of course, this has become a thing at other protests too, not least I suspect because with the new scary laws to criminalise even peaceful protest, the young can’t really afford at the moment to take part.   Retired people though have far less to lose (at the moment anyway!).    For me, the most interesting bit was the train journey home – the carriage was almost empty, but included a conservative, a hardish lefty and softish lefty who had all been to the march (and to the previous ones).   Sounds a bit like the start of a joke, but we had a really good conversation and it was a...

This isn’t original, just a stream of consciousness wail into the wilderness! Since 2016 I seem to have spent my life in a cloud of rage about the state of our country. One of the things that makes me the most angry is the ‘culture war’ designed to manufacture anger and grievances against minorities or in fact anyone who disagrees with the bullies in charge and as a side effect, making people like me very angry too. I did my bit too late in the Brexit referendum, believing, stupidly, that people could see through the lies being told to the self interest sitting behind it. Obviously I got that wrong, but not by much, which gave me hope. So, I campaigned and marched my way through to 2020. The pandemic gave another outlet for disinformation, division and hatred on social media, but also seeping into the real world, and this seems to have now become the norm, rather than, as I think some of us hoped, leading to a kinder and more rational world.  Since then, I deliberately took ...

After a 10 year gap in blogging or writing a journal of any kind, I'm feeling the need to empty my brain of thoughts and opinions that don't really sit well in Facebook, Twitter, Insta or any of the other multitude of places that exist for immediate and definitive responses to people and things.  So, I am starting off with some recent jottings, and see what happens. It might be a bit of a diary, or a place to work out what I think about something. Or sometimes I might just want to write something a bit more nuanced and so this is going to be my new sketchpad. It's going to be a bit messy but let's see how it goes!