Melody

I bought my travelcard at Hatton Cross in March, which I think is just a tube station, not a regular rail station. But of course things can change in six months. If this contactless stuff has anything to do with regular credit cards, that isn't going to work. American credit cards don't even have chip and pin technology, we're still stuck with swiping and signing. I don't know if any cards over here offer a contactless feature but ours certainly doesn't.

When we were in England in March I got a regular Travelcard when I needed to use the London underground and bus system for a day. It meant I couldn't travel until 9.30 am (not a hardship for me!) but was good from then all the way through till midnight. My husband is over there now and in London for a couple of days, and he wanted to go out and see his aunt who's in a home in Buckhurst Hill to give her a rose from her sister's funeral wreath that the funeral home had given him for her. I told him about the Travelcard, and that I'd just got mine by walking up to the guy behind the window and handing him my American credit card, so he was expecting to be able to do that. Turns out that he couldn't. He said the Travelcards no longer exist, and that he had to get an Oyster card, and that it had to be done in a machine. And that the off-peak card isn't good for travel all day like the Travelcard but could only be used between 10 and 3. Is this true or was the person at the underground station telling him a bunch of nonsense? I'm still seeing Travelcards being featured at a bunch of London travel websites including TfL. Only he's having to do this again tomorrow because his aunt was at the hospital having tests so wasn't there when he turned up.

Not that some dogs pay attention, mind you. But then if the dog isn't going to behave, the owner should be paying more attention. On a similar note, I remember one really frustrating time my husband and I were having lunch in a local café, and there were a couple of women ensconced in the corner with their laptops doing some sort of business deal or something. Both of them had young kids with them (a girl of about 3 and a boy a bit older), and the kids were just running round the restaurant bugging people at other tables and shrieking and generally making a bloody nuisance of themselves while the mothers sat there oblivious. Those children could have run right out of the door into the street when other people came in, and the mothers would have been none the wiser. And when the little girl started really pestering us and wouldn't go away, and I rather sharply asked her mother to take her nose out of her laptop and come and get her kid away from our table, she was really shirty with me. Really, electronics and kids/dogs is getting to be nearly as bad a distraction hazard as electronics behind the wheel of a car.

So my husband is in England for his mother's funeral. He went over to the retirement home where she'd been living (and from whom we had heard not a single word of information or condolence by email, including silence in response to my email to them about dealing with her things since we don't live over there), and soon figured out why we hadn't heard from them. Instead of sorting out her papers and other legal stuff to give to her lawyer and putting aside the couple of small items we'd wanted, they stuffed everything of hers into plastic bags - clothes, papers, ornaments, photos etc all mixed up randomly - and chucked it outside into a garden shed, along with stuff from other deceased residents, and they pointed him at the shed and told him to go through it all and take what he needed. And that was the sum total of the communication we ever received from the owners and management of that place since she died. At this point we don't even know if the lawyer got the stuff he needed when he went over there last week since my husband found quite a bit of bank and tax information scattered among the bags.

Speaking of which, 16 inches so far in North Carolina and 15 in South Carolina so far, apparently (good thing that hurricane stayed offshore or goodness knows what would be happening). Plus our local weather gurus tell us we've had more rain here in the last 4 days than in the entire period from the beginning of July to the end of September. Mind you, since we had basically no rain to speak of during those three months, that's not hard.

Well, it looks as if it's tracking offshore; I hope that scenario continues to play out. Just means he'll be driving to the airport in heavy rain, but that's not as bad as a full-blown hurricane with serious flooding and trees and power lines down everywhere. Apparently in South Carolina they're going to get more than a foot of rain from this event.

So we've had a really dry couple of months, to the point where we've been having to water some of the plants to keep them ticking over. Had a death in the family last week that requires my husband to travel to England at the weekend to attend the funeral early next week. And after all that warm, dry, boring weather, we have a category 4 hurricane brewing up, set to make landfall around here at the weekend. Brilliant timing.

I think we should be as broad-minded as we want to be.

Well, it's just a fact that we aren't all interested in the same thing, and for some of us it really isn't as interesting to watch NBoC or SFB as to watch our home company. For others, it is. So while it can't hurt to watch other companies, hopefully we're going for a more pleasant experience than "can't hurt." I guess there's always going to be a degree of mutual incomprehension between the two groups; I remember running into much the same argument a while back when saying I'd rather watch RB performing Alice in Wonderland on DVD than NBoC performing it live.

Socked in with cloud here for the first time since July or thereabouts. Always seems to happen that way. Twice we've timed trips to England to coincide with solar eclipses, and both times it was cloudy. My poor astronomer husband has never actually seen a total solar eclipse. We did see a wonderful lunar eclipse at Lake Tahoe some years ago, all the more impressive for our not having known ahead of time that it was happening. But this time there was a sort of reddish glow in the sky behind the clouds, so I guess we saw an impressionist's version of the eclipse.

I posted that video in post 15. Seriously, he'd have done better just dousing it with petrol from the pump and leaving his lighter in his pocket.

Then again, in a way I'm surprised it took so long. She seems to have been showcased there for a long time.

I'm not sure how irrational a fear of spiders actually is, since the poisonous varieties might have been a danger to early humans. I remember reading an article about how fear of snakes is ingrained in primates, and I assume the same might be true of spiders (and scorpions and whatnot). Not really the same as something truly irrational like a fear of buttons, which I assume is just a misfiring of the fear response or something.

And sometimes when you try to kill a spider, you get more than you bargained for: http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2015/sep/27/driver-spider-petrol-gas-station-fire-lighter

We have wolf spiders around here. Judging from their size, I reckon they're called that because they eat wolves.

I'd love to see an R&J choreographed to the Berlioz score, although I know it's a problem with sheer numbers when you're working with a choral piece rather than just an orchestral one.

I think this "right physique" business is a real problem if it's the reason the schools are turning out cookie-cutter dancers. I mean, some of the world's greatest dancers (particularly thinking of Marie Taglioni, obviously) had the sort of physique that would get them turned down at a Year 7 audition these days. But going back to what Floss said about hypocrisy - it's a shame if the vocational schools are harping on so much about all-round education, but happily taking some of these Australian students who've been letting their academic work slide during distance learning for the sake of an extra 10 hours a week in the studio. That's putting the British kids at a disadvantage from the beginning while claiming not to be. Given our success in the past in ballet, I refuse to believe that this latest trend in the Genée competition - where maybe one British kid shows up in the final 12 - is the natural order of things. A few decades ago we used to compete and perform at the highest level in all sorts of arenas, and now it just seems to be accepted that the British are basically second rate with the occasional shining exception. I'd love to know when and why we became satisfied with being a nation of also-rans.

The school seems to have a schizophrenic attitude toward competitions - it doesn't encourage its pupils to enter, but it always seems to be there to hand out scholarships to winners. If the school and company really value artistry and theatrical performance over technical dazzle in these set pieces, I'm not sure why it's out there recruiting the cream of the latter when there are so few places overall.

Yes, POB does have some foreign principals - maybe two or three - pretty much as many as RB has British ones (and they studied at the POB school before joining the company). I wouldn't mind if some of these international stars were brought in as guest artists as and when, I just really object to seeing full-time principal slots going to foreign ballerinas who didn't go to RBS and who are also principals at several other companies. You can't work as a full-time employee for IBM, Apple, Google, and Amazon at the same time, and you shouldn't be able to do likewise for ballet companies. It doesn't make sense. Either a person has a commitment to the company or she doesn't, and if she doesn't, then she should be a guest artist.

The problem is, how are the RB dancers ever going to become stars in their own right if the solution of first resort is a phone call to Alina Cojocaru or some other big-name ballerina who's already a principal with ABT, the Bolshoi, and two or three other European and Asian companies? If we're happy with the notion of getting like the opera companies, where the stars are imported while the company provides the chorus, fair enough, but ballet dancers have shorter careers than opera singers and this seems a bit hard on the British kids. The Paris Opera Ballet manages just fine without bringing in the international-flavour-of-the-month ballerina every season, and at least it has its own distinctive style which is more than can be said for some of these other companies who are all showcasing the same half-dozen ballerinas. According to at least one bio I read recently, Natalia Makarova didn't feel the need to accommodate the British style and the requirements of Ashton's choreography when she was dancing with RB, she did her own Russian thing and everyone just had to put up with it. If we're that keen to see people doing their own Russian thing, we have regular visits from Russian companies. Apparently I'm in a minority, but I'd rather see RB be a genuinely British company than a wannabe Russian one.

Thanks! Wish I understood French a bit better.

I'd rather see the RB bringing on some of the younger dancers who are actual RB dancers than going out and getting another international superstar ballerina in her mid-30s who dances with several companies already. If the company is a bit thin on female principals at the moment, it does at least have some very good first soloists to help take up the slack.

In between reading Arbella by Sarah Gristwood and Isabella: Braveheart of France by Colin Falconer (and starting Bronislava Nijinska's memoirs), I just took time out to read the new Princess Diaries book, Royal Wedding (which of course led to a binge-read of the previous 10 books in the series). Compared to the books, the first movie is so, so awful (the second movie is stand-alone awful, doesn't even have to be compared with anything).

Yes, I know about the movement of workers within the EU, since a couple of friends of mine from European countries are working in the UK at the moment (and are a bit worried about what might happen if the EU membership referendum leads to a British exit). Still, a lot of scientists these days are from Asia, although often educated in the USA or the UK, and possibly hoping to work in the UK. I assume the same is also true for ballet dancers.

Interesting that the only physical-science jobs where they claim to have a shortage are in the energy industry. Priorities, priorities.... I suppose that having classical ballet dancers and classical musicians on the list makes it easier for the major companies to bypass all the thousands of British youngsters and hire from the cream of the international crop of students, even though there isn't anything remotely resembling a shortage of British candidates. But really, all it takes is someone with political connections to drop a word in the right ear, and there you go.