Melody

So it's finally happened. Are people over there interested? Of course it's news over here, with Meghan Markle being American and all, but I'm not seeing much interest among Facebook friends other than in specific royalty groups.

Well, we tend to have colder winters than you do, so those daffodils are going to regret their enthusiasm. But autumn has tended to be warmer and drier than normal in recent years, and this is the result.

We've got daffodils coming up. I mean, not just leaves, but buds.

I was shopping for a cauliflower once and the shop had run out, but I saw a package of pre-prepared cauliflower and thought, "oh good, I'll get that," until I realized it was about three times as expensive as buying a whole one. I tend to avoid the pre-prepared vegetables for that reason. But I do find a couple of things really annoying in the supermarkets here; not sure if it's also true in the UK. One is that many of the items seem to be supersized, so it's actually hard to get something like a cauliflower that's a sensible size for a small family unless you're going to eat it every day for half a week, and apples are really expensive because they're getting on for the size of small melons - it's impossible to buy small apples or oranges these days. The other problem is the number of items that are sold pre-packaged (not pre-prepared, just pre-packaged) so that you have to buy the amounts the shop thinks you should buy rather than the amounts you want to buy. It's years since I saw grapes available to buy in bulk, they're all in those bags, and there have been times I've had no choice but to buy something like 10 oranges at a time because there were none to buy singly and the smallest amount was a 4-lb bag. That just asks for food waste, which is something we keep being told we should be avoiding.

oh lordy... Honestly, no wonder kids these days actually seem to believe that food grows in supermarkets.

The thing that surprises me when I shop is how few people are buying fresh fruit and vegetables in significant amounts. I know people are short of time, but it really doesn't take that long to cook fairly simple meat-and-two-veg meals. I'm part of a group that's "adopting" a couple of families for Thanksgiving, and we're putting together food baskets for them. We were told by the lady in charge, who's done this several times before, not to donate fresh vegetables because "the families won't know what to do with them." When my dad died about 10 years ago and the estate agent went to his house to look it over, he was quite surprised to see vegetables growing in the garden. Apparently this is terminally old-fashioned, yet I remember, growing up, that everyone with a garden larger than a postage stamp had a bit of grass and a few flowers out back and then a vegetable garden and fruit trees behind them. No longer, it seems. Mind you, places seem to be being built with much smaller gardens these days - not sure if that's because people don't have the time or interest or if it's just for developer profits and they're telling people they won't have time to look after a garden.

Dog lovers are the same the world over. A few years ago I was in the emergency room with pneumonia and was sharing a room with an old lady who'd broken bones in her neck after a fall while walking her daughter's dog, and was lying there immobilized and apparently not sure if she was going to be able to walk again. Her daughter called the ER to find out about her, and the nurse brought the phone to her so she could talk to her daughter. The first words out of her mouth were, "It wasn't the dog's fault!"

You have the most interesting freezer! I just have some frozen peas and edamame and ice cream in mine. Oh, and frozen bangers because you can't get fresh ones at the supermarket so we have to order them from a British butcher in North Carolina.

Sounds as though you're running a fusion restaurant!

Americans tend to take themselves more seriously than Brits do, and sometimes I'm reminded of what I'm missing. Loved this article about Twitter responses to an ignorant comment about the British. Needless to say, it would never happen here (although I do realise this is a pretty heavily edited set of tweets). https://www.shortlist.com/news/guns-america-britain-terrorism-twitter/328592

I'm not seeing the Bolshoi segment on YouTube. Is it available anywhere else?

Didn't John Curry use the Don Quixote music for his long programme when he won the figure skating gold medal?

Are they wearing military uniforms or is that just the American ones? When I get friend requests on FB from guys with no mutual friends and wearing fatigues, I just delete them, I don't even check their background.

Best wishes as you go forward. I hope everything goes smoothly for you.

Well, she is listed as a guest artist, so presumably that means she's going to turn up from time to time. And I suppose the Queen of Hearts is one of the roles we might expect to see her turn up in.

It seems that Moira Shearer thought she was being blocked, from things I've read about the dynamics of the company, but I don't know that she ever said so specifically for public consumption. It just seems to be the case that many chroniclers of the Royal Ballet in the 1940s and 1950s have said that de Valois' focus on Fonteyn as the company ballerina meant that other dancers (Beryl Grey, June Brae, and others of that generation) were overlooked - they were used as second casts (at a time when the first casts were dancing much more often than nowadays during the course of a ballet) and didn't have new ballets made for them.

I saw an interview with Margot Fonteyn on YouTube the other day where she said she'd started dancing professionally at 14 or so, and that she thought it was better - certainly easier - to start young than to stay in school until 18 and wait till the early 20s before tackling the major roles, because there's been so long to worry about it and people expect so much more. Of course, this is the view of someone who was dancing the major roles from early on and not stuck in the corps for 20 years.

He made such great contributions to British theatre, and not just in London. We were very fortunate to have him. The middle of the 20th century really did turn out some giants of the performing arts.

And now the studio of the film's director has been firebombed by irate Orthodox Christians saying the film is offensive to believers and an insult to the memory of Tsar Nicholas II. https://themoscowtimes.com/news/mathilde-film-directors-studio-attacked-with-molotov-cocktails-58819 Seriously - this movie is chronicling history, it isn't some sort of fantasy directed toward a totally chaste Tsar who never had any affairs in his life. What in the world is wrong with these people?

I was looking at some YouTube videos of Alma Deutsch and of Amira Willighagen, and it raised an issue I've already been a bit concerned about, especially after also seeing the one of Laura Bretan at America's Got Talent and reading some of what professional singers have said about her. It sounds as though professionals are genuinely worried for these young girls (not including Alma in this) who are singing showy opera arias at talent shows at very young ages and without much if any training. They're pointing out deficiencies of technique which are likely to not only impede progress but also result in injury if not corrected sooner rather than later, and also explaining why the arias being chosen for these shows are unsuitable for untrained youngsters. But then, those are the exact arias which most impress the audiences and the judges, and of course that's the very thing which helps the shows get good ratings. Another thing that helps the ratings is the self-taught aspect, meaning that finding a good teacher would be counterproductive to the impact of the singer at the show. To me, this would be like seeing a seven-year-old enter a TV talent show and proceed to dance (on pointe) something like the Black Swan variation, imitated from something she'd seen online, without a real appreciation of much beyond the steps and no real attempt at characterization. It would basically be a performance that would be quite unremarkable if the performer were ten years older. (And yes, I remember seeing an eight-year-old Russian girl doing something of the sort in a YouTube video, and was appalled rather than impressed, although I'm sure a talent show audience would be thrilled.) I'm wondering if these talent shows have any prohibitions other than stuff which is obviously dangerous (high-wire act without a safety net or something). Because, if not, they should seriously think about what they're doing. At the moment they seem to be encouraging children into bad habits for the sake of ratings, possibly at the expense of those children's futures.

At this rate we'll have the whole alphabet in the acronym.

I remember, years ago, there was some criticism of the use of "boys" to refer to male members of ballet companies regardless of their age. Apparently that seems to have been sorted, but the female equivalent still needs to be worked on. As for not referring to students as "girls" or "ladies" in an all-girls' school - that sounds a bit idiotic. There may be students considering gender realignment surgery (although, is it really that common these days?), but while they're in the process of considering it, they're still girls and there shouldn't be a problem referring to them as such.

It must depend on whether they have a liberal or restrictive algorithm for things, since I gather that actual human beings don't tend to get involved in these decisions. A friend of mine on FB has drawn the ire of hard-core Diana fanatics when she goes to their groups to defend Charles and Camilla, and they report all her posts as being offensive. In one case they also reported her for posting nude photos, which she's never done. And she always seems to get infractions from FB for all these imagined slights; she was banned for a couple of weeks and had every single one of her photos deleted after the nude-photo episode. They never even checked - apparently when you get on the FB naughty list, you're fair game. Anyway, after three days of trying they finally let me verify my identity with my date of birth so I got back on. But when my husband tried to log in from the remote location he was just let right in. Obviously consistency isn't their strong suit.

I'm on travel at the moment and we have a new laptop, so of course when I tried to log into Facebook it told me my account was temporarily blocked and I'd have to prove in one way or other that I was really me. Apparently according to the explanation I could enter my date of birth or answer a security question or identify tagged photos from friends or get someone already designated as a trusted friend to send me a code. Well - I go to actually try one of these, and it turns out that the date of birth option, which would be the most simple, wasn't there. Nor was the security question. But what was there was an option to see a set of 10 comments from FB threads and identify which four were mine. So I tried that and it was fairly obvious which were my comments, so I clicked them and got told, sorry, didn't work, try again. Tried again, found my comments, clicked them submitted them, got rejected. I was then shut out of being able to verify my identity for 24 hours. The 24 hours were just up, I just tried again, same thing - it wouldn't accept that I knew my own comments. So apparently I'm locked out of FB till we get home and the bloody thing recognises my ID. Seriously - just entering date of birth would have fixed this, unless of course they refused to accept that. And of course FB doesn't have any sort of helpline or chat or anything useful. You'd think, if they refused to provide real-time help, they'd have the automated stuff in working order.

I know this isn't ballet but John Oliver has an amusing robot clip here: