Goodness knows of the bonkersness of the people who get grassed-up on Ask A Manager there are, I fear, depths still unsounded, because every time one thinks it can't get any worse, lo and behold, something else comes along, and well, WOT??!!
My boss wants us to go on an all-day rafting trip. There is a new director with (okay, these would always be ( Read more... )

I was recently reminded me of the unfortunate occasion when I had a friend to dinner -
- who informed me, as we sat down, that they had very lately indeed become a vegetarian.
Ooops.
I'd made a lovely lamb thing from Elizabeth David.
(Though, knowing them, I'm not altogether surprised that they didn't consider this Relevant Information to convey ( Read more... )

I noticed - flitting past me on Twitter the other day - somebody eyerolling at, if not codfishing, some bloke's plaint that watching Dunkirk had made him realise that The Modern Man does not have these Manly Challenges To Rise To -
And being a historian, I thought that, actually, there have been long generations, at least in my country, where most ( Read more... )

Maybe it's just me, but 'I was challenged by this play' [or other form of art] is not the same as 'I was grossed-out by it'.
Should our theatres do more to challenge audiences?
Too much of this sounds to me like the special pleading for 'grimdark' as supposedly more 'realistic'.
I depose that the viewer/reader/etc can be challenged by something ( Read more... )

Howard Barker has a play on at the National: his response makes Eeyore resemble Sunny Jim:
For most British playwrights, having your work staged at the National theatre for the first time would be a pinnacle of achievement. For Howard Barker, it's a kind of defeat. Scenes from an Execution, which focuses on the relationship between a pusillanimous ( Read more... )

Riffing off at a tangent from something I read this morning, have been thinking about the difficulty people have in imagining a state of being deprived of certain things they consider intrinsic to their identity.

I suppose it's a bit of a cliche that the young can't imagine how older people can bear to be old (for really quite junior degrees of ( Read more... )

I was going to make the appropriate 'Happy New Year' wishes to all those who read this, and then I thought, is 'a happy year' the best good (Socrates vs pig issue)? Ringing in my mind was Dorothy Parker's 'Fair Weather':
This level reach of blue is not my sea ( Read more... )