They've managed, in ten minutes flat, to send every neighbourhood girl back into their house crying with snowball-inflicted injuries (well, mainly damaged pride). What can I say, my boys have a good aim!
Yes, it's that time of year when the country braces itself for misery, transport mayhem and empty shelves at the supermarket. I'll leave the mass media to bang on about commuter chaos and question again why we don't devote more public spending to grit and snow ploughs (when will people get it into their heads that we don't get quite as much snow as Norway which explains why large chunks of our national budget are not similarly devoted to snow management - it's not rocket science, is it?)
However, the empty shelves situation is just insane, INSANE!
How can fellow planet dwellers stoop to such levels of selfishness when the first flake is spotted floating down from the sky? And I have to question just how many milk sandwiches people can actually eat? (doesn't it make the bread soggy!?)
Yesterday, we GENUINELY ran out of bread (it happens, please don't call Esther) and my boys like sarnies for lunch on Saturdays. So hubby nipped round to the Co-op only to be greeted with a war-like scene of totally gutted bread shelves and empty dairy chillers, fruitlessly and milklessly whirring away to themselves (there wasn't even any red top or rye bread - people must have been desperate!).
I mean, honestly, what is that all about!?
It smacks of images from Les Miserables; Jean Valjean's years in slavery for stealing a loaf for his starving niece, the poor and wretched of Paris, clamouring at the bourgeoisie stage coaches, pooh-coated Ali G and Helena BC in the sewers picking over the dead and dying like rats.
I feel a song coming on......
Have you seen it?
I took my reluctant husband last week and, with dry humour and equally dry eyes he merely commented, 'there was too much singing'.
Does he not have a heart?!
For me, the tears flowed from the get go and reached a sobbing crescendo at a particularly horrific and harrowing scene which filled me with anguish (ooo, it's an adjective-fest today).....no, not when Fantine dies or Eponine realises Marius doesn't fancy her. No, the scene which made me really weep was when Anne Hathaway has her locks chopped! OMG.
The things we do for our art, daaaahling.
Great film, with Russell Crowe showing he can hold a tune, Hugh Jackman making stubble look attractive and the eye-poppingly gorgeous Amanda Seyfried transporting herself from a sun-kissed Greek Isle to a much darker place with apparent ease. It's an emotional roller-coaster which offers no straight sections to catch your breath and you are truly immersed in Hugo's sad, sad world for nearly three hours (of course, with the help of performance art's old friend 'suspension of disbelief' which allows you to overlook the most unlikely scenario of a load of French folk talking (nay, singing) in perfect English).
But I think my mum summed it up perfectly this morning when she asked which I would choose; to see the film again or return, as we have many times, to the Queens Theatre. No competition, I'd book my train ticket in a heart beat.
