Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

Amateur psephology time again. In, actually all of the U.K., we have local council elections every year normally, but only for about a quarter at a time. There are some weird wrinkles, England does a quarter of its seats each year but all of London is in one year (not this one). Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland are all nationwide in a single year and so on. So, the seats this year were last up for election in 2019. Teresa May (remember her) was still PM although basically at the bottom of her popularity as even her own MPs thwarted her at every turn (BoJo replaced her a bit later on, then called an election just before Christmas). Jeremy Corbyn was the Labour leader and whatever you think of him, he was also at the bottom of his popularity. So there’s an argument that, for both big parties, the only way is up. Contrariwise, the Greens and LibDems, who both do well at local elections, had basically done extra well in 2019 - someone has to win each election after all. In terms of t...

The problems with Obsession are at least twofold. One is not really the fault of the show. While it lives up to its title, and I believe that at least one of them is dangerously obsessed from very early on (I’m less convinced the other is obsessed, but definitely damaged), it’s not being reviewed that way which is a real problem. The “erotic thriller with BDSM” is absent under a very twisted, obsessive quasi-power exchange with two very broken characters at its core. What I came to watch, based on the reviews I read, is not the show I was given. That’s a problem with the reviewers not understanding what they’re seeing, or not writing what they’re seeing and, as I said, not the show’s fault. But it’s jarring. However, within those two very broken characters and their interactions lies the second problem, and that is the fault of the writing and directing. Unless you’re here to watch this as porn (in which case you’ll get bored quickly, it’s just not porn) these characters are just so...

I’m going to take the unusual step of reviewing a book. I read Disobedience because I missed the film, and then the book appeared on my BookBub list and I thought why not? I didn’t find it a particularly easy read in some ways. The central setting is within the British Orthodox Jewish community in Hendon. There are elements of that I can relate to, clearly I’m British after all, but British Jewry is something I know very little about, and deeply Orthodox Jewry is, equally, something I know next to nothing about. Most of what I know about British Jewry is, kind of ironically, beautifully skewered within the pages of Disobedience and, although I’ve had Jewish friends over the years, none were practising so I didn’t learn anything about the religion from them. The only real exposure to Orthodox Jewry I really have is hearing about the ultra-orthodox community in Israel on the news and while I’m sure their statements are correctly presented, they are news snippets they aren’t an in dept...

This weekend really played out with he matches in reverse order of significance, which was a bit of a shame. Without any more fuss, let’s dive in. Match Reports England v France Let’s start with something other than the game. Twickenham had 58,498 people, a new record attendance for a women's rugby match. We’re going to have these records broken fairly regularly for a while, until the big games are selling out the big stadia routinely. We’re not there yet, but it wasn’t that long ago that this match was played after the men's game in front of about 2,000 people that stayed behind out of curiosity more than anything. Now it’s a huge, stand-alone event, shown on the BBC main channels (the other matches this weekend were on the red button but are there too) and attracting over 58k people just for this game. To subvert the old cliché, this was a game of three parts. In the first 15-20 minutes England barely got out of their own 22 with the ball, except to kick it out on the ful...