This weekend is all about London Social Detours. Today, they did another "time-travel" - Ancient Rome this time, complete with a short film again.
The usual technological difficulties surfaced - but she's learning, everything displayed in due course. The short films were ok - the first purely informative, the second a more "jokey" one she'd chosen to lighten things up. Good idea, but a weird video - the presenter broke off in the course of it to quiz us on what the biggest stadium in the world is! And a couple of us found the background music intrusive - still, it was passable. The slideshow in between was, I'm afraid, a bit dry.. each accompanied by a spiel from the organiser, who also insisted on checking whether there were curator's notes for that slide, and reading them to us verbatim if there were! Yawn. The usual breathy delivery - combined with her atrocious pronunciation of both Latin and French words and phrases - made for slightly irritating listening. Ah well.
The chat afterwards was a long one.. she has this habit, which surfaced today, of getting stuck on a particular topic and beating it to death. This time, it was books - no particular book, mind, but just that she has a surplus of books around the house, and with so many charity shops closed, needs somewhere to dispose of them! So, someone mentioned she has a book club.. and then another foreign attendee said she'd be interested.. and on and on it went, and me bored to tears and wanting to leave, but couldn't get an opening where I wouldn't have looked rude. 90 minutes, it was - 45 solid minutes of which was taken up with this single subject. Oy ve. Reminds me why I didn't attend more of her live events!
Lots of films on telly for the weekend - tonight I watched two back to back. The first, I'd heard of - Mother's Day is a family-oriented comedy, with Julia Roberts as the career woman who's forsaken family life, Jennifer Aniston as the divorcée with two little boys, Kate Hudson as the young woman who doesn't get on with her mother, and Jennifer Garner as the ex-wife of a dishy divorcé - he's the one bringing up their two little girls, so you can tell he's going to be the one the film focuses on.
Quite enjoyable, if completely predictable - I dropped out for nearly an hour, to watch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? on another channel. Turned out to be the repeat of an episode I'd seen before (always a problem, when you watch so much telly, and it repeats so often) and so I left it before the end and returned to the film - where I'd obviously missed some events, but as I say, it is so predictable that I could just drop straight back in and enjoy the rest! Kudos to the gentle prod at racial profiling - with a group of characters in trouble with the police, it's the dark-skinned one who's ordered to lie on the ground! Happily, one of the cops recognises him as her doctor, so he doesn't get shot.
Right afterwards came Campus Caller, where a detective investigates her college student daughter's disappearance. Girl power! All the major players in this - apart from the bad guy - are female. Kudos to them for a completely unpredictable motive for the disappearance - we find out quite quickly there's been foul play, but it takes ages before we get told the full details! The film also includes some interesting tech details, when the (female) hacker manages to get into the missing girl's devices - not to mention accessing her deleted social media profiles! Decent little film, nobody famous in it.
And tomorrow, that group has a talk, by someone from the National Gallery, about Catherine of Aragon! I was the first to sign up - nice to be kept busy again. Pity they're the only group running online events I can make, though - at least someone else is giving tomorrow's lecture.
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