Share a cuppa?

Hi @ArraDreaming, @Meowmy and @Shaz51, how are you all? Tomorrow morning I'm going to start hand writing out Carmina Burana and Mozart's Requiem, it's the best way to memorise music, and our conductor wants us completely off the book by week three eof rehearsals, and as our next program is going to be Mozart's Requiem, I may as well memorise that too.

My week's been very good @Shaz51. My friend Hayles still hasn't quite recovered from his gastric nerves. I rang him today and he's still a bit nauseous. His doctor said it's just the remnants stage anxiety that he usually gets before concerts. He'll be fine in a day or so.
He's also looking after both his grandmothers who both have dementia and he's not getting younger himself so as time goes by these recoveries take longer. How are you @Shaz51?

Good to see you too, @tyme. How are you? I watched a great documentary on Netflix last night called "Everything the Nazis Hated". Finally a doco that tells the story of the persecution of LGBTQIA+ people under the Nazis in Germany. Very interesting, and hard to watch, because the fact is we could still slip back into that, even in this country. The contempt that is present in some (not all) current conversations about transgender medicine and people illustrates that very clearly. I recommend everyone needs to watch these docos, because we all need to have some clarified perspective around the conversation, otherwise we're just reduced to the lowest common denominator.

They also hated communists, Poles, Slavs, Jehovah's Witnesses and Gypsies. Those are all ridiculous hatreds, but one of the most ridiculous hatreds I've ever heard of is that up until the 19th century Europeans and the English so hated black cats that the English hunted the English black cat down almost to extinction. It was an American who brought that breed back from extinction.

We need to accept we're a species that hates, and rather than get rid of hatred, which just won't be achieved, we need to learn to live with and manage it so it doesn't run amok. As long as we're not doing that, it will run amok. We're simply not going to get rid of it, people!