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Showing posts from December, 2005

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Same but indifferent: Laughing Boy @JStheatre

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Stephen Unwin's Laughing Boy, adapted for the stage from Sara Ryan's Justice for Laughing Boy, is a powerful and moving story about a mother and a family that keeps asking questions despite the victimisation and harassment from the institution - the NHS - that was supposed to protect her son. It's a moving, celebratory account of a life cut short due to indifference held together by a remarkable performance by Janie Dee as Sara. It's currently playing at the Jermyn Street Theatre .  Sara's son, Connor, is a little different to others. He is fascinated by buses and doesn't like things like loud noises. But as he becomes an adult, his seizures and unexpected outbursts mean the family turn to their local NHS for support. Little did they realise they would receive such little care from a service that was institutionally incompetent and covered up thousands of unexplained deaths of people with disabilities, including Connor's. The search for answers about why he
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Scenes from various parts of London Thursday evening. I kept getting the strangest of looks on the tube home with my luggage covered in plastic wrap. It was if I was carrying Laura Palmer home. Cling-wrapping your luggage probably isn't as popular here as it is in Australia as Londoners don't know that loud mouthed drug smuggler from the Gold Coast otherwise known as Schapelle Corby . I got the "Schapelle Wrap" as I wasn't confident that the zips would contain the 30kg of stuff contained within, and I didn't want my Aussiebum pants flying all over the cargo hold, rather than over any concern about what baggage handlers in Brisbane would do with them (or stick in amongst them)... Of course since everyone in Australia now is paranoid about 4kg's of dope being inserted by Brisbane baggage handlers the wrap is de rigeur. Incidentally while in Oz I heard a new jingle: Don't blame it on the sunshine, Don't blame it on the Bali Nine, Don't blame it o
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Scenes from Heathrow Thursday 19:36 - After nearly an hour at immigration (where someone was arrested after walking around for 10 minutes yelling out what sounded like "Stella" in another language), Paul walks back into London... Incidentally as the plane was getting ready to land one could glimpse all the major landmarks of London (Tower Bridge, Westminster, The Eye etc)... Just another winter's night in London. Oh and it wasn't as cold as I was expecting... Temperatures were somewhere above zero for most of the night...