This was a filler episode, with a lot of foreshadowing, and, pessimist that I am, I'm not too keen on much of it.
O'Connor is pandering, again, to the tweenie set, by introducing yet another twatty-looking teenaged boy. He's brought back Danny Mitchell, who's just a hop, skip and a jump away from the dire awfulness that encompassed the Moon Goons, Joey Branning and Dexter - as if having Shakil and the misogynist Trumpster, Keegan, weren't enough. He's setting up Saint-Fucking Denise as being saintlier, having Phil harbour secret regrets about the Holy Christ child from Sharon, and implying that Sharon, who's done absolutely nothing wrong in this, is a bitch. Once again, he's pushing the meme about adoption being a cardinal sin, with the idea that children are far better off with their blood families than being raised by "strangers." Denise's mother looks like Medusa, with a face which would turn anyone to stone ...
No wonder Vincent keeps well away from his house.
Mick's acting like a spoiled schoolboy, Babe's a cartoon, Whitney looks as if she wants to run her hand down Mick's boxers and grab him by the pussy, Trump's about to be inaugurated in this piss poor and worsening world.
What could possibly go wrong?
The Carters Dig a Bigger Whole for Themselves. The Carters are oozing overt foreshadowing. They may as well walk around with yellow Post-its stuck to their foreheads saying ...
Leaving ...
or
Cartoon figure approaching ...
or
I fancy Mick ...
or
I'm in debt too, but nobody knows it ,,.
or, collectively
We'll lose our licence, Sharon will become the licencee, and we'll manage the pub for her.
Because all of the above is happening or is bound to happen at some point in the future.
Mick is downright nasty to Lee. His true feelings are out in the open. The only way Lee will ever regain Mick's love and trust is to leave. Seriously. Mick never once attempted to reconcile with Nancy, treating her like shit, until she decided to go travelling with Tamwar. Then he blubbed for England.
Now, he barely acknowledges Lee, whilst going out of his way to compliment her, thank her for all her help and make her feel important. Whitney encourages this actively, by always being within arm's length of Mick, emphasizing to him that she's doing all she can to help the family, of which she seems to think she's an important part - the natural successor to Linda, no less - and constantly thanking him for everything he's done for her and Lee, which is a tacit and bitchily subtle way of pointing out that this is all really Lee's mistake, and she's trying to make amends for it.
She plays up to Mick, the fact that Linda's not around, when she knows he's missing her. She makes all the right sympathetic noises and makes all the sad little faces reflecting his own unhappiness, whilst constantly reiterating the reality that Linda isn't there ... Linda would pull out all the stops for Supper Nights ... Linda would love all the Scottish hoopla ... It's such a shame that Linda couldn't be there. The other day, she even began to reflect Mick back to Mick by referring to Linda as "L", which is Mick's pet name for her.
Mick is feeling alone, worried and vulnerable, and Whitney is reinforcing his feelings by making remarks about Linda, reassuring him that she doesn't want Linda to worry and, almost in effect, trying to step into Linda's shoes. She even engaged in coy flirting with Mick, teasing him about his age.
Mick, Lee and Whitney had spent the weekend in Watford, where Linda had laid on a big spread for Mick's 40th, with Tamwar and Nancy flying in from Italy. Lee remarked that Mick never spoke a word to him all weekend - and Linda never noticed that? An earth mother like Linda wouldn't notice her firstborn being cold-shouldered by his father?
Whitney's guard dropped with Lee for a split second over breakfast when he informed her that he had another job interview after work, in insurance sales.
Commission? She sneered, as if that's something she looks down her nose about. Who is she? She's never had a bona fide job in the world. Her ambition is nothing more than to find a man who's a good provider and spend his money. At one nad the same time, she expresses her love for Lee, but also reiterates the blame he must bear for Mick's financial crisis.
In fact, when Lee returned to the pub after his interview, announcing to Whitney that the interview went badly, and that the job never really was him, Mick made a snide remark ...
It never is.
He smacks down anyone who tries to get him to reconcile with Lee, but it's all too easy for Mick to blame Lee for his own shortcomings, because Mick has a big secret. He is as much in debt, even moreso, than Lee, who has genuinely promised to repay every penny of the money he owes Mick - of course, that doesn't count the money he stole from Jack or the money he earned pawning the expensive gift he lifted off a neighbour. But I can't imagine Lee owing more than a few thousand pounds - certainly enough to be covered by Mick maxing out his credit cards. Mick's debt is the £14,000 he borrowed from a dodgy loan company to bring Linda and Elaine home from Spain. He knows he is as guilty as Lee for going into debt, and what is more, he went into debt for precisely the same reason Lee did - for the woman he loved.
Because of this, he's in thrall to Babe, who's not only started a breakfast buffet at the pub, but also was behind the idea of having international supper nights, which was a good idea on paper.
The Carters have a lot to prove with Scottish Night, after the failure of Italian Night because of Johnny's irresponsibility, but Babe is also embroiled in a ridiculous feud with Kathy, pitting the café against the pub. It seems the only people who frequent the breakfast buffet now are those people who want to start their day with the hair of the dog, because babe serves up alcohol from a tea kettle poured into china cups, something that is against the licencing laws and which could lose Mick his licence. She's come close to being caught by Mick and by Tina, and tonight she was blasted by Kathy for trying to advertise the supper nights in the café, whilst Kathy was promoting the evening trade there.
As a means of revenge for their encounter, Babe contrives to divert Tina long enough (not hard) to put ratshit droppings in the coffee maker, but made the stupid mistake of telling Tina not to drink the coffee. (Pretty stupid, when you think that Tina is remarkably loyal to Kathy for giving her employment and would pick up on a remark like that). As a result, there was a very public showdown in the Vic between Kathy and Babe, where Babe was forced to admit, in front of all the drinkers and diners, that she put ratshit into the café's coffee. How to drive a business into the gutter in one easy lesson. The first Supper Night was an epic fail. This one sealed the venture's fate.
You can imagine what will happen. Somehow Kathy or Jane or Ian or even Donna or worse, Carmel (who likes a drink, but not first thing in the morning) will find out that Babe is serving alcohol as part of the breakfast menu; Mick will be reported, and he'll lose his licence.
Watch this space for Sharon as the new licencee of the Vic, with the Carters managing it for her.
The Ties that Bind. We spent the bulk of last year watching Denise screw up her face and walk around rubbing her belly; now we start this year watching her mope about her house, looking sad and mournful and whining about "her milk."
Too much information.
I totally get it that it's hard to give a child up for adoption, but she had her reasons, and those reasons, for the most part, were good and honest. But EastEnders pisses me off, royally, the way it subtly injects the idea that adoption and anyone who gives a child up for adoption is unnatural and abnormal.
I hate the idea they push about blood kin is the only sort of familial relationship that matters. Look, no one ever gave a child up lightly, just as most people don't take abortion lightly and blithely use it as a means of birth control. The latter is a myth pushed by extreme Rightwingers; the first makes the people who produce EastEnders look as batshit crazy and pejorative as the Christian Taliban.
In EastEndersLand, with the exception of Sharon, adopted children find or are returned to their birth parents and live happily ever after. In the case of Rebecca, this scenario would never in a million years have happened. Once you sign the child off for adoption, that is it. Records are sealed and cannot be accessed until the adoptee is 18 years old.
As someone who's married to an adoptee, I know that "happy ever after", for the most part, is a myth; I also know most adoptees are taken in by families who have chosen them and who love them unconditionally. Sharon fared badly with her birth mother and even worse with her joke of a birth father.
The show promotes the idea that it's shameful to give a child up for adoption, when in many ways it's brave, and it's actually putting the child's needs first. Denise is getting one poxy GCSE. Where she'll go with that is anyone's guess, but unless she goes into further education, my guess is that she'll go nowhere other than a zero hours' contract at the Minute Mart.
She's depicted in a totally unrealistic situation as is, living in a house worth a cool half-a-million in that area of London and sharing a mortgage with a man whose only source of income is his State pension. How could she possibly support a child? The bottom line with her is that she doesn't like Phil Mitchell, looks down on him, but I doubt she'd turn down money from him for the child. The real reason behind this is that, close to her half-century, she wants to move ahead now in a different direction. She's had her children, and she wants this child to have something neither of her girls had - a normal, loving family.
And sometimes, with all the best intentions, your blood family can really fuck a child up. Kim's child is a reflection of her own vanity. She uses Pearl as a fashion accessory. Pearl is the prettiest child on the show, but the look of abject terror on her face anytime she's around Kim is palpable. And although Grandma Medusa is coming around, I don't trust her. At best, this character - with her posh voice and stoneface, is a tit-for-tat quota replacement for Claudette, except this time, where Claudette gave Kim grief, she will be the mother-in-law from hell for Vincent, and she'll probably end up bonking Patrick at some point and sparring with Dot, which is just boring and predictable.
There were three particular characters who stood out in this instance, as well as the brooding Denise and the supercilious Libby.
I wish I could feel some sort of sympathy for Denise, as I infer that the message they are trying to impart is that she's noble and sacrificing and that Sharon, somehow, is the bitch in all of this, but I can't see how that is. Denise got drunk and slept with Sharon's husband. Yes, he was still, at that time, her husband. Just because they were not living together gave neither of them licence to engage in sexual activities with anyone else. Phil was too drunk even to remember what he was doing, and Denise was just pathetic and irresponsible. By the time she found out about her pregnancy, she was still within the time limit to get an abortion, and I've never seen so much cognitive dissonance who is such an avowed atheist as Denise, who believes in a Right to Life. That doesn't jive at all.
She got herself into this situation, and kudos to her for sticking to her guns and not giving into her appalling sister and mother. Kudos as well to her for sticking it to her po-faced daughter who proclaimed, when she learned of the pregnancy, that Denise was wasting her life, having another child at her age. Libby can spend the rest of her life apologising for that remark, but initial remarks about a situation, like leaks of secrets, often turn out to be true in sentiment.
Grandma Medusa whines on and on about being denied a grandson, but that's not an impossibility. Kim is certainly young enough to have another child, and doesn't Grandma have another daughter, younger than either Denise or Kim - Daphne, is it? Or has she been conveniently forgotten?
The other three characters who stuck out in this were Carmel, Shirley and Vincent.
I really like Vincent, now that they've got away from the gangster shit and Claudette and that insidious fling with Ronnie. However, in salvaging his character, they've emasculated him. Like poor Charlie Slater, he's been reduced to pushing a pram around Walford and becoming a nanny for Pearl, whilst Kim preens and prances about, in love with herself. I feel sorry for him having such a bitch of a wife and an exhibitionist of a mother-in-law that he had to sneak out of his house to express any kind of sympathy and compassion for Denise.
Carmel annoyed me, because she was the vocal piece, echoing the message EastEnders has sent out for years, by EastEnders that blood ties were the only thing that mattered, that adoption was an aberration, which was pejorative, even when it worked - just look at Sharon being the buffer zone between her warring parents.
Carmel was the embodiment of judgement, even to the inane remark about ...
I could never give up any of mah boys.
Well, you didn't have to, you dozy bitch, because you were married and in a stable relationship when each of them was born. What a stupid remark to make. Yet still she has to be goaded, shamed into visiting Denise, unable to separate her judgemental nature from being able to show any sort of compassion or understanding for someone who's supposed to be her best friend. In the end, it just showed how incredibly weak and shallow Carmel is as a person.
And finally, there was Shirley, who both fascinated and annoyed me. It was interesting to note that she understood exactly why Denise did what she did, wanting a better life for the child and even that she had thought about doing the same for Mick when she had him at fourteen; but, as she said, her family interfered, and she didn't have to make that decision. Yet at the same time, when she found out that Phil knew and that he had ultimately walked away from this situation, she immediately blamed Sharon for coercing him into the decision, reckoning that Phil, being ill and vulnerable, would never have given up his son.
That disturbed me. Just what did she expect Phil to do? Take the baby? Did she think that Sharon would leave eventually, with this decision, so she could move back in with Phil and show him how much she would accept and raise this child? Just like when she cried upon learning that the baby was Phil's, I don't understand this. Neither of these women is taking into account just what this would do to Sharon, who had one miracle child and who would have loved to have given Phil a child, a Mitchell wife, doomed to raise someone else's children who are Mitchells.
I know Phil has regrets, which he's hiding from Sharon - so much for the epiphany. He doesn't want Ben to find out about this, and that's understandable. This son would be the non-Ben; but now this makes Sharon vulnerable too, because baby or not, there's still the chance that, like Wicksy, Phil will drift along to the mother of his latest child, and I'm still not certain that EastEnders will let this storyline go.
But then, I'm a cynic.
O'Connor is pandering, again, to the tweenie set, by introducing yet another twatty-looking teenaged boy. He's brought back Danny Mitchell, who's just a hop, skip and a jump away from the dire awfulness that encompassed the Moon Goons, Joey Branning and Dexter - as if having Shakil and the misogynist Trumpster, Keegan, weren't enough. He's setting up Saint-Fucking Denise as being saintlier, having Phil harbour secret regrets about the Holy Christ child from Sharon, and implying that Sharon, who's done absolutely nothing wrong in this, is a bitch. Once again, he's pushing the meme about adoption being a cardinal sin, with the idea that children are far better off with their blood families than being raised by "strangers." Denise's mother looks like Medusa, with a face which would turn anyone to stone ...
No wonder Vincent keeps well away from his house.
Mick's acting like a spoiled schoolboy, Babe's a cartoon, Whitney looks as if she wants to run her hand down Mick's boxers and grab him by the pussy, Trump's about to be inaugurated in this piss poor and worsening world.
What could possibly go wrong?
The Carters Dig a Bigger Whole for Themselves. The Carters are oozing overt foreshadowing. They may as well walk around with yellow Post-its stuck to their foreheads saying ...
Leaving ...
or
Cartoon figure approaching ...
or
I fancy Mick ...
or
I'm in debt too, but nobody knows it ,,.
or, collectively
We'll lose our licence, Sharon will become the licencee, and we'll manage the pub for her.
Because all of the above is happening or is bound to happen at some point in the future.
Mick is downright nasty to Lee. His true feelings are out in the open. The only way Lee will ever regain Mick's love and trust is to leave. Seriously. Mick never once attempted to reconcile with Nancy, treating her like shit, until she decided to go travelling with Tamwar. Then he blubbed for England.
Now, he barely acknowledges Lee, whilst going out of his way to compliment her, thank her for all her help and make her feel important. Whitney encourages this actively, by always being within arm's length of Mick, emphasizing to him that she's doing all she can to help the family, of which she seems to think she's an important part - the natural successor to Linda, no less - and constantly thanking him for everything he's done for her and Lee, which is a tacit and bitchily subtle way of pointing out that this is all really Lee's mistake, and she's trying to make amends for it.
She plays up to Mick, the fact that Linda's not around, when she knows he's missing her. She makes all the right sympathetic noises and makes all the sad little faces reflecting his own unhappiness, whilst constantly reiterating the reality that Linda isn't there ... Linda would pull out all the stops for Supper Nights ... Linda would love all the Scottish hoopla ... It's such a shame that Linda couldn't be there. The other day, she even began to reflect Mick back to Mick by referring to Linda as "L", which is Mick's pet name for her.
Mick is feeling alone, worried and vulnerable, and Whitney is reinforcing his feelings by making remarks about Linda, reassuring him that she doesn't want Linda to worry and, almost in effect, trying to step into Linda's shoes. She even engaged in coy flirting with Mick, teasing him about his age.
Mick, Lee and Whitney had spent the weekend in Watford, where Linda had laid on a big spread for Mick's 40th, with Tamwar and Nancy flying in from Italy. Lee remarked that Mick never spoke a word to him all weekend - and Linda never noticed that? An earth mother like Linda wouldn't notice her firstborn being cold-shouldered by his father?
Whitney's guard dropped with Lee for a split second over breakfast when he informed her that he had another job interview after work, in insurance sales.
Commission? She sneered, as if that's something she looks down her nose about. Who is she? She's never had a bona fide job in the world. Her ambition is nothing more than to find a man who's a good provider and spend his money. At one nad the same time, she expresses her love for Lee, but also reiterates the blame he must bear for Mick's financial crisis.
In fact, when Lee returned to the pub after his interview, announcing to Whitney that the interview went badly, and that the job never really was him, Mick made a snide remark ...
It never is.
He smacks down anyone who tries to get him to reconcile with Lee, but it's all too easy for Mick to blame Lee for his own shortcomings, because Mick has a big secret. He is as much in debt, even moreso, than Lee, who has genuinely promised to repay every penny of the money he owes Mick - of course, that doesn't count the money he stole from Jack or the money he earned pawning the expensive gift he lifted off a neighbour. But I can't imagine Lee owing more than a few thousand pounds - certainly enough to be covered by Mick maxing out his credit cards. Mick's debt is the £14,000 he borrowed from a dodgy loan company to bring Linda and Elaine home from Spain. He knows he is as guilty as Lee for going into debt, and what is more, he went into debt for precisely the same reason Lee did - for the woman he loved.
Because of this, he's in thrall to Babe, who's not only started a breakfast buffet at the pub, but also was behind the idea of having international supper nights, which was a good idea on paper.
The Carters have a lot to prove with Scottish Night, after the failure of Italian Night because of Johnny's irresponsibility, but Babe is also embroiled in a ridiculous feud with Kathy, pitting the café against the pub. It seems the only people who frequent the breakfast buffet now are those people who want to start their day with the hair of the dog, because babe serves up alcohol from a tea kettle poured into china cups, something that is against the licencing laws and which could lose Mick his licence. She's come close to being caught by Mick and by Tina, and tonight she was blasted by Kathy for trying to advertise the supper nights in the café, whilst Kathy was promoting the evening trade there.
As a means of revenge for their encounter, Babe contrives to divert Tina long enough (not hard) to put ratshit droppings in the coffee maker, but made the stupid mistake of telling Tina not to drink the coffee. (Pretty stupid, when you think that Tina is remarkably loyal to Kathy for giving her employment and would pick up on a remark like that). As a result, there was a very public showdown in the Vic between Kathy and Babe, where Babe was forced to admit, in front of all the drinkers and diners, that she put ratshit into the café's coffee. How to drive a business into the gutter in one easy lesson. The first Supper Night was an epic fail. This one sealed the venture's fate.
You can imagine what will happen. Somehow Kathy or Jane or Ian or even Donna or worse, Carmel (who likes a drink, but not first thing in the morning) will find out that Babe is serving alcohol as part of the breakfast menu; Mick will be reported, and he'll lose his licence.
Watch this space for Sharon as the new licencee of the Vic, with the Carters managing it for her.
The Ties that Bind. We spent the bulk of last year watching Denise screw up her face and walk around rubbing her belly; now we start this year watching her mope about her house, looking sad and mournful and whining about "her milk."
Too much information.
I totally get it that it's hard to give a child up for adoption, but she had her reasons, and those reasons, for the most part, were good and honest. But EastEnders pisses me off, royally, the way it subtly injects the idea that adoption and anyone who gives a child up for adoption is unnatural and abnormal.
I hate the idea they push about blood kin is the only sort of familial relationship that matters. Look, no one ever gave a child up lightly, just as most people don't take abortion lightly and blithely use it as a means of birth control. The latter is a myth pushed by extreme Rightwingers; the first makes the people who produce EastEnders look as batshit crazy and pejorative as the Christian Taliban.
In EastEndersLand, with the exception of Sharon, adopted children find or are returned to their birth parents and live happily ever after. In the case of Rebecca, this scenario would never in a million years have happened. Once you sign the child off for adoption, that is it. Records are sealed and cannot be accessed until the adoptee is 18 years old.
As someone who's married to an adoptee, I know that "happy ever after", for the most part, is a myth; I also know most adoptees are taken in by families who have chosen them and who love them unconditionally. Sharon fared badly with her birth mother and even worse with her joke of a birth father.
The show promotes the idea that it's shameful to give a child up for adoption, when in many ways it's brave, and it's actually putting the child's needs first. Denise is getting one poxy GCSE. Where she'll go with that is anyone's guess, but unless she goes into further education, my guess is that she'll go nowhere other than a zero hours' contract at the Minute Mart.
She's depicted in a totally unrealistic situation as is, living in a house worth a cool half-a-million in that area of London and sharing a mortgage with a man whose only source of income is his State pension. How could she possibly support a child? The bottom line with her is that she doesn't like Phil Mitchell, looks down on him, but I doubt she'd turn down money from him for the child. The real reason behind this is that, close to her half-century, she wants to move ahead now in a different direction. She's had her children, and she wants this child to have something neither of her girls had - a normal, loving family.
And sometimes, with all the best intentions, your blood family can really fuck a child up. Kim's child is a reflection of her own vanity. She uses Pearl as a fashion accessory. Pearl is the prettiest child on the show, but the look of abject terror on her face anytime she's around Kim is palpable. And although Grandma Medusa is coming around, I don't trust her. At best, this character - with her posh voice and stoneface, is a tit-for-tat quota replacement for Claudette, except this time, where Claudette gave Kim grief, she will be the mother-in-law from hell for Vincent, and she'll probably end up bonking Patrick at some point and sparring with Dot, which is just boring and predictable.
There were three particular characters who stood out in this instance, as well as the brooding Denise and the supercilious Libby.
I wish I could feel some sort of sympathy for Denise, as I infer that the message they are trying to impart is that she's noble and sacrificing and that Sharon, somehow, is the bitch in all of this, but I can't see how that is. Denise got drunk and slept with Sharon's husband. Yes, he was still, at that time, her husband. Just because they were not living together gave neither of them licence to engage in sexual activities with anyone else. Phil was too drunk even to remember what he was doing, and Denise was just pathetic and irresponsible. By the time she found out about her pregnancy, she was still within the time limit to get an abortion, and I've never seen so much cognitive dissonance who is such an avowed atheist as Denise, who believes in a Right to Life. That doesn't jive at all.
She got herself into this situation, and kudos to her for sticking to her guns and not giving into her appalling sister and mother. Kudos as well to her for sticking it to her po-faced daughter who proclaimed, when she learned of the pregnancy, that Denise was wasting her life, having another child at her age. Libby can spend the rest of her life apologising for that remark, but initial remarks about a situation, like leaks of secrets, often turn out to be true in sentiment.
Grandma Medusa whines on and on about being denied a grandson, but that's not an impossibility. Kim is certainly young enough to have another child, and doesn't Grandma have another daughter, younger than either Denise or Kim - Daphne, is it? Or has she been conveniently forgotten?
The other three characters who stuck out in this were Carmel, Shirley and Vincent.
I really like Vincent, now that they've got away from the gangster shit and Claudette and that insidious fling with Ronnie. However, in salvaging his character, they've emasculated him. Like poor Charlie Slater, he's been reduced to pushing a pram around Walford and becoming a nanny for Pearl, whilst Kim preens and prances about, in love with herself. I feel sorry for him having such a bitch of a wife and an exhibitionist of a mother-in-law that he had to sneak out of his house to express any kind of sympathy and compassion for Denise.
Carmel annoyed me, because she was the vocal piece, echoing the message EastEnders has sent out for years, by EastEnders that blood ties were the only thing that mattered, that adoption was an aberration, which was pejorative, even when it worked - just look at Sharon being the buffer zone between her warring parents.
Carmel was the embodiment of judgement, even to the inane remark about ...
I could never give up any of mah boys.
Well, you didn't have to, you dozy bitch, because you were married and in a stable relationship when each of them was born. What a stupid remark to make. Yet still she has to be goaded, shamed into visiting Denise, unable to separate her judgemental nature from being able to show any sort of compassion or understanding for someone who's supposed to be her best friend. In the end, it just showed how incredibly weak and shallow Carmel is as a person.
And finally, there was Shirley, who both fascinated and annoyed me. It was interesting to note that she understood exactly why Denise did what she did, wanting a better life for the child and even that she had thought about doing the same for Mick when she had him at fourteen; but, as she said, her family interfered, and she didn't have to make that decision. Yet at the same time, when she found out that Phil knew and that he had ultimately walked away from this situation, she immediately blamed Sharon for coercing him into the decision, reckoning that Phil, being ill and vulnerable, would never have given up his son.
That disturbed me. Just what did she expect Phil to do? Take the baby? Did she think that Sharon would leave eventually, with this decision, so she could move back in with Phil and show him how much she would accept and raise this child? Just like when she cried upon learning that the baby was Phil's, I don't understand this. Neither of these women is taking into account just what this would do to Sharon, who had one miracle child and who would have loved to have given Phil a child, a Mitchell wife, doomed to raise someone else's children who are Mitchells.
I know Phil has regrets, which he's hiding from Sharon - so much for the epiphany. He doesn't want Ben to find out about this, and that's understandable. This son would be the non-Ben; but now this makes Sharon vulnerable too, because baby or not, there's still the chance that, like Wicksy, Phil will drift along to the mother of his latest child, and I'm still not certain that EastEnders will let this storyline go.
But then, I'm a cynic.
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