NIKKI- Paul, I understand that there was a big meeting this week to decide what’s going to happen next. Can you tell us who was there and what the latest is? The difference between Am and Br is simply that our IRREGULAR verb ‘to get’ has a different past participle to the one he has learnt (that’s different too – he probably thinks he’s learned it). Reply HUW- I can be anxious without being depressed. I’m anxious about little and big things. But depression is totally different. That’s when you sink into a state where you can’t really help yourself. With anxiety you can do certain things, you can manage anxiety in certain ways; you’ve got little techniques. With depression if it really takes hold I’ve found myself at one point I couldn’t get out bed because you can’t do anything, you can’t speak to people, you don’t want to see anybody, you don’t want to speak to people, you feel that everything’s too much, you can’t deal with anything. That’s a terrible kind of cloud that just comes over you and you can’t shift it. And that is a proper illness. This is something that’s got to be said as well, I’ve got colleagues, they mean very well, but when they talk about depression it’s like they’re talking about a bit of, ‘Oh you’re a bit worried about something?’ Uh, no, it’s not that. It’s when your life comes to a grinding halt. You can’t do anything. And you need much more than a bit of a friendly chat to get out of that. I am a native English speaker, but when I went to England for the first time I was surprised at how much the word ‘got’ was used, and I was particularly irritated by how people kept on saying ‘I’ve got’ when what they really meant is “I have”.

NIKKI- Paul, I’m going to start with you. What exactly is Evusheld and why does Lupus UK want Evusheld to become available?P.S. In my (great-lakes US) dialect, at least, for I’ve got to be the present perfect of get, it would need to be I’ve gotten. Just my 2 cents. Reply Have got is present perfect, because got is (sorry Americans), the commonly used past participle of get in English English. However, sorry to disagree with everyone here, we English also sometimes use gotten as well, and the meaning is slightly divergent… NIKKI- We have to wrap it up, but you’re not going to retire soon, are you? There have been reports about you retiring for a couple of years now.

Also Jamelia. The night I met Jamelia I texted my family saying ‘Jamelia’s my new best friend. Love her. Always going to have her in my life.’ I also get on so well with Wynne, he’s so funny, and Max George too. He’s someone who I’ve seen from afar over the years in the industry and we got on really well – us last five really did bond. 100% the people have made this show for me. I’ve always thought of this as a Brit/US thing, and it’s strange that people aren’t aware of this. Listen to any Brit speak, and s/he will say have got much more than have. In fast connected speech, assimilation occurs with got in have got when the following word begins with a vowel sound. Please, to those of you who are calling have got sloppy or incorrect, before you make up your mind on the subject, please do a bit of traveling (or travelling, in British English). Reply Have none of you (with the exception of Dr Moran, of course) ever heard of Swan’s Practical English Usage? If you had you would see that grammar is not a matter of right and wrong, but of what people actually do with language.We use both forms all the time yet we just don’t think about it… in fact, if you start thinking about it, you start to wonder whether it is correct, but it is! You can say I’ve got a new house or I have a new house, it’s the same thing. The Sandwich Challenge was a good week for me, a really good week, because it was something a bit different. Trawling the internet for ideas of cakes and how I might convert them into a sandwich. Sitting in the pub with a glass of wine in week one, trying to work out how I was going to make a lobster cake look like an ice cream. Thinking about how I would have to colour sesame seeds to look like hundreds and thousands and then discovering that after Ramadan, you can actually get such a thing! So heading off to the Asian shop to try and find them. Those were good moments. HUW- Oh honestly. That’s just one example. Orphaned kids in Syria another example. There are loads of examples we could give. There are people in Ukraine suffering really badly. Does that have an effect on you? Well, you’d be a pretty odd person, wouldn’t you to be honest, if you weren’t affected by it. NIKKI- And Mark, the government’s stance is that they haven’t rolled out Evusheld yet because they don’t know how effective it is against the Omicron variant of COVID and other more recent variants. Why do you and others still want it? I’ve got a car or I have a car is just a difference between BE and AE. The Americans tend to use I have and the Brits I have got. In the British sense, the got part could be seen as the past of get, and means that you already have got something so you already own it, it is there with you now. It suggests that at sometime or other you actually went out and bought a car for example, or that you have lived with ‘a brother’ (I’ve got a brother) for sometime.