Some Fretwork and the Interminable Christmas Play at the Chalet School

We can invite you-know-who to the Christmas play, send him for a post-play chat with Miss Annersley and he'll emerge a reformed character. Or if all else fails, your troops troup can take him out onto the Steppe and do their thing.

I think this may be the best suggestion I've seen all week.

Chin up, EmilyAlice old bean. We can invite you-know-who to the Christmas play, send him for a post-play chat with Miss Annersley and he'll emerge a reformed character. Or if all else fails, your troops troup can take him out onto the Steppe and do their thing.

Ooo, maybe we could add "which book are these the opening lines to?" into the range of exciting games to play on a Saturday evening when we tire of threading needles, collecting peas with knitting needles and playing the Kate game!

My older ones call their teachers Miss and Sir.

In fact conversations with my older one in particular go along the lines of.
"Then Miss came out of the classroom and shouted and Sir said she needed our exercise books so we gave them to Sir, who gave them to Miss and then Miss gave us another sheet which wasn't fair because Miss had already given us two and Sir said we didn't have to do it and he'd speak to Miss and Miss said don't worry she would too."

With 3 different "Miss" and two "Sir" but no distinguishing additions. I think the nicknames we used we less hard on the parents, but possibly harder on the teachers when they found them out. Mind you, being a German teacher with the surname "Long" and being totally bald is never going to end well. And that was one of the politer ones! We didn't (usually) address them by their nicknames though.

Dh was at a bog standard comp and they were "Sir" and "ma'am" which always gets me

Yes, that's how I remember the start of Problem, Witchend. And doesn't Rosamund address her teacher as Teacher? Which always made me think that EBD had never actually been inside a council school, where women teachers back in the day were invariably addressed as 'Miss'. I think in the US teachers were addressed as 'Teacher', though, so maybe EBD had been on a visit there? Or had North American friends with children?

Do children these days still call their teachers 'Miss' and 'Sir'? Mine didn't, but I don't know whether that was geographically specific (most of their schooling was in Scotland).

Welcome, speisaalmilk. I'm afraid you haven't been around long enough to be allocated a doctor of your own, though. You'll have to serve your apprenticeship either in the Baby Angels, or in EmilyAlice's dancing troops troupe. First task of course is to fashion your own dainty kalashnikov or set of wings out of sheets and a pillowcase - prizes available for the prettiest and most ingenious.

I love Redheads.

There's something remarkably ironic in someone who is prepared to kidnap a school girl to turn her into a drug addict to get revenge; who when discovering it's the wrong child not only puts her on a train to get back to school, but leaves her with a train ticket too.
"I don't mind kidnapping, drugs or even murder... but not having a train ticket? Aye... that's too far for me!"

I think Problem starts with Rosalind in school being told that she's going to the Chalet School by her teacher. Why on earth would you get the teacher to tell her that?

Redheads isn't as bonkers as you might think, given the rest of the plot:

"The lean, dark man and the solemn-faced schoolgirl had sat side by side in silence for some time. Suddenly he spoke softly without turning his head - almost without moving his lips. 'Copper! No; don't move. Keep on looking out of the window. Now listen! You understand that you must use your proper name. I know you've always been called Flavia Letton, but from now on you are Flavia Ansell. Got that?"

Can't put my hands on Problem, it's here somewhere...

And now back to my own current preoccupations with Oberland...

Elma Conroy - her father owns a chain of beauty shops. Does this basically make them nouveau-riche and therefore brash and tasteless, just like Diana Skelton and Joan Baker? (Is this also related to her being portrayed as a bit 'fast', whereas the saintly Peggy doesn't even think about boys?)

Grace/Phyll Nalder: theories on what happened to her husband?!

Ooh - Rivals begins with a description of "Good Herr Braun" which explains that "though he was only a fat old Austrian hotel-keeper, [he] was a gentleman at heart". That's one contender.

The opening of Eustacia is one I always remember, just as I do School at.

The first chapter of New CS (staff room chapter) might actually be my serious-favourite first chapter.

Ooh, Lavender - yet another one which begins with the imperious words of a doctor.

Shocks and Changes again both pretty much begin with the words of other random men (Mr Hope and Commander Christie).

I don't really own any of the later ones, which is a shame for this exercise as I bet there's some charmingly bonkers nominations to be had amongst them. I bet Redheads opens with a bang, frinstance; or Problem.

I should go to bed. I need to catch up on the ROW thread too.

Yeah, I'll bring some cake to eat the sardines off.
speisaal, if you're still awaiting onedrive details PM me and I'll send them.
I need to catch up properly later my lambs but first I need to ask a quick, important, and v scandalised question. I've just re-read CS in the Oberland - is "are you engaged to him?" a euphemism for "have you had sex with him?"
When I've read it before I've been happy to accept that "are you engaged" means exactly what it says. But this time I'm more inclined to think otherwise, because some of the "if that came to pass" comments make much less sense in relation to an engagement (which can be broken off, ffs; and which is apparently totally fine for Len when she's still a schoolgirl). And yet that seems a really unlikely choice of subject matter!

I have found my people! How long will it take for me to find my doctor and start giving birth to multiple trained-to-absolute-obedience children? I'm willing to stay out all night on a mountain or throw myself into a chilly lake if it will help. Would somebody mind PMing me the link to the shared drive?

Bringing sardines and raw bacon here. Surely frying pans are for Blyton wimps, not real Chalet School girls?

All this sausage talk is making me hungry for a midnight feast. So I've invited Tessie from St Clare's (I think it was her) to come to Mushy Pea as a special guest, and bring a frying pan. I'm sure such an enterprising young gel can think of a way to get to Mongolia - after all, if you can persuade a kitchen maid to give you a pan, why wouldn't you be able to get yourself across one continent and halfway across another in an evening? So, bring your bacon, sausages, tins of Nestle's milk, light country wines, and anything else you can get hold of fancy, and see you in Mushy Pea to munch our way through the US election results. Just make sure Mary-Lou doesn't hear you coming, she's so on the spot. And for goodness' sake, remember to wear your dressing-gowns. We don't want anyone catching a chill.

Yes Cheddar I too failed to think of a Mongolian sausage reference. [fnar fnar sausage in unChaletian fashion]

I'm trying to work out how to make a joke at Mary-Lou's expense here - wasn't it hilaire when she replied "not a sausage!" when the Abbess asked her what she thought flying would cost - but I can't. So here it is, free gratis, for NotCitrus to consider when making her flying plan. [joke fail]

There's probably a Chalet charter plane nowadays. Piloted by Jack Maynard or Nell Randolph's dad. Lots of scope for diversions to rural runways in the fog and having to share out everyone's snacks and sleep on the plane for a night.

Wouldn't that just make the school like it was originally, where grizel was going to stay for the whole year as it was scarcely worth making the long journey for holiday save the summer ones? And in the early books don't lots of them just go off to different place for Christmas for example rather than home? I always thought that was rather sad.

Wouldn't it take simply weeks to get out to Mongolia by train? It would make holidays scarcely worthwhile.

Hmmm. The trips have been busy with the baby angels rehearsal, and we've all (trips included) been imbibing skipping so merrily that we've passed out had to lie down for a nap in Mushy Pea. I do hope dear Joey hasn't gone to too much trouble making her special fruit drink over at Freudesyurt because I don't think any of us is in a fit state to get there, despite it being just across the rose garden Steppe. Could we prevail on Genghis and the troupe to make our excuses for us?

I expect they've moved onto the light country wine by now. I think I can support them in that decision.