Jilly Coopr character Lockdown competition thread

[BalloonSlayer]

The most successful thread I ever started was about wanting to be a Jilly Cooper character.

Since lockdown, this has started to feel more achievable. See my scores below:

• Cut my own fringe: 3 points (scissors hadn't just been used to cut bacon first, deduct one point)

• car is Absolutely Filthy: 3 points (not a golf, mini or Porsche so as no other cars exist in Jillyworld, deduct one point.)

• "old trousers and a shrunk t shirt made her bum and boobs look huge," yeah whole three points for this one

• anthropomorphising my pets like crazy. No he wasn't showing how much he loves you, he wanted his dinner! 3 points.

• Smell of wild garlic making me miss going out to restaurants : 3 points. (Not sure if that is wild garlic or something else actually, deduct one point.)

So that's 12/15 for me. How is everyone else doing?

How do people always seem to have such GIANT and unexpected tax bills that hit all at once and then hang over them, and have tax men coming to their house and nosing around their stuff?

I think that's because it was the 70s and Jilly is a staunch Tory . . . the Labour policy of "squeezing the rich till the pips squeak" via extremely high tax rates was very unpopular in her circles.

I read a later book when many of the characters were suddenly broke as they had lost money because they were Lloyds Names. Anyone remember when that happened in real life in the late 80s? IIRC I struggled to dredge up a lot of sympathy at the time.

Lack of underwear seems to be a thing in the Jilly books. Fen in her white sharkskin jodhpurs so she didn't spoil the line, Rupert expecting Helen at a party with no pants (language barrier), Hermione turning up at a school concert of all places with no pants on and her bush trimmed into a heart shape...

Oh I finally win some points for rarely wearing knickers!

Points for cutting my own fringe with kitchen scissors (no bacon, though - made sure to wash them carefully just in case!)

Filthy car/mobile skip - check
Walking through bluebell woods and crashing through the wild garlic - check
Rescuing an insect (bumblebee not butterfly) from marauding cats - check
Shrunken trousers and t-shirts - check
Children as destructive as a JCB - check
Lying in a foot of scented water while dreamily shaving my legs - check

I always imagined Taggie as looking like CZJ in Darling Buds of May.

I always imagined Valerie and Freddie Jones as much older than I actually think they were meant to be. Freddie always looked (and sounded) a bit like Del Trotter in my head.

I mean I defy anyone to tell me this isn’t Taggie!

I always see Taggie like a taller young Nigella Lawson. Billy a bit like Philip Glennister in Vanity Fair.

How did they all drink so much and drive all over the place?

The allowed blood/alcohol limit was higher in the 80s, although certainly not high enough to account for some of the amounts Jilly's characters knocked back. There was a lot less traffic on the roads back then (amongst commoners two car households were rare) and in a rural area I'd imagine it would be fairly easy to get away with drink driving. Also, the penalties then were much less severe - I don't know what they were exactly, but for simply being caught over the limit it could be as little as a ban for a year and a fine, rather than a custodial sentence, and it didn't have the same stigma as it (quite rightly) does now.

and the food as described is all so plain, was it really like that in the 1980s?

In a rural area like Rutshire exotic ingredients would have been difficult to come by - you could only really get them in cities that had shops catering specifically for different cultures. If you look at a cookery book from the 80s (my mum's Delia Smith for example) it's peppered with suggestions of alternatives if you can't get this or that, which are things that you'd nowadays find easily in any supermarket.

Was it really normal for grown women to be 7 stone (like Fenella and Valerie are both described as weighing?) I mean that would put anyone over 4'10" in the "underweight" BMI category.

Clothes were certainly smaller in the 80s - you'd find it difficult to get anything larger than a then-14 (more like a modern 10) on the high street, however 7 stone wasn't the norm in the 80s. My mum was 5'1 and weighed 7 stone and was regarded as underweight. Jilly may be writing from a slightly earlier perspective - 50s, 60s - when people were smaller generally. People 'grew' throughout the 20th Century. I've got a book written in about 1910 where a woman is derided as being enormous because she has a 26 inch waist!

Jilly has issues around her own weight, I think, and it comes through in the books. There's an interview with her in the Guardian for Wicked in 2006 which says:

"When she is hard at work, Cooper morphs into her characters. During the writing of Riders, which is about horsey types, she was very thin with long, blonde hair. During the writing of Wicked!, she went up to 10 stone, and though she weighs less than that now, she is keen to 'get off' a few pounds before she goes on her book tour. 'That's the one thing about teachers - they're a bit fat. They've bingo arms and Henman hair. Oh, I musn't be rude. But I became like them.' She hasn't had a drink for three weeks - an age. It's funny, I say, that she is so concerned with her weight. But she just forms two tiny fists with her hands and beats her thighs."

I've also read an interview with her where she talks about a pre-Leo boyfriend she was in bed with and he said, 'Oh Piggy, you'd be absolutely heartbreaking if you were thin.' She weighed about 9 stone at the time.

She lives not far from my mum, Mum sees her in Stroud occasionally.

@VeryLittleOwl
Jilly lives near my DD1 too. She sees her in Stroud and met her at a Christmas Work do. She said she was so excited as she knew how excited I'd have been to be there!

Anyone planning on baking a cake today?
Don't forget to leave an adorable little splodge of batter on your cheek (to be sexily wiped off later, either by yourself or an expected guest)

I've binged on Riders and Rivals now (to the detriment of the day job!!) and am hooked.

Re the drink drinking, my father got caught drink driving at the end of the 80s and got a year's ban and £100 fine. My mum had to collect him from the police station and ferry him round for a year, but it wasn't really considered shameful. When I met DH 10 years later he was horrified and censorious about how offhand and casual I was about my dad's conviction, he wouldn't even touch a pint of shandy if he was driving. Attitudes did change a lot in 10 years.

ItsABit wow that's cool, TIL! Even as part of a matching lingerie set?

Interesting about drink driving and how much things changed. Certainly the sexual politics have changed almost unrecognisably but in one way I have a sneaking admiration of the way that people seem to jump into bed with each other or flirt or get cuddly at parties and then no hard feelings afterwards - look at Billy and Fen, for example, or the crush Maud has on RCB (which doesn't also mean she and Declan are still massively into each other).

I am channeling a bit of Jilly today with my outfit - wearing an old T-shirt which has a tiny darn in it where I fixed a hole, and even though I realised it has a little stain right over one boob I’m keeping it on cos it’s comfy. And my old jeans. And flip flops which are displaying slightly chipped toenail polish, topped with an old Musto jacket because it’s a bit chilly. My adorable ancient spaniel is lying on my feet and my robust but slightly uncontrollable son is crawling through a dog agility tunnel repeatedly because the dog toys are more interesting than his

#bemoreCooper

'Oh Piggy, you'd be absolutely heartbreaking if you were thin.'

That reminds me of a line in Rivals, where Patrick is talking about the friend of his that Taggie has a crush on, and says his friend thinks she'd be 'absolutely heartbreaking' if she were shorter.

Xiaoxiong

Thank you! I don’t do lingerie either, I’m a cotton pants kinda gal. I’ve been given a hard time over the years for not being ”feminine” enough.

In the ’70s and ’80s my dad used to drive home from the pub, drunk, every night. He always made a total pig’s ear of reversing up the drive.

'Oh Piggy, you'd be absolutely heartbreaking if you were thin.'

What an utter arsehole though. Imagine saying that to someone! Clearly an early negger - that’s what they call it, isn’t it? When men are mean on purpose to make women feel insecure.

I don’t think Jilly would be all that kind if she wrote me into a book (I genuinely quail at the thought of her rendering my accent, never mind my vast bulk) but I’d still like to go back in time, hunt that man down and tip a drink over his head. Something sticky and staining, preferably.

She did use lines from real life; in Imogen someone says a fat girl in a bikini should be wearing an overcoat, and one of her autobiographical articles had someone using the same line.

I've been channelling my inner Janey today in that I've been bashing away at a keyboard all morning getting a transcript done. I could go out and attempt to recreate an early section of Polo this afternoon by taking all three horses down the village together to another field, but since it's raining pretty heavily I think that can wait for another day. My spaniel is curled up in a den on the sofa made by the collie pushing the dog bed off the windowsill on top of her and I think she's probably got the best idea of how to spend the afternoon!

Very good, Little Owl! Extra points if you've scraped your unwashed hair back, are wearing a puffa over red pants and if you've left the dishes unwashed in the sink! Also, if you clench your jaw and poke your tongue out slightly as you bash away!
Maximum points for leading multiple horses through the village, but only if the local do-gooder tuts at you. Oh god, I love her!

Maximum points for leading multiple horses through the village, but only if the local do-gooder tuts at you.

That happened once! I only had two at the time, so thought it would be a doddle to take them out of the field they were sharing with three of my sheep and down the village (which is a bit of an exaggeration, only 26 houses) to the field at the other end. Got headcollars on, clipped on leadropes, draped Podgy Cob's leadrope over his neck and let him graze the verge while keeping hold of Elderly Boss Horse as I shut the gate. Unfortunately Ancient Sheep decided she was in the mood for a wander and shot out of the gate before I could shut it and off down the road. Elderly Boss Horse ripped his leadrope out of my hand and took off after her and I just managed to grab Podgy Cob and dig my heels into the ground enough to stop him following. By the time he'd stopped doing circles and we were walking in a vaguely sensible manner in the right direction, Ancient Sheep was nowhere in sight, Elderly Boss Horse was doing a beautiful floaty trot down the road and Podgy Cob decided he'd had enough and went from powerwalking, which I could just about keep up, to Full Welsh Cob Trot, taking me waterskiing behind him until I had to let go. I think I may have broken the record for 800 metres in wellies and caught up with them just as the local tutter was coming out of her house and stepping into the road to catch them.

(Ancient Sheep was later lured back into her field with a bucket of feed - I miss her, she once cleared three stock fences to try and get to a neighbour's tup when she was in her early teens, she was a feisty girl to the end! I took her to the vet to be put down rather than see her deteriorate, they underestimated her weight, so my last memory of her is her snoring her head off in my trailer, heavily sedated, while they went back for a top-up injection, after which I blubbed all over the lovely French locum vet.)

Is this the right TV miniseries from the 90s??

Love all that, Very! I think you might be a winner, right down to the dishy vet x
I love all the horsey descriptions - Wayne, Sailor, Tero, Desdemona, Macauley etc.
I had ponies from 2yrs up to late teens (never showjumping, just working hunter, Pony Club and a bit of showing.) Mine were all total delinquents-wouldn't box, spooky, tanked off and at least one you had to watch yourself in the stable as he'd squash you! A complete contrast to the gentle darling 17.2 who used to put his head down so you could reach to buckle his headcollar!

Yes, that's the miniseries!

Sadly, I think I'd be one of the "lower middle class with nouveau money" that Jilly used to sneer at.
Living in one of those soulless 5 bed executive homes on the edge of the village (where Old Alf's garage used to be), married to Trevor who plays golf and wears Pringle jumpers.
I'd be called Brenda , spend all Trevor's money at John Lewis because of course our parents didn't have a huge family farmhouse full of battered antique furniture to pass on to newlyweds.
Everyone would laugh at me behind my back when my Liverpool accent slipped out, and my insistence that I actually came from The Wirral not The Pool wouldn't make any difference.
Somewhere around chapter 63, I'd hopefully be shown to have a heart of gold despite my humble beginnings. This might involve Trevor having a mid life crisis and running away with Eric, his regular golf partner.