Thread 12 - TalkLair: “I say we take off and nuke the entire site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure.”

[Kucinghitam]

(Previous thread 11).

The days are gradually growing longer, but the worst of the winter weather is not yet behind us. In the TalkLair, we remain hunkered down keeping cosy and warm. The hearth is glowing, the walls covered in dubious artwork, books by non-approved authors line the shelves, rugs are down on the floors (and assorted pets curled up on them).

We just won’t mention the gnawed bones of our prey over there in the corner of the cave…

Btw, has anyone seen the why don't terfs want kids to wear non-gendered clothes surely that would solve EVERYTHING thread which started off with the OP messing up her question but then sort of doubling down on those pesky terfs. I'm not sure if it's more frustrating or amusing but I did feel the need to post mostly to stop my eyes rolling into the back of my head and giving me a headache.

Sounds entertaining. Which board - the usual or is it one of the ones thats escaped into the wild?

I'm utterly fascinated by @MouseMinge's tubes and diagrams!

We just got back from a couple of days in Stratford-Upon-Avon, doing the Shakespeare thing. An utterly wonderful brand-new production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the RSC - highly highly recommend, DDs enjoyed it so much they were literally(!) breathless with delight. And of course, we had to do Shakespeare's birthplace and Anne Hathaway's cottage.

In the ticket queue at the Shakespeare birthplace museum, a Chinese tourist came up to us. He started by asking if I spoke Mandarin, I answered "A bit, not that fluently," and he asked a few questions about whether he was in the right queue and how much his ticket would be. All fine.

Then once in the museum, Mr Chinese Tourist properly latched on to us. Followed us round every display case, decided that DH would be his photographer, and kept asking me to explain the exhibits - even though it was patently obvious that I completely lack the Mandarin vocabulary to explain Tudor inkstands, Jacobean cloaks, or wattle-and-daub construction. Every time we shook him off, he managed to reattach himself.

Eventually he escalated to including us in all his photos of the old house, getting us to pose looking at the tassels on the bedcurtains and so forth. DH tried to run away to the next room, and got called back with a frantic "Hello! Hello!"

Things reached a peak when we were talking to one of the staff explainers about the details of Tudor glove-making. Mr Chinese Tourist bustled in and began rearranging us like mannequins in order to take his photos. The explainer was completely bemused, and I whispered "We don't actually know him!" - this caused great consternation and a stream of apologies to us, and a stern instruction to Mr Tourist: "Sir, please do not manhandle other visitors!" which fell on uncomprehending ears.

By the time we got to the next room, the explainer had called a museum supervisor to come and rescue us from Mr Tourist, as they were concerned we were being harassed! (We did feel a bit harassed TBH, but I assured them we would be OK).

As we got to the end of the exhibition, Mr Tourist asked me, in confusion, "Where is the bit about Shakespeare's school?" and I explained that his actual school was elsewhere in town and showed him where it was on Google Maps. He was very grateful and inquired, "Are you all going to visit the school next?" You will all be unsurprised to learn that my response was a polite version of "FUCKING HELL NO WAY!"

@NoBinturongsHereMate - It's in AIBU, and is ludicrous. People have pointed out that it's half-term.

Arf @Kucinghitam - I hope you gave him some deliberate misinformation?

I'm glad you got rid of him in the end. What a pain in the bottom!

I thought I had something interesting to post, which is highly unlikely but whatever it was I've forgotten. Although, happy galentine's day to my womenz. I like the new invention because while I've never been particularly lucky in romantic love, I have been hugely blessed with some of the best women friends anyone could ask for, so to all women great and small I salute us! If I hadn't been feeling like shite I'd have gone to the cinema. My filum of choice was The Zone of Interest. I will see it, just not this week.

I like the idea of Galentine's Day!

We firmly DO NOT DO Valentine's ChezKuc, has always been the case since DH and I first got together. (I personally loathe don't like V-Day, never have.) Today we are celebrating by me going to the dentist and DH spending the whole day in London for a work trip, I probably won't even see him by the time I go to sleep tonight.

@Gonners I am too nice to send confused tourists (however annoying) in the wrong direction. However, I may have given any amount of misinformation about Shakespeare and the Tudors, because I spent a lot of time muttering "Yes/Uh-huh/Mmm-yup" to all his questions about the exhibits.

We were musing about Mr Chinese Tourist's holiday snaps - when he gets home, will he do a slideshow to his friends, "Here's a random confused British family I rearranged into poses, looking at a Tudor beam, and next to some bedcurtains, and here they are holding a glove, and here's the security guard looming at me..."

Just finished reading The Five: The Untold Lives of the Women Killed by Jack the Ripper which I think I've seen someone here mention having read. I think it should be a benchmark book for how to write about female victims of violent crime. I see the author Hallie Rubenhold has also done a series of podcasts on the subject, so that's next on my listening list.

https://www.pushkin.fm/podcasts/bad-women-the-ripper-retold#episodes

This thread (and its offshoot) are a beautiful illustration of how two viewpoints can be so utterly alien to each other. (I am very very firmly one one side of the debate, can anybody guess which?)

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5006398-was-it-unreasonable-to-take-the-table?

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/5006647-vote-was-it-unreasonable-to-take-the-table

That makes me feel a bit killy. The idea you can take a table and leave people who came in before you standing there wih their order and nowhere to sit, it's just fucking rude. Might as well argue it's OK to push in to the front of the crowded bus queue because otherwise you might not get a seat.

I realise other opinions are available, sorry for the swearing.

Oh my...

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/home_decoration_pictures/5007529-check-out-this-beauty-on-rightmove

Blime, Kuc! What a terrible experience at the Shakespeare Museum!

I'm firmly on the side of get in the queue and wait for a table, don't go and baggsy one.

Pretend Chanel is just so tacky, says the big ol' snob. I love the simplicity of the Chanel logo so I have it in my home by having - an increasingly nearly empty - bottle of Chanel No.5 in my bedroom. In the box because I don't want the perfume spoiling before I've nabbed every last drop of it.

@Dotellhimpike The Five might have been me because it's a book I love and wax lyrical about. It's SO good. I might be misremembering but I think it was Annie's story that made me cry. One certainly did.

The podcast is v good. There's a second series which revolves around a man who was murdering during WWII who was known as the Blackout Ripper. As with The Five it focuses on the women's lives.

Yesterday I listened to Alistair Campbell & Rory Stewart's "Leading" podcast interview with Robert Sapolsky - The psychology behind Donald Trump, the science of stress, and the illusion of ‘free will’. He is so bloody articulate it hurts - well worth a listen (if you can get past the unbearable me-me-me of Alistair Campbell).

Re that house… that’s exactly the sort of decor my old NDN had in her flat. She had Chanel wallpaper in her bedroom and a bed very similar to the one in those photos. She had the same sort of studded velvet chairs with the lion handles and OTT mirrors too. And a weird garden gnome obsession.

She was utterly scathing about other people’s decor. Everyone else’s home was a shithole according to her. The most negative person I’ve ever met. God I’m so glad she’s gone.

And happy Valentine’s All!

It really is something special in terms of True Crime. Weirdly it put me in mind of Emerald Fennel's pre Saltburn movie, Promising Young Woman in that it presented a tale we've all heard a thousand times before but from a perspective we rarely get. I said at the time that Promising Young Woman should be shown in school to teenagers of both sexes, then discussed.

With the cafe thing, I am mostly about queuing for food and then finding a table but if I’m with my mother (unlikely now as getting her out of the house is a rarity) I’d need to get her settled in a seat before queuing. But I’d try to avoid somewhere with a queue and only one free table as it’s clearly not reasonable to nick the last table from under the noses of people who’ve been queuing.

I think that book about Jack's victims sounds good and I'll look it up.

I actually have a small amount of paid work at the moment and it's really interesting. My DD is a psychotherapist and also teaches at an institute that trains psychotherapists. Students have to submit their final case studies to a very tight word count and sometimes they need help with getting the word count or other things. This current student not only has this problem but is also dyslexic and has clearly never had lessons in grammar. So it's fairly hard work ploughing through this 15000+ words in word by word detail but also absolutely fascinating.

Oh, @Britinme what fun! I used to do that for a living in Girona, translating from Catalan/correcting the English of people who'd done their own translations. The latter always took longer. The marine biologists wrote nigh-on perfect English, but my favourites were the child psychologists. They did their own incomprehensible "translations" so I always had to ask for the original. I still have a copy of the English paperback version of Monica's PhD thesis - a "non-linear approach" to something-or-other - in which she thanks me for my "careful" correction of the manuscript. Too right, Monica - in both languages. "That sentence is in Spanish, not Catalan. And those statistics don't mean what you say they mean." It took months. She got her PhD, though I did think I should probably have got one too.

If I recall correctly (though I have tried to erase it) she set out to investigate whether adolescents liked mobile phones and came to the astonishing conclusion that yes, they did. After we moved to Italy, I still did work for the child psych lot but did it for free (because in order to bill them, I would have had to register for VAT and Italian bureaucracy is best avoided).

That sounds really interesting, @Britinme

Re cafe. I've never really thought about it before. It depends on a few things but if there's a queue and not enough tables for the queue then it would be excessively cuntish to go and take a table and I'd expect everyone to take against me.

@Dotellhimpike I still haven't seen Promising Young Woman which I must put right but from what I know of it I'd tend to agree.

Snoop popped around on her way home from elsewhere to give me a Valentine's cuddle earlier which was so lovely of her. She couldn't hang around because Seamus was in the car and he's not allowed in my flat because he's a greyhound and Francis is a cat. Not long after she left drama ensued. I decided to give my bath a clean because I wanted to dye my hair and have a shower - shower is over the bath. Knock on my door while I'm giving the bath a clean, it's my downstairs neighbour. Water is "pissing" into his flat. We check in my kitchen and there is a bit of a leak. It's quite small and I think he's exaggerating. He goes back down to move stuff away from the leak, I put a big bowl under the leak, get some towels out, blah. I go down to let him know, walk into his flat where the leak is. Sweet baby Jebus! It is pissing water and it makes no sense given the smaller leak from me.

We look for the stopcock. All of our stopcocks are in the same cupboard as our electric meters! What in the actual fuck! Mine is positioned in such a way that neighbour can't turn it off even with a grip thing. We decide to come back up to mine in case maybe, just maybe there's a stopcock under my sink. There isn't but while we're looking we discover the actual leak and it's quite something. There's no reaching it though. It's underneath my immersion heater and we can only see it because there's a cut out space there, one assumes for a plumber although it's a bit useless. I immediately turned the immersion heater off. Phone Snoop, a few minutes later go back to look at the leak and it's nearly stopped, so it's water coming from the immersion heater. Sort of phew. I mean it's a big problem but the leak is stopped for the time being, I can still have a shower and the pissing water has stopped in my neighbour's flat. Plumber tomorrow! Snoop and I have been talking about getting rid of the huge immersion heater anyway as it's ludicrous, takes up too much room and now we both know it's shit and for c-words. Crisis averted for now, lots of plumber action in the next few days I imagine. Thankfully, I think I'm getting to the coming out the other side of the chemo downhill spiral. Less dizzy today - after nearly fainting sitting up in my own bed, what's that all about! - and slightly less tired.

Why are my posts always so bloody long. I can't seem to stop my fingers and I "talk" too much.

Fuck me, watching Newsnight and all "my hospitals" are under investigation for being shit. It's the leadership not the staff but crikey. Worthing hospital has been downgraded to needs improvement and Brighton has been upgraded to needs improvement. Worthing for the almost win? The people doing the grading did point out that the medical staff are good and caring which has been my experience but it does give a chemo brained wrongmo pause for thought. I'm just grateful that the shitshow isn't impacting me because at this point I'm nothing if not very selfish.

Mouse that sounds dire. I would have no idea what to do if confronted with that situation and would have to find A Man. And you never got your shower!