Sir James Talbot tackles Mrs. Jack Maynard's Displaced Organ

[QuaterMiss]

Would I be unreasonable to initiate legal proceedings against this man?

Previous thread here:

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/am_i_being_unreasonable/3624032-Not-to-have-realised-until-now-that-Joey-Maynard-s-displaced-organ-was-a-prolapse?

With thanks to Jemima232 for rifling through Sir James’ archives to supply the title of this one.

I thought Bride was bride as I’m bride and groom but with the e emphasised at the end - Bride-ee

EBD wrote a cookbook, I’ll have you all know! I might manage to send it to Parker to add to the Dropbox if I can work out how.

I would be fascinated to read this.

Tell me there are serving suggestions for raw smoked bacon in it

Am thoroughly enjoying reading through the Kindle series, thank you all so much.
Can anyone clear up a puzzlement for me? The whole thing about Mary-Lou and Verity-Ann being 'sisters-by-marriage' because apparently somebody pointed out that they 'couldn't be step sisters'?

If their parents got married then isn't that exactly what they are? What am I missing?

Of course Mary Lou and Verity-Ann are stepsisters.

EBD clearly didn’t know what that sort of relationship was called and couldn’t be bothered to check a dictionary.

Apparently chip pan fires were incredibly common. Come home late after a drink or two 😂 decide freshly cooked chips are just the right thing and then fall asleep before they are finished

A young man who lived a few roads away from my parents died in exactly that way.
It’s a good thing that chip pans are less popular these days.

Because she's Mary-Lou and she's special (and no, I didn't understand the difference either because I was in a stepfamily when I got into the CS books - my mum remarried after my dad died).

The thought of chip pan fires always terrified me, but I don't think we ever had one, though I did accidentally set fire to a tea towel once.

Has anyone else been late for work because they didn't bother setting an alarm and used the Grizel method of banging your head off the pillow while repeating the time you wanted to wake?

I’ve emailed the cook book to Parker - Joey, Frieda, Simone and Marie write a cook book for Marie one wet holiday before she gets married. It features ‘hilarious’ reminiscences of Corney’s garlic cloves and Joyce’s sulphur cakes. The recipes all seem to feature pushing things through sieves, in pre-food processor/stick blender style.

EBD clearly didn’t know what that sort of relationship was called and couldn’t be bothered to check a dictionary.

Yet bizarrely she understood It when she wrote . *Step sisters for Lorna"

The only difference in Lorna is that the step sisters didn't know each other beforehand.

(The two Lorna books are my favourite non Chalet EBD's)

Yes, the cloves/garlic cloves one! Even if Cornelia had never seen either before, surely at least one of the girls she handed them out to would have noticed they didn't look like cloves, or that they smelt like garlic!

And the Wrong Chalet School one, how unlikely even by Chalet School standards was that mix up? Two girls of the same age, with same first 2 names reversed and the same surname. Then one doesn't come for a convoluted reason but sends her trunk. The other comes without a trunk, both schools have the same name, same headmistress' name and the same colour scheme!

Ah, but they didn’t, did they? One was ‘brown and orange’ (urgh) and the other was ‘brown and flame’ (wtf? What colour is that? Also orange? Blue?)

If you’re not going to be specific, The Chalet School, no wonder you’ve got confused children turning up from God knows where.

(Also, it’s a side effect of everyone either having one name and being know by another, using their middle name not their first name, or all having the same bloody name and a million nicknames. I think EBD must have had a thing about names. Joey is always being disparaging about people who call their children normal names ‘names that will date them’.

OK. My phone won't open any of the files in Dropbox. I have the kindle app and playbooks and it won't export to either. It will go to Drive but then says file type is unsupported. I give up.

Only just found this thread - I loved the Chalet School books but they all came from the school library so I don't have any at all now!

II'd be so grateful if you could share the Dropbox link with me as well please @Parker231 when you have a minute.

@pascha if you have the Kindle app, you can email the Kindle files to your Kindle - the email address is in your Amazon account. I got stuck with this too! It worked once I did this.

I am now heartily confused about the whole Island episode. I thought the trips were just a bit younger than Marylou?

Doesn't someone link Bride's name to St Bride's Bay in Wales, hence nothing to do with Irish at all? (How is St Bride's Bay pronounced, any Welsh people?)

My (Irish) mother is known as 'Bride', a nickname for Bridget, pronounced 'Bridie' (which is also the more usual spelling), and also known as 'Breda' to other people. She's in her seventies, and would be the first to say that it's a deeply hick rural name, though, as she says, 'Not quite Gobait territory'.

@Glasscrab

I’m Welsh ( though can only speak it a bit). I’ve never heard that bay pronounced any way other than bride as in weddings.

If I was a Chalet School girl I’d probably say “look you” and “indeed to goodness yes” I don’t think EBD liked the Welsh much, they are either portrayed as sneaky and devious (Eiluned), sulky and stroppy (Gwensi) or thieves and poachers (Owen Owen or whatever the groundsman was called)

I think she had some deeply essentialist ideas about 'Celts' in general they''re either 'wild Irish girls' like Biddy O'Ryan and Deira O'Hagan, Welsh people exactly as you said, or second-sighted Scots who wander about in tartans. And everyone speaks in a Stage Irish/Welsh/Scottish dialect even Anglo-Irish Deira -- that suggests EBD had never actually met a Welsh, Irish or Scottish person.

Oh, nearly forgot Juliet's useless beau (Dermot?) who 'blarneyed' Joey into helping him win Juliet back after he'd been too wet to stand up to his nasty sister.

On the cookery subject, it was fairly clear to me even when I read the books aged ten or so, that EBD must never have seen a clove of garlic, surely! NO one could confuse cloves with garlic cloves -- did she just assume from the name they must have looked vaguely similar???

Oh, and the 'rechauffée' always sounded like an odd recipe for EBD to choose to show in detail for the first cookery class we actually see the CS girls having -- given that it relies on making leftovers palatable by disguising them.

I mean, thrifty stuff for the ordinary 1930s/40s housewife, obviously, but given EBD's obsession with how delicious the CS food was, and her lingering depictions of delicious cakes, little potato balls etc, either having enough leftovers from the day before to feed the whole school or deliberately cooking double the meat in order to have enough leftovers to make rechauffée for the whole school sounds a bit boarding school slop.

@Glasscrab

The Armishire books are based on Herefordshire, which I’ve never thought as being particularly Welsh - it’s on the border!

I’m really enjoying reading the stories again but more and more of it is making me a bit , probably because I’m reading them in quick succession and so I notice the errors and anomalies more.

Finally getting around to looking at all the books now on my Kindle. Plan is to read from the start. Anyone have a favourite and worst book?

Worst I think is Jo to the Rescue, which is mostly maundering about housework and childcare for a million small children, with a creepy subplot about a doctor falling for a patient he’s actually treating for a serious illness. Best — Exile?

In general I like the Armishire ones best. Worst - the very late Swiss ones.

Best definitely Exile. Nothing like a bit of Nazi fleeing. Though I also like CS and Jo (2nd book).

Worst I’ve read is Adrienne. Shit plot that’s full of holes. Unnecessary and annoying use of Mary Lou.

Highland Twins is another of my favs.

Parker - you have been ridiculously selfless! Thank you again.

I can’t face re-reading any of the early volumes, but Exile does stick in the memory as being rather fab.

Two Sams is deadly dull. And Prefects doesn’t reward the wait.