A fête worse than the Chalet School

[EmilyAlice]

Roll up, roll up!
Bid for a mortgage on the doll's house! Pin the tail on the St Bernard! Guess the weight of the handsome doctor! (Or pin the tail on the doctor and guess the weight of the St Bernard). Knit a lime green liberty bodice against the clock!
The Chalet School fête is open.....

Ha! Do it, Witchend - with a closing remark about how you're sure their lax attitude will translate into very poor attendance at this year's Sale. See if you can summon up an impressive doctor-patriarch to make the point more persuasively, too. (Hope you're feeling better now.)

I would love to partake in a postal lending library, Cheddar. I can also offer both prequels, CS World and the CS Christmas Book if anyone would like to borrow any of these...

I use stentorian tones regularly...but 30 children in a small room with drums, glockenspiels etc tends to need it!!

I bet that's Herr Anserl's excuse too. ;)

What would you like to borrow? I have:

Jo To The Rescue
A Head Girl's Difficulties
Maids of La Rochelle
Seven Scamps
Monica Turns Up Trumps
Jean of Storms
They Both Loved Dogs (which is shite, btw)
Lorna at Wynyards
Elizabeth the Gallant

I have most CS titles but they are also mostly on OneDrive so I expect won't really be required.

I would love to borrow CS World and the Christmas Book - who wrote them? Any chance anyone has a copy of A Chalet School Headmistress that they are willing to lend?

When you say both prequels, please may I borrow The Bettanys of Taverton High?

You may! PM me your address and I'll pop them (all three, if you want?) in the post. CS World is Helen Barber - it's a collection of shorts. The Christmas book is a GGBP collection - some EBD, some bits by their regular fill-in authors. I liked bits of it but have to confess some of it bored me, much like the CS nativity plays...

I would really really like to borrow Maids of LR and A Head Girl's Difficulties, please. At some point I would also really like to read Jean of Storms too but realistically I won't any time soon so is probably best I leave that free for someone else for the time being!

Okey doke. I will dig them out when I get home! Thank you so much - yes please to all 3! Off to PM my address.

Do you want Seven Scamps as well? It's one of my favourites, and it's not on OneDrive.

Ooh actually, yes please, that would make sense. Thank you!

Just out of interest do you think that stentorian + tones is as linguistically inevitable a combination as quintessentially + English?
Now I am a bit confused here girls, because I am a bit fatigued after an hour of trying to deal with lawnmower repairman in deepest Norman French, but what was all that stuff a couple of pages back about Doctor Jack, special milk and something drooping in the flower beds? Surely not?

Good question, EmilyAlice. Merriam-Webster gives this sentence as its example of stentorian:

the professor's stentorian voice was enough to keep even the drowsiest student awake

I'm sorry, but that sounds cumbersome and wrong to me. 'The professor's stentorian tones were enough to keep even the drowsiest student awake' is much better. Should I email them to let them know?

As for your second question, don't worry, it was a completely different doctor. Jack's solid lump of comfort is as - erm - solid as ever. At least, I have no reason to believe otherwise.

Oh goodie. Had Joey very worried there even though she is 98 and he has been dead for 20 years-.

I had to call all my parents friends Uncle and Aunty. They used to come to tea on Sundays and then have a glass of Emva cream sherry before they went home.
Oh how I miss the 1950s not.

Whoops sorry, parent's friends. Extra English for me. Mais c'est le jour de la langue française n'est-ce pas?

I think I confused things earlier - I am alternating between steely eyed glares that would quell the most bumptious Middle, and Vater Bar style stentoriousness (definitely a word), depending on circumstances. Never both simultaneously, that would not have the desired effect.

I don't have anything much to lend except Abbey Girls At Home. But I would love to borrow any non OneDrive books at all, and guarantee to read quickly and post on promptly. Happy to be low down the queue because of my sad inability to offer anything in return.

Les Mercredis sont Anglais, non, Emily? (Je parle Francais juste en casse)

Oui peut-être.
Norman country French is incomprehensible though. No pretty accents here. Reminds me apropos of nothing to do with the thread of the apocryphal EU translation story about "il faut profiter de la sagesse normande" being translated as "we must all learn from Norman Wisdom".

TooExtra I'd love it if you'd type up Jo to the Rescue, it's (I think) the only one I've never read. And there's some interesting fanfic about Phoebe on SDL which has really whetted my interest.

I've got a new computer and the one drive login details were saved on my old one and I've deleted all my old pms, can anyone send me through the details again? Thanks!

Mon dieu, c'est Wednesday and nous all owe beaucoup de fines to the gin fund parce-que nous avons talked end-on in anglais toute le jour. Je never could remember quelle jour de la week il est.

Is it Wednesday? My hat! I'd quite forgotten it was Wednesday.

15 points, a bottle of light country wine, a cup of coffee with featherbeds of whipped cream and half an hour alone with the doctor of your choice for the poster who names the character famed for this utterance (though to be strictly accurate she says it of Thursday, Friday and Monday but not Wednesday, as far as I recall). She appears in a number of books written by a sister author of EBD. I adore the exclamation 'my hat'!

Does any personne know le francais pour 'stentorian tones'?

Google translate says "voix de stentor". Larousse says "stentor" in French translates as "stentor" in English and is zoologique.
À haute voix?

Slow typist. My was for Emily and Norman Wisdom.

I think it's 'voice comme une cloche' Mornington.

Oh, he was a Greek chap! House points for meee....
stentorian (adj.)
"of powerful voice," c. 1600, from Stentor, legendary Greek herald in the Trojan War, whose voice (described in the "Iliad") was as loud as 50 men. His name is from Greek stenein "groan, moan," from PIE imitative root *(s)ten-, source of Old English þunor "thunder."

Is the person who exclaims "my hat!" Cecily from the Abbey books, perhaps?

No, it's not Cicely, Cheddar, but you're not far off. Cicely probably does say 'my hat' every now and then, but she doesn't lead herself and a.n.other into deadly peril through her besetting sin of forgetting what day of the week it is.

Are Mary-Lou's bell-like tones ever described as stentorian?

Haha no I think ML's tones are only allowed to be referred to as "clarion" by the same sort of linguistic inevitability that necessitates 'tones' rather than 'voice'. (There is one author on SDL who frequently uses "clarion" as a verb to describe ML speaking and this always pleases me enormously.)

I can't answer the question but I think you really ought to offer Aunty Joey's lovely lime green twinset in the list of available prizes mornington.