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.....

Ruey- has your dd tried "Jennings" yet. DS is laughing his socks off reading about Jennings and Darbishire at prep school.

Antonia Forest, Ruey? Not quite the safe, devout world of CS or the Abbey, but brilliant nonetheless.

I have just got to the triplets' birth in Exile, and realised that they do have godfathers - Gottfried (swoon), Eugen von, zu, unter und wieder zuruck Wertheimer, and Herr Anserl. A more negligent set of godparents I have never seen.

Herr Anserl is also Sybil's godfather though (I think?), and as one of his godfatherly duties rescues her from the Mystic M. Clearly she was his favourite. I love the idea that poor Sybil might have been someone's favourite.

It's a fair point, though - and means that the triplets basically have one proper godparent (Nell) between them! Well, Grace Nalder sort of comes back after she misplaces her husband...

You're right, he is. He is GottVater Bar.

I am just going to trip in with a thought.
Doesn't Joey say Catholics can't be god-parents for CofE? (Sybil's naming party?)
Surely good old Vater Bar is catholic?
It just another thing to ignore for the sake of convienience?

Also, can anyone please tell me the onedrive login details?
I have some of the unabridged versions as ebooks on my phone, but my phone is dying, and I am chalet school deprived!

Arf at Gottvater Bar

Does Joey say that, Natasha? I don't remember it (I do remember her telling Madge that CofE can't be godparents to Catholics, in Exile) but it sounds entirely possible although I think it's not theologically accurate(?). He must be Catholic, though, not least because the unwritten rule of the CS is that all Europeans must be Catholic!

I've PMed you the onedrive details. :)

Think it is when one of the girls suggest naming the baby Elisaveta and asking the princess to be god-ma.
And thank you!

Bonjour mes amies. I've just been internet free in France. Incidentally do you think the French have become less chic recently and have lost their clothes straightening instantly tidy knack?

When I bought the CCGU book (if that's right- the Eastenders one) I was warned about the fans hating it by the bookseller! It was a children's bookshop in Hay.

Could I have the onedrive details again please? Last time I tried to get in the password didn't work.

Could I also have the onedrive details please? Am waiting for a box with the 10 Chalets I'm missing and bouncing off the walls waiting for them.

Planning a full-read through in August :)

Thank you my lambs, fully recovered and have sacked the garden director (needed a hyphen I think, garden director's-chair?).
I am getting the chateau ready for invasion of the family; OH has just spent an hour hoovering up spiders in the guest cottage because the GDs will be hysterical if they spot one and there were at least a thousand..... Not very brave and Chaletian really.
French chic - ho hum. I have to say I don't see it round here. My favourite recently (totally off topic whatever the topic is), was a lady in Bricomarché. Shocking-pink floaty skirt, turquoise top, red white and blue nylon jacket, scarlet boater and crimson shoes. It was July 15th so she might have been up all night after the festivities of Bastille Day, but I think it was just everyday bad taste. No neat fingers to be seen.....
Mlle Le/La Pattre would have been shocked to the core.

Not that I can imagine many Chalet School characters in Bricomarché or even B and Q. Gaudenz, the Welsh look-you handyman and possibly Tom Gay? I think Faithful Anna would definitely have shopped at Lidl.

Rue You might need to trawl through second hand bookshops, but Listen to the Nightingale by Rumer Godden is partly set in a ballet boarding school.

How did you get Chalet books onto your DDs Kindle?

Maybe I'll let her finish malory towers before introducing her to chalet school. She has just finished year 2 so plenty of time!!

Rue......I second trying your dd with Jennings. Also how about ( if you have them) trebizon, the Nancy books, Clare Mallory s merry books, the drina dancing books?

I think we'll give the dodgy laundry a miss for camping! Dd has managed today to stand in the, thankfully cold, bbq which dh had filled with water to cool it down.......what a mess!! Good job the quintet are not here or they would have washed and dosed her!!!!

I used an online converter to put the epub versions into mobi, then saved them to my laptop and emailed them to DD's kindle email. Bit of a palaver, but worked pretty well - although they don't go into the kids area that I've forgotten the name of as they're not "proper" kindle books iyswim.

Thanks for the ideas of Jennings, Drina etc - she'd probably enjoy Drina and I'm sure I've got a couple of them on a bookshelf somewhere. I'd forgotten all about Trebizon but remember enjoying a couple of the early ones so will try and get hold of some of those, too.

I always envision Frau Mieders as an Austrian version of the archetypal rural French housewife, the sort that you see in local markets in the attractive flowery pinny come housecoat thing.

Good luck with the family invasion, Emily. Hopefully all branches of your family have their very own Anna who will be only too willing - no they'll need - to do all the menialities for you so that you can concentrate all your energies on devising sheets-and-pillowcase parties, sliding on your hall floor and marvelling at the secret passages your relatives are sure to discover.

I keep coming across hidden gems in Head Girl. There's a brilliant bit where they discuss exchange rates and what you can get for your Austrian schilling which I'm sure didn't make it through the Armada cuts, and it's fascinating. Jo and Grizel lament that so much of their pocket-money has to go on new hankeys (spelt that way, and I'm sure GGBP would have copied the original spelling). Grizel tells Joey that when she goes to Florence she'll be newly kitted-out so she can donate her 40+ hankeys to Jo to save her buying new ones. 40 hankeys? Really? And just how did they lose them?

I was also a bit taken aback by this passage which is just after the arrival of Cornelia who Matron has asked Joey to look after. Yes, that's right, Joey spirit-of-the-school Bettany. She dumps Corney unceremoniously in the lower fourth form-room telling the girls that she's to be in their form so they can look after her. And then:

Joey turned on her heel and left the room. She had a rooted objection to 'doing sheep-dog' and her theory was that new girls got on best if left to find their own feet.

Crumbs. If only she'd retained that theory into adulthood, think of all those new girls who would have been spared their tea parties and baby bathing.

Nell, yes it is Surpassing the Love of Men which I meant particularly, and also some articles I read once in a collection whose name I forget.

at the DDs who read school stories and Chalet School. Mine never would. Where did I go wrong? The nearest my two got to enjoying school stories was Ramona Quimby where some of the action is school-based but it's definitely Not the Same Thing.

Natasha is right, Joey did indeed veto me as godma because of my Catholicism. I accepted this at the time, but the point about Vater Bar had escaped me. I am now .

Rue did you know that the floral housecoat pinnie things are called "fantaisie"?

Thanks Mornington. We have had an exciting expedition to see the combine harvester which is probably going to keep going all night and now they are drawing and colouring so I haven't needed a coadjutor yet....

Emily I am confused: you're using the past tense to describe your expedition, but you've not mentioned any doctorly heroics. What kind of expedition was this?

My commiserations to EElisaveta. There is an AIBU thread in that - "my supposed best friend vetoed me for godmother to her niece because of religious incompatibility. I've since discovered that the child's godfather is of the same denomination of me (and anyway, the best friend is forever banging on about them all being different paths to the same God). AIBU to rescind my kind offer to have her as my lady in waiting in my Ruritanian kingdom?"

Actual at Joey being averse to doing sheep-dog! Do you think any reader ever wrote to query this in the newsletters? As for the hankeys (spelling noted), were they randomly giving them away as prizes for prefects' evenings at that point or did that only happen later on? Gosh, with 40 hankeys a head you could set up hankey fancy dress evenings to rival sheets and pillowcases...

I love the idea of faithful Anna shopping at Lidl! And I'm now trying to think up who else would have shopped where.

AIBU to think Joey would have sheepdogged away if the new girl in question (Corney I think) had been a Real Princess and heir apparent to a Baltic kingdom?

about the directors-chairs-which-happen-to-be-situated-in-the-garden. I hope Emily was amused enough by my confusion to shriek with laughter and collapse weakly in tears of merriment.

EmilyAlice you are, as they say, 'avin' a larf. Fantaisie?! :o :o

I was trying to find a pic of one to show the other Chaletians what we're on about, but no luck so far!

Re shopping, Marie would have shopped in Harrods food hall I reckon. Either Corney or Evadne probably own Walmart and shop there because, well, profits.

Floral housecoat / pinnies frequently labelled fantaisie on French market stalls. Normally next to the skimpy, lacy underwear in improbable colours.
No doctors to be found round here, no matter how dangerous the expedition. I once tried to get one and the receptionist said "Oh they won't come out there". In extreme emergencies the fire brigade turn up to resuscitate you, bung you in the fire engine and take you to hospital. We all had to learn to use the defibrillator at my keep fit class, but it is kept 8 km away....
I think Joey and Madge would have gone to Waitrose apart from when Lidl had Austrian week when they would have been queuing up at 8.30 like we are for the Prosecco in Italian week.

The Lucys and Ozannes would get everything from farmers markets and artisanal stalls. The Chesters would get things that look similar from the Co-op.

Dd2 started reading CS from year 2 but preferred the later books. It was only as she got older she liked the early ones.

I remember the bit about her hating sheepdogging, one of those things that has no link between child Joey and adult Joey.

I hear Joan Baker has developed a real taste for Lidl's cakes. Ros, on the other hand, bakes from scratch using ingredients from Sainsbury's organic range. Simone buys her clothes from Primark and then with her clever French fingers inserts a nip here, a tuck there, and voila! So chic!

Golly, isn't Jo melodramatic at the end of Head Girl? I don't mind the arched references to Madge not being able to get down to Briesau because the weather would make it too much for her and she's 'not strong' - when what she means is that she's pregnant. Fair enoughsky. And Grizel not wanting to alarm her about Robin's disappearance, again presumably to take care of her when she's expecting. But Joey's claim that if Madge heard about Corney's disappearance it would kill her really is too much! By then David has been safely born. Having said that, I wonder whether there were complications after David's birth that we don't get to hear about. Are there any references to it later on?