Bluestocking - the second leg

[ErrolTheDragon]

The original premises are getting crowded, we need to expand.

Welcome all women, and well behaved animals.

I'm confident they'll be bettered.

Hope they sort it out for you.

I remember some old ladies I knew years ago who used to follow their doctor's advice to take Complan at bedtime. They all agreed that rather than buying a flavoured version, they should buy the plain one and add (conspiratorial giggle0 their own flavour. Opinions varied as to the relative merits of whiskey, brandy or rum.

@ifIwerenotanandroid our Rector is known as "Babyvic". He is mid 30s and thinks everyone over 50 smells of Yardley and wets themselves.

We should get together as some kind of ninja-church-botherers, ensuring the mature- but- fabulous people are not invisible.

I love it (not) when they have ridiculous prejudices. We once had a new vicar who'd come from a parish somewhere near Liverpool, I think, & he'd start every sermon by telling us all that we were privileged Southerners living in a naice area (true) who knew nothing about real life (false: if I'd ever told him about my life it would've, as they say, blown his goddam socks off). I used to wonder why he didn't just Foxtrot Oscar back oop North if he hated the South that much. But I've found the more they whinge about being here, the more they dig their fingers in as they're dragged away when their time is up.

Eventually I left when women finally won the right to be ordained & he got up into the pulpit & started with, "Well, I'm sure we all know what happened this week, & we needn't talk about THAT!".

Oops, missed that.
Of course I meant the blackberries.

Though I used to have aged relatives who, under Axis occupation during WWII, decided that they were so bloody hungry that now was the time to eat cat. They found that their scruples had worked against them. Other people had got there first and the city was fresh out of cat.

During the siege of Paris by the Prussians 1870-1871, a well-known restaurant offered in its menu cat flanked by rat.

Nooooooo. Not cat. Never cat. My lovely beautiful girlcat is curled up on my lap and I would genuinely starve before I ate her.

@ifIwerenotanandroid what a nobby vicar. One of my DDs is starting ordination training next year, and she'd soon put him straight!

We got a new priest last year (his previous parish was in the next county) and were a bit unsure of him at first, but then he told us about the community in Uganda he has worked with, and the women's craft collective, and how of course, that wasn't just about the crafts because the really important thing was women's education, because an educated woman can control her life.

So we decided he was okay.

He wouldn't dare patronise old ladies, not only would he be outnumbered, but most church activities would grind to a halt.

It's a daft vicar who doesn't understand that.

I refuse to do the coffee or bake cakes or provide food. No one would want that anyway.
I'm a singer in the band as my contribution. Very -un-suitable for an old lady--who thinks she is about 27.

Subject change here just reading a what brought you here post. A wonderful post linked to the likely origin of “I am Spartacus”.

I have not even read it all yet, so moving.

Can I have a tissue please and a Tunocks cocktail or whatever it is decided to be called please xx

Elsie’s optimism level is set to High.

Apropos of fuck all, I dropped in this evening for a quick glass of white. I explained that I was looking for something that would give me a last taste of Summer. The Entre Deux Mer was wonderful. Very little pallete but a beautiful nose of citrus and wild flowers. A perfect reminder of why Summer should be remembered and Autumn be looked forward to.

Yes, I know that I ended a sentence with a preposition.

So glad you popped in for that verre de vin, and regaled us with another piece of poetic oenology
As far as the preposition at the end - I can't see how that sentence could be rewritten with the preposition anywhere else except at the end.
Perhaps m'learned friends in Pedantry Corner would like to have a go?

[or should it be Pedants Corner? did I accidentally rename it, thereby doing away with all the 'pin the apostrophe on the pedants' fun? ]

Lordy, I've always focused on science not grammar, is it a bad thing to end a sentence with a preposition? Surely you can get away with it if you're aiming for style over substance.

It's fine, I'll boldly go and split infinitives too.

www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/prepositions-ending-a-sentence-with

And to clarify - Mumsnet has a Pedants' corner, the Bluestocking has its own Pedantry Corner.

...erm...Autumn be anticipated? Although, that's not quite the same je ne sais quoi.

Autumn is half over - Sunday is the equinox.

The equinoxes don't map that simply to the weather and what most plants are doing. The flowers in my garden tell me summer isn't quite out of reach yet, leaves are still predominantly green. There may be 'mellow fruitfulness' but not much by way of mists yet.

Really? Mists every morning this week, and spangled cobwebs on the bushes, followed by glorious sunshine and chilly nights - classic mid autumn weather. I'm Irish, and for me autumn is the harvest season and starts on August 1st.

August is definitely still summer in most of Britain, I think. 'Nobody on the road, nobody on the beach' definitely doesn't apply on the bank holiday!
The air starts to smell of autumn pretty much when the schools go back in early September. So we're only about three weeks in here.

Our bank holiday is at the start of August so it's in the middle of that season the folklorist Máire Macneill called The Festival of Lughnasa - horse races on beaches and elsewhere, pilgrimages on mountains and at holy wells, bilberry picking, outdoor assemblies, fairs, from the end of July to mid August.

Summer starts on May 1st and is all flowers, new milk, the danger of starving to death because you've been cursed by an old woman the old season's food has run out and the new season's food hasn't some in, haymaking, bonfires.