The Bluestocking Women’s Pub - The Return of Salad and the Lion

[MyrtleLion]

It’s been a while since I last saw everyone!

Welcome to everyone, regulars, lurkers, newly ventured in.

A place for women to discuss whatever takes their fancy, where the bar staff are attentive gerbils, Rosy the Red Panda is available for cuddles and all sweet things have no calories and all alcohol leaves the drinker slightly merry and hangover-free.

Previous thread is here:
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5326705-the-bluestocking-womens-pub-where-brains-can-exist-in-a-single-state

That is lovely, @MyrtleLion! So clever.

Impressive, Myrtle!

Marie & Edith - I once stewarded an exhibition with an older lady who seemed OK until she started talking just like that. I was stuck there listening to her for HOURS. All morning, in fact. If I tried to make an excuse & walk away, she just followed me around talking about herself.

She was stewarding there all day, but thankfully I was only in for the morning & then my fellow art student came in to do the afternoon shift. She arrived & laughed at my frazzled condition which I couldn't explain without being rude. Having gathered my things, I left the building through the exhibition hall & it was my turn to laugh as the older lady had latched onto my friend & was yacking at her non-stop, while my friend's face as she looked at me said, "NOW I understand!". And she had 4 hours of it still to go.😂

Oh! 😳 how did that happen!

It's easy to take a wrong turn around here.

But you may as well stay and have a drink and a Tunnock's Tea Cake whilst you get your bearings as to where you are in relation to the thread you thought you were on.

Ah, here comes Geranium with your wine and tea cake

Sorry been absent. Been a stressful coupla weeks in the Lurker Household - AS Levels, final Access diploma dissertations and the sudden announcement of the date for my PhD Annual review (technically only 3m in, so major fucking panic). Exams done, only one assignment to go, DH finally celebrating his birthday and I am still running around like a headless chicken.

But it’s Friday, so I am hoping someone at the bar can pour me a pint (marmalade gin and slimline tonic) and grab me a family pack of Quavers. I’ll just be in the corner, earwigging and catching up on the past 20 pages of posts…

@CautiousLurker01i am not sure how or why the gerbil put a head on your gin and tonic

Anyway, drink, quavers and a glass of rum (the rum will make sense as you catch up)

Yum - I am also a major rum drinker (have a couple of bottles of Venezuelan and Guyanan rums in the cupboard which I will hit very soon.)…still catching up.

Thanks for the quavers. Amazon prime have run out for weeks now and normal amazon only has a box of 30 for £33. I’m not quite at the stage for selling my body for them just yet although I do attribute my success at losing 6.5 stone to the once or twice daily pack (shared with the spaniels)… will have to take myself into a real life supermarket tomorrow and buy some.

Oh that's Guinness the Gerbil! she keeps illustrating nominative determinism with the g&ts😀

Brilliant book nook, Myrtle, so impressive.

Looking forward to seeing how a headless chicken necks a pint of gin and tonic, Cautious
Seriously - it sounds like life has been very demanding - and very academic! - so sit down and relax

Surely for a headless chicken, the only way to consume a pint of G&T is to neck it, Marie?

DH has just said he is soooooo looking fwd to the summer knowing he’s booting one off to Uni, the other one onto the morning bus. I just have one more year and then i am trying to work out what a fifty something woman with no kids at home (finally), no recent work experience (just voluntary work) and an utterly useless set of degrees is supposed to do with herself? DH works stupid hours, is hoping for a final promotion and a 5 year posting, so I’ll be home alone with dogs feeling a bit of a spare part.

I could HOPE that one of my novels is very marketable, makes the best sellers list, gets optioned by Netflix for a series and I can swan around saying ‘oh, I’m a writer dahling’ and insisting my agent arranges for marmalade gin and tonics (in the absence of Veuve Cliquot) at every signing and PR event… but I suspect I will be twiddling my thumbs building Book Nooks (got the dinosaur library kit in readiness last week) and getting addicted to puppy porn [the Spaniel Adoption pages on Facebook].

Well, I've had a long old week, and I need the long weekend just to wind down a bit.

AI seems to think there's such a thing as Tunnocks whisky. I'm not sure if I think this is a terrible idea or the best idea ever.

It sounds like chocolate baileys - SHOULD be lovely, but not quite… me, I’d double the whiskeys and coffee the tunnocks!

oooooh you're clever

Cautious, I hope you become a very famous author and have a big boat you swan around on, and a big list of Worthy Women's Causes to give big wads of dosh to, and ample supplies of Veuve Cliquot, stored in a specially-constructed gimbal-mounted room in the hold so it won't be agitated by the movement of the sea...

Bloody spell check - that should have said SCOFF the tunnocks 🤦🏽‍♀️

Gosh yes, and take up smoking cigars with my rum!

I do love when a plan comes together.

Hi all, at my daughters assisting with baby banned one and three. Her partner away working on call until Monday. Just clocked off up and from pacing and down with banned three who is night fractious, but deliciously cuddly at the same time.

Looking forward (not) to an early rise at six am.

hopefully daughter has a bit of a break as i remember how hard it was with two tinies.

A post for the elderly parent board is on my mind as my mum keeps phoning me crying about a fictitious ailment, for attention. I am not heartless, it is just that i go around in circles with her, just like an extra toddler.

Anyway for the Irish women or those of irish heritage i wonder if a seperate thread would be appropriate about what my nan went through and how many women seemingly did.

Banned right now...

AI did that to some booze I asked it for, too. It seems SOMEONE has taught it bad habits looks around suspiciously.

YES! Like that. And if she did shut up, we didn't dare speak in case it set her off again.

We did have two proto-conversations but just as the thing really took off and got interesting (the ins and outs of her relationship with Mike - obviously not called Mike IRL; the ins and outs of my father) she'd decide it was all a bit much and do a handbrake turn into platitudes. Not just a few platitudes, an extended not-pausing-to-draw-breath riff of every even tangentially relevant platitude you could think of.

I'd better do a handbrake turn myself before I end up wanging on like SIL...

Lovely book nook, Myrtle. I'm contemplating getting some as Christmas presents. I can think of several people who might enjoy them.

Good luck with the PhD review, Cautious. Nerve-racking time.

We're going out to drinks this weekend. I have a very old friend, in both senses, and she has reached the stage where every year that she is running her own affairs, driving, walking to the shops, and taking people less fortunate than she is to church is worth celebrating. So we're going along to help.

Coffee Tunnock’s has made me think of coffee Walnut Whips - am I imagining it, or were these once a real thing?

Yes, they were a real thing, to be avoided IMO. I like coffee but I don’t like coffee flavoured things.

You aren't imagining it.

They were lush!

Lifted from wiki

The original Walnut Whip contained a half-walnut, or more usually walnuts that had been broken during handling and transportation and were therefore not suitable to be placed on the top. It was later marketed with an extra walnut on top, and subsequently the walnut inside was removed to leave one walnut outside.

Over one million walnuts, most of them imported from China and India, are used every week in the manufacture of Walnut Whips at Halifax, West Yorkshire.[citation needed] Nestlé claim that almost one Walnut Whip is eaten every two seconds in the UK.[3]

Originally manufactured by Duncan's of Edinburgh in their Beaverhall Road factory, there have been different flavours of Walnut Whip over the years, including coffee and maple flavours, but currently only vanilla is widely available.

When the Duncan's brand name was dispensed with by Rowntree's and manufacturing moved from Beaverhall Road in the late 1970s, the manufacturing process changed from being hand made to being hollow moulded by machine. An attempt was made to recreate the original surface appearance but with limited success, and it now has no function other than decoration.[4]

In 2017, Nestlé announced a new version with no walnuts, and a change of name to the Whip. As of 2020 Mint and Caramel versions are also available. Nestlé is expanding the range of its whirl-shaped cone, Walnut Whip and launching new variants of Nestlé Whip: "Delicate Vanilla", "Delicious Caramel" and "Delightful Mint" to offer more choice with and without the walnut. The original Walnut Whip is still available in Spar, Nisa and other independent stores.[2][5]

The chocolate cone itself and the vanilla fondant filling have altered in recent years. The original whips were hand made by extruding chocolate from a piping bag onto a rubber mould, each containing 12 'formers'. This generated the original deeply ridged surface, and the fondant at that time was more dense.[3] The texture of the outside surface is a skeuomorph.

Am wondering whether I will pop up on an MI5 watch list. Been searching things like: does a body decompose or mummify if encased in concrete? Would tarpaulins as used in the 1980s have been made of primarily of plastic? (No, waterproofed canvas); would a canvas based tarpaulin if buried in concrete decompose; would a decomposing body buried in concrete cause it to weaken; do nails really continue to grow after death (answer that’s a myth, but the composition of the body means that they appear to have grown); what clothes would a 40year old bloke have worn in the mid 1980s…

My mum adored walnut whips… they fuelled her pregnancy to my baby sister!

I wonder who makes the M&S version of Walnut Whips? I think I remember some from somewhere with pink filling, but that might have been just wishful thinking.