The Bluestocking, where Maud reigns supreme...

[ifIwerenotanandroid]

... & Magpie regularly drains the hot chocolate bowser.

If you understand that, or you're just cool with it, come on in & bagsie a chair by the fire.

Previous thread: https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5410054-the-bluestocking-the-one-where-the-nights-start-to-draw-in?page=1

My primary school was still using pounds shillings and pence textbooks and I'm a few years younger than you. We were told to just ignore the shillings and pretend the pounds and pence were decimal! I assume the teachers had gone through and recalculated the answers on that basis.

It's gone! (The shop, not just the Mars bar.)

My other one refuses to be pretty for the camera. He will help with crafts though.

Me: Where did I put the Pritt stick lid?

Cat: I've no idea!

Reminds me, Boiley…I went to convent schools. In the second year of the big school (so aged 12-13) we started biology classes. This was an all girls’ school. The second chapter of the text book was on the menstrual cycle. The last page of chapter one was pasted to the first page of chapter three and all the pages of chapter two were cut out (in all the textbooks). We were given blackboard lessons on the sex life of a buttercup instead. We had to label buttercups. We weren’t to know about our bleeding. How we laughed.

Did it force you to learn your 12 times tables?

The old imperial units must surely have been devised by a maths - no, arithmetic - teacher who didn’t want to let children have an easy time with base 10 units like the rational French, but put in 8 (furlongs in a mile) 12 (inches, pennies), 14 (stone…wtf 14?) , 16 (pounds and ounces) and 20 (fluid ounces, shillings). 18 is missing….is there some obscure unit that uses 18ths?

Re picture sizing - I use ChatGPT5 for mine and ask it to resize below 6mb as per Mumsnet instructions.

Oh, that’s a shame @ifIwerenotanandroid

Nevermind. Ooh though… can you check on the google street map historical dates? Goes back about ten years, I think…

😱

I was wandering round the supermarket today, ignoring the fact that €1 does not equal £1, and tut-tutting at ten shilling eggs, however fresh and free range and organic they might be. Your sum book would be just right for me.

I was in primary school from 1955 to 1961 so all my maths tuition then was in Imperial. I'm OK at arithmetic but quite lousy at mathematics. Other than for currency, since the Americans use the sensible dollar/cent variety, I've had to go back to Imperial for the last 23 years as our weather forecasts are in Farenheit and the unit measurements are in inches and fractions of them, and recipes come in volume measurements (cups) anyway, though I notice nowadays more of them are coming with alternatives in ounces or grams.

I could never work out why we learnt up to 12 times table. Is that why?

That’s dreadful - I wonder if any of them knew what prompted the foundation of the Samaritans?

12s are good though, divisible by 2, 3, 4, 6, and it's easy to count to 156 on your fingers once you have an opposable thumb on each hand.

And then they wondered why teenage girls managed to find themselves pregnant with no clue as to how that could have happened!

Wikipedia tells me that a cubit is 18 inches.

Quite, Boiley.

When we were in O’level year, a woman from Family Planning came to do a talk because that was the (local?) law. She visited all the schools in the region to talk about contraception.

The head nun told her she could only talk about the rhythm method. The woman was annoyed. The nun stood at the back throughout. The woman had brought condoms to show us how to put them on correctly, and explained this is what she’d usually be doing at this point of her presentation and asking us to have a go. She had other bits of kit that she wasn’t allowed to show us.

On the front row was a girl who was eight months pregnant. Oh the benefits of the rhythm method. Obviously we all blamed those bloody buttercups.

I've gone back to 2009 & it's not there. It looks like a couple of houses have been converted from something else, so maybe it's a house now.

Well I hope they changed the drapes!

Thanks so much for trying 🙂

DH ( younger than me) asks me questions about decimalisation.
"How many pennies in a pound/ shilling?"
"What's a florin/ guinea?"
"How much is ten bob?"

Ah, the folly of youth.

But it does get confusing. Because the shillings were used as 5 pence coins. So they were five pennies, but not old pennies. Strange times.

At junior school we had the "Ladybird Book of the Body". The end pages had very basic drawings of a naked boy and girl. The head teacher drew swimming costumes on them in thick black felt pen and then glued the pages together!

Hilarious, Fuzzy! Sounds like it was quite the thing back in the day.

We were such innocents.

In my convent school - almost all girls' schools in Ireland are convent schools - we were given 'The Booklet which was about the basics like menstruation, pregnancy, birth - it was terrifying, and didn't help my gender dysphoria one little bit😬

I doubt if it was felt necessary to talk about contraception back then - we were a good few years away from getting married, and there wasn't the current assumption that all young people will be sexually active.
There were pre-marriage courses run by the church for engaged couples, that's when Party Line on contraception would have been given.

No problem. I was intrigued & hoped to find it with the velvet & Mars bar still there. I found living there soooooo dull, & that shop kind of summed it up for me.

If you like weird shops, here are two more:

I visited an antiques shop in Newcastle which was in a house that was so old & falling apart that I wandered around it & came upon a room where I could see the outside world - through a huge crack running right down the wall! That seems to have been redeveloped since the 1970s, shame really.

Once, in a bit of north London I didn't know, I went into a traditional sweet shop & found myself alone in there with a big, bullet-headed guy behind the counter who looked & acted nothing like a sweetshop proprietor. It felt like Something Had Happened, probably in the room behind the shop to which the door was open. Like he was in the middle of something & I'd walked in on it. I thought the only safe thing to do was to act normal & pretend I hadn't noticed anything, so I asked for a quarter of some sweets. He seemed unsure but did it for me & I paid & left. I think we were both relieved to get through it.