The Bluestocking, where the short days shorten and the oaks are brown

[MarieDeGournay]

Welcome all, regulars and newcomers, to the Bluestocking Women's Pub, a place of refuge and inspiration and camaraderie and silliness, where all alcoholic drinks are non-intoxicating, cakes contain no gluten, sugar or calories, but still taste yummy, and the attentive staff are small but very professional rodents wearing snazzy little outfits.

Other roles - such as acting as foot stools, looking decorative in the garden, or just being impossibly cute when you need something impossibly cute to go awwww at - are filled by a team of miniature pigs, quokkas, wombats, etc etc.

If real life is difficult, you can bring your troubles to the Bluestocking and a comfy chair will be found for you at a roaring fire, a miniature pig will settle down happily to support your tired feet, and a gerbil will serve you promptly with a comforting drink - very large G&Ts or massive mugs of hot chocolate with extra cream and marshmallows are popular choices [don't forget: no calories in the Bluestocking].

Never had canned prunes but we did get warm stewed rhubarb with cold lumpy custard.

Boiled to death rhubarb, i can see the players at this table take no prisoners.

I feel almost privileged to be one of the Turkey Twizzlers generation. I know that they were really bad but we wolfed them down. Then we discovered the chippy just round the corner from my secondary school where a saveloy and a cone of chips was cheaper than a school dinner. No contest!

Oh god turkey twizlers another crime

😂😂😂 Howling here...

My headteacher caught me trying to bin my uneaten rhubarb crumble and custard and literally forced me to eat it. I was about 7 or 8 years old. She got me crying so hard I was gasping for breathe. And trying to keep the awful stuff down. I think she regretted starting it but it was in front of all the other kids who were still eating so she couldn't back down. I did negotiate to only have to eat half, then scraped all of what was left to one side of the bowl when her back was turned. She must have realised what I'd done but probably was happy to have it over with.

It was the look of it that put me off mostly. The rhubarb looked like rotten sinewy flesh to small me. It was also undersweetened I discovered.

I quite like rhubarb nowadays. But she really put me off it for years.

Right changing the game <shuffles cards>

my nan used to send me and my siblings down the garden with a bowl of sugar. We would pull of rhubarb sticks and dip the tip in the sugar.

we also were served up apple sandwiches

Did you actually eat the raw rhubarb dipped in sugar @Bannedontherun ?

Did anyone else's Grandma give them an orange with a hole pierced in the top by Grandma's thumb, and stuffed with a couple of sugar lumps? You had to squeeze and squeeze the orange to suck out the juice through the dissolving sugar lumps.

Yep but your orange is a pretty good challenge

As am I. In those days there were no packed lunches, no leaving the premises at lunchtime and no choice - at secondary school we sat at a table for 8, someone went to the serving hatch for the food and one of us divided it out and put on our plates at the table. A teacher would check the table was clear before the pile of plates and empty serving dishes was taken back to the hatch and we were allowed to leave the dining hall.

We knew no different.

Yes, rhubarb fresh from the allotment/garden, dipped in sugar. I still remember how sharp it was. Also cocoa-mixed-with-sugar as a sweet (confectionery, not sweet = pudding.)

We were allowed to bring packed lunches, but I used to go home for lunch up until I was about 14. We had an hour and a half for lunch in those days and I only lived a five minute walk from school (both primary and secondary). My dad used to come home for lunch as well and my mum always made our main meal at lunchtime - we used to have something more light for tea after dad got home from work at the end of the afternoon. After lunch my dad would go and snooze for twenty minutes before going back to work

We lived in Forrin Climes for most of my childhood. Sometimes I went home with school friends and never knew what I'd be fed (local kids, also bods from all over the globe). Consequently I have a taste for some things that turn DH over. We visited, and I insisted he try a particular drink and his response was 'never again!' I gathered from other people that if you'd not drunk it as a child, you would never find it palatable.

Sometimes the mothers had coffee mornings and in the holidays the DC tagged along. International snack food. Oh my word. Wonderful.

English school dinners were a terrible shock.

Morning all, my guests are out for the day so I can catch up.

The MNHQ's 'support' button arrived just in time for Cake's force-fed-rhubarb-crumble story😨Poor 7-yr-old you! Adults sometimes underestimate how deeply their words and actions can affect little kids - just because they can't articulate their feelings doesn't mean they won't carry them with them all their lives...
Britinme has reminded me that it was normal for people to come home from work for lunch, even though it took up all of lunchtime! If you wanted a proper meal and not sandwiches, that was your only option as there were so few cafés in Days of Yore as there are now, in Ireland there weren't even many 'greasy spoons'.
My dad used to cycle home for his 'dinner', and you've also reminded me that the main meal was the midday meal, 'tea' was something light.

I remember seeing working men - I mean ones doing heavy work like digging etc - would buy a bottle of milk on their break and glug the whole thing down in one go
Pints of milk during the day and pints of Guinness in the evening fuelled the navvies who were 'building up and tearing England down'
I used to think that God
made the mixer, pick and hod
So that Paddy might know hell above the ground
I've had gangers big and tough
tell me 'tear it all out rough'
When you'rе buildin' up and tearin' England down

When I was at primary school, we got our school dinners delivered in insulated containers from the nearest secondary school, so they were warm rather than hot, when we got them. Some highlights included pilchards in tomato sauce - but not nice tomato sauce - some sort of flavourless red jelly, and instant mashed potato. I used to ask the dinner lady for a half scoop of the mash, and she would tell me "half souls never go to heaven"! It was all pretty vile, and I ate very little of it. Somewhere there were some pigs growing very fat on all my left overs.

I had to work really hard to persuade my mum to let me have packed lunches at senior school - I don't think I got them until the second or third year - and I carried on feeding those piggies until she caved. Often all I would have for my lunch was an apple - and they were Golden Delicious, so woolly and tasteless.

When my mum did finally let me have sandwiches, she used to make them with Stork Superblend margarine, instead of butter, which was pretty nasty. It did rankle somewhat that I knew I was eating cheap baking marge, whilst she was having Lurpak inches thick on her lunch.

Unrelated whinge:
I have received TEN emails about the status of something I ordered online.

One order, one item, TEN emails about it being received, processed, packed, dispatched, received by courier, handled by courier, processed by courier, ready for delivery by courier, out for delivery by courier... then there'll be a self-congratulatory one when they eventually get around to delivering the damn thing!

In fairness, it comes from the UK so there is a bit of handing over between couriers, but that only accounts for about 2 out of the 10🙄

I don't want to come over all Greta Thunberg, but there is an environmental cost to all these emails, and when I get an announcement from a company saying that they are no longer going to do paper communications 'for environmental reasons' I think yeah right, how many superfluous emails are you going to send me instead?

Yes - going home for lunch! I did that for a while at secondary school so I could walk the dog. I can't imagine anyone going home for lunch now.

Often all I would have for my lunch was an apple - and they were Golden Delicious, so woolly and tasteless.

Too right Woley, they are the most misnamed apple in existence, being neither golden nor delicious!

<flops down on a chair> I was going to order some brunch but the school meals chat has put me right off. I think it was luke warm pilchards in tomato sauce that tipped me over the edge 😥. So many peculiar culinary combinations that I also had at school. I probably ate most of them because I was hungry....

@MarieDeGournay you'll probably get more after the damned thing's been delivered. They'll be in your inbox; big, melting eyes, waggy tails, asking if they've been good bois.

I've unearthed loads of school dinner memories. We used to queue for the hatches where the food was dished up. Thick, white ceramic plates, none of this melamine crap. The manufacturer's stamp was on the back, loads of different ones. Which probably demonstrates how many times they'd had to restock. Some logos were more desirable than others. It was a way to pass the time while queuing. We had a designated place on a table of eight. Had to stand behind your chair until told to sit. We're sent to the hatches table by table. Had to say grace before eating so i think me must have waited until everyone had their food. Big jugs of water on each table. Once in a while we'd have cordial or even... milkshake! No choice of food. Had to have some of everything that was on offer. Vegetarians? Pah! Allergies? Fuck knows? Death probably. The kids that brought in packed lunches (called sandwiches) had their own little enclave. We had to scrape the plates into these enormous metal bowls at the serving hatches once our table was deemed finished. Rumour said this went to feed pigs somewhere. Occasionally a child would drop a plate, necessitating a rousing cheer from everyone else.

My mum wouldn't let me take in sandwiches. I suspect she cba making them every morning. Although in my last year she let me come home for dinner, usually something on toast. Once she forgot me and I spent that dinner hour waiting forcher on the front seat of a car my dad had up on jacks, which fortunately wasn't locked (dark blue Vauxhall Viva I think). It had a working clock, thankfully, so I got back to school on time. I'm vaguely astonished that the school was happy to let me leave the premises on my own. Different times.

Re constant emails from sellers - as well as all the pre-delivery emails there are the ones begging for reviews afterwards, or Amazon assuring you that your reviews are noticed. I do occasionally oblige but mostly I just delete them.

The primary schools I went to in England had really good food - big schools, 1,000 in the junior school, 800+ in the infant school, so they both had their own kitchens and the standard was high, good fresh, often local, ingredients well cooked, and properly served in hall so we ate at tables of 8, using cutlery.

Pretentious secondary school was less good, but still perfectly edible.

And as I said, the place I worked in when I was in college had a good, properly trained school cook who produced meals that were appreciated by all - the children always compared them favourably to the lunches in their daytime school.

The main junior school complaint was steamed puddings (with custard) more days than not, but that was from those of us with the luxury of plentiful food at home - the wartime lesson of malnourished children needing both quantity and quality had been well learned and was still the driving force 20+ years later.

Nice to hear something other than horror stories about school food, Deano

Anybody following the Women's Cricket World Cup? I am, because it's on the freebie Sky Sports Mix which happens to be on my telly. I suppose that when it gets to the later bits, the semis and the finals, they'll only show it on the subscription channels, that's a sneaky thing they do😒

But I'm enjoying what I've seen so far - I could watch the Indian team all day, they are so stylish. And so good - e.g. 122, 109 and 76 from the opening 3 to be 340 for 3 at the end of 50 overs! [against NZ]

Mind you, with a captain like Harmanpreet Kaur, you have to be good - she must be the most demanding and critical captain in the whole world, and boy but does she let her team know what she thinks about dropped catches, run outs etc.
Her glare is incinerating!😬

Another change of subject:
Some years ago We were discussing table manners and etiquette. Older lady with cut glass voice demonstrated an exercise learned at her Finishing School.
Peel and eat an orange with a knife and fork. A fruit knife is best (V sharp) and a small fork.
Do not let orange escape and roll around. Do not get table cloth or self wet with juice.

I still struggle to believe the polite way to eat asparagus (don't put that in the .gif drawer btw) is with your fingers!

The gerbils are decorating the Bluestocking for Halloween 🎃

In other news, Batshit is trying to decide if the rug in front of the open fire is a good place to sleep.

Batshit isn't very bright. Decisions are either instant (and often unwise) or deeply considered.
.
.
.
.
She's decided... no, she hasn't, got back up again...
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Debating going back into the kitchen.
Goes into hall.
Comes back in and jumps onto sofa.
Sits there looking mournful.
Gets down.
Gets back up.
Finally lies down.

Brains cut out the dithering. She hopped onto the sofa while Batshit was considering the fire, and is cleaning her paws prior to a nice sleep.