The Bluestocking, where the cheese is plentiful and the Champagne is on Boiledbeetle

[Magpiecomplex]

Welcome one and all. Quick précis - women's pub, rodent staff, apparently we're sane.

I think I might be. I have lost touch with the others. ☹️

The Sleep Gerbil has blessed me twice in a row. I had 8 hours 20 minutes on Wednesday and 7 hours 30 minutes last night. After months of 4-5 hours a night, this has been a blessing.

Only six more days of antibiotics and hopefully I can start to feel better by the end of next week. I completed my cowl in time for Monday this week, and I've picked up the baby blanket for my friend's grandson's arrival.

I read The Nonesuch by Georgette Heyer in November and wasn't very impressed. Maybe it was the wrong book though.

Georgette Heyer, for me, is like curling up by a warm fire with a box of chocolates and a cup of tea and letting the world go hang itself for a while. Undemanding, fairly predictable, better written than most romances, and an excellent stress reliever. Not great literature but it doesn’t need to be.

The Nonesuch is rather late and far from her best. Readable but formulaic.

I'm getting very bored of the after effects of this flu. Yesterday, for the first time in about a month I did my long-accustomed walk round the centre of my small town, visiting the bank and the charity shops, and was floored for the rest of the day.

otoh, I am getting better, and was able to make fish cakes with one of the bits of hot-smoked salmon that I'd put into the freezer because I had no appetite a few weeks ago, and some mashed potato from the supermarket, and some actual fresh parsley from the pot outside the door, and they were jolly good. And the sleep gerbils were kind and efficient, and could say my prayers without going into spasms of coughing. But still, five weeks is too long.

I knew that (about wooden boats) because I read the Aubreyade, yay.

Any Heyer fan who is tolerant of Space Opera might enjoy the Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold. Her 'A Civil Campaign' is dedicated to Jane, Charlotte, Georgette, and Dorothy and although one strand of the plot, a sex change operation undertaken to enable a character in inherit, has been tarnished by recent nonsense, I don't think any of them would object.

The covers of the books are notoriously and comically unrepresentative of the contents and style.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vorkosigan_Saga

I also bought a kindle copy of the first St Mary’s last night, after reading about it here. I like the idea of it, but am finding it rather “thin”. I’ll keep going in the hope they gradually offer more to chew on. (Do they?).

In other news I woke up to more snow. I am sick of it now.

I’d say they do.

Thanks, Kitty. As it was the princely sum of 99p I will persevere ☺️.

I've read a few of those. Master and Commander is a very good film.

I'm up to The Ionian Mission. dp and dd read them all (dp more than once) and discussed them extensively. dd would lie on the sofa reading and there would be the occasional "Oh Stephen, sigh" or "FFS Jack, you idiot" coming from her direction.
The film is very good, such a pity there weren't more. It would lend itself to a TV series.

It would lend itself to a TV series.
Wouldn't it just.
Instead we get the usual formulaic bullshit.

That got me wondering is there an Aubrey Maturin podcast. And there is,

https://lubbershole.podbean.com/

We moved away from London into this house in 2021.

When we moved, we stuck different coloured dots on our furniture to indicate which room it should go in. It was a great system and part of unpacking and settling in was removing the dots.

After a week or so we thought we had removed them all until we kept finding the odd one or two. We have a kitchen board with various things written on it - shopping, when the electrician is coming etc.

One of the things written in the board is the Dot Date, indicating the last time we found a dot. Until yesterday that date was the 25 August 2024.

And then I found a dot on my bedroom valet - the metal frame where I keep worn clothes I will wear again. I literally see it every day and this dot has been there for four and a half years!

I find her St Mary’s short stories better than the novels. I’ve tried them twice now, because I should love them - SF, female protagonist, time travel. But I just don’t.

Sad times.

I was going to say I've never read any Mills & Boon, but then I realised that was wrong - I've read The Prince and Betty (1912) by PG Wodehouse, which is extremely different in the British and American versions (I probably have both), and he recycled the basic plot in a couple of later stories. It was also turned into a silent movie which is now lost.

I remember it being quite fun, it's an early PGW before he's quite found his voice, but it gets a lot of laughs out of the Mills & Boon formula.

I revisit Wodehouse regularly, so let's see if that temptation interferes with what's on my TBR - Barbara Pym, if memory serves.

Ladies and gentlerodents, pray silence.

I would like to announce the presence of a noticeable gap between where the scales read tonight and where they read 10 days ago! Admittedly I've only lost a couple of pounds, but it's a start!

.

Hurray!

Well dine, Maggers!

Huzzah!

That's a great start, Magpie, you've got The Big Mo, onwards and er.. downwards😁

That's very impressive, Magpie.

And Cher, I'm assuming that your 'Well dine, Maggers!' was a compliment to the chef of the slenderising meals...

🍾

Well done. Keep going.

Anyone seen my slippers?

Slippers, Boily? No idea. What do they look like again?