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 was at a committee meeting the other night, and at least one attendee was in a Tattersall shirt and a fleece gilet. He's not a townie.

I had a good day at work today. I spoke in three meetings without a man interrupting me. I think that's a new record (I know women can interrupt too, but there weren't any other women in the meetings so I can only judge the men).

John Deere and New Holland are still the most popular two where I am. Many years ago I had a relative who worked selling second hand Massey Ferguson tractors. It was his favourite job.

I have an urge to move to the south east!

Loving the gerbil with the green hair, btw.

In other news, I've finished my new jumper and it's being blocked.

Be warned, most shops there don't sell Tunnocks products.

Congratulations, is the picture is being blocked? Did you embroider naughty pictures on it that need to be censored?
I'm now picturing a range of knitwear featuring positions from the karma sutra.

<does a u turn to escape from Tunnock'sless fate>

On the subject of clothing...

I've seen women on Mumsnet referring to chinos as 'smart'. I'm nearly 66 and from a working class background. [ETA I'm a coalminer's daughter, but I can't sing country music.] I can possibly see chinos being deemed 'smart casual', but surely they don't fit in within a formal setting? Am I out of touch?

Is it one of those working class things where we'd all dress up in our best suits to go travelling many years ago and those from middle class backgrounds would turn up in their holey jeans? (I'm suffering flashbacks to the time I was on a language course in the Soviet Union...1980. The few working class girls wore their best suits to go on the plane. To explain - because of the Olympics, several courses were combined in one place, so there were around 70 British students on the plane.)

I loved Goth's hair too!
I momentarily wondered how and why your jumper had been blocked... oh right, 'blocked' as in something knitters do to knitting, I remember that from the squares.
Is it flattening it out? a bit like putting it on tenterhooks?

Books, cheese, tractors... I don't have much to add to any of these conversations I'm afraid🙁

I got a new book today, I've wanted it for ages but it's expensive new so I was delighted to find it 2nd hand online - withdrawn from King Alfred's College Winchester Library

It's not exactly a light read, though:
It's Shakespeare, Spenser and the Crisis in Ireland by Christopher HIghley, about the evolution of national IDs in the 16th c. in Our Two Great Nations.
I know all about Spenser - he was one of the early settlers planted in Munster, and very anti-Irish - but it'll be interesting to see the Shakespeare link.

It's taken me so long to write this post that I see Random has already made the 'why was your knitting blocked' joke. 😒Great minds, eh?😄

I completely ID with always looking 'well turned out', Weary, the shame of wearing something that looked shabby is firmly embedded in my DNA!

Nothing screams privilege like deliberately dressing shabbily, because everybody knows form all the other signals you are giving out that you have a wardrobe of good clothes at home

Soviet Union in the 80s? that sounds like an amazing experience!

There’s a book for every need…
(if the image is approved)

Maybe that should be my next project...

My baby blanket has either 22 or 46 rows (of 150 stitches) to go. It will depend on whether six repeats are wide enough or I should knit a seventh. I have seen a mistake in the pattern at an earlier stage but I'm not going back. Should be completed by Monday.

Marie wrote:
Soviet Union in the 80s? that sounds like an amazing experience!

In 1973 I spent a month there. It was described as an educational exchange visit to study their education system, but we never saw the people we were ‘partnered’ with. We came from teacher training colleges all over the country: the Russians probably all went to London.

I learnt Russian at school: there was a school trip to Moscow in August 1968. We saw lots of men in soldier uniform in the streets, just being there, not on duty. We thought it must be normal and perhaps it was, but the Soviet Union (and others) invaded Czechoslovakia later that month.

It was...interesting. Usually the language courses were held in Kiev, Minsk, Leningrad, Moscow...but student accommodation was being used to house tourists over for the Olympics.

We were in Krasnodar, at Kuban' State University. Every single one of us caught giardiasis from the water... We'd been warned and had been boiling the water and using chlorine tablets. Turns out chlorine tablets don't kill that particular bug.
Also, we'd all gone swimming in the river.

On the plus side I was 5ft 9 and 10 stone 6lbs when I arrived, but 9 stone 6 lbs when I left... On the downside: Soviet food, toilet paper deficit and Soviet toilets.

That sounds familiar. They used to refer to those trips as exchanges, but you were kept apart from most Soviets as much as possible.

I recall that many of the Soviet exchange students used to finish up in Ealing for some reason?

Later, I was at the Moris Torez Institute in Moscow on a Heriot-Watt exchange (though I wasn't one of the H-W students - they had a spare place). There were students from MT in H-W while we were in Moscow.

I did Russian at high school, but only to "O" Grade level: one teacher got a promotion to another school and the other got a job with the Czech division of the BBC World Service. I later studied it at uni, hence the exchanges.

During the Moscow trip, we were taken to Leningrad for about a week - on the sleeper, so we wouldn't be able to see where we were going, apparently.

We were housed in a Leningrad Teacher Training College Hall of Residence. When we got there, I was delegated to check out the loos.

"Right, girls...Do you want the good news or the bad news first?"

"Good news."

"They have proper toilets and they're beautifully clean."

"What's the bad news?"

"Nae doors."

Oh, wow! I caught giardiasis, too, in Leningrad. Nobody else on the visit did. I put it down to the hygiene in the training college where we had our lectures, for example food was served on plates with black cracks running across them. We’d been using tablets in the water, but drinking hot drinks away from the hotel without them in.

Fancy that, it was in the water.

It wasn’t diagnosed properly until I got back to England, followed by a lifetime of ‘gut problems’. I had biopsies taken during a colonoscopy relatively recently and they could see the effect of the infection 50 years later.

I hope you made a complete recovery before you had to travel home and have had no symptoms since.

It's in the water supply in Leningrad - that's what we were told by our lecturers in Glasgow. (By a quirk of fate, I also had a 3 month placement at Leningrad Uni when I was in Junior Honours, courtesy of the British Council.) The tablets don't kill it all, apparently.

I knew by then, of course, so avoided the worst of it but I think I did get a minor dose of it.

But yes - the food in the stolovaya was dire. The first day we were there, there was a ruddy pigeon flying around inside.

We had what was supposed to be chicken. When we cut into it, it was green. One of the boys became extremely distressed.

Turned out he'd lied to his lecturers at Cambridge about his health - he was a diabetic. I think about 2 months in, he was hit by giardiasis and finished up in hospital. Fortunately, he recovered.

When I got back from Krasnodar, I got a letter saying that one of the girls had been tested at the Institute of Medicine in London. (She'd been really unwell.) We all got the letter and were told to see our GPs for flagyl.

My roommate never did recover properly. TMI - I've had varying degrees of tummy trouble, IBS for years...but she was so bad that she finished giving up teaching. I think that I was around 40 when I got my colonoscopy.

waves madly at fellow survivor of Russian loos, bugs and food

I'm sorry that you also got the dreaded bug.

The one advantage of the time I was in Moscow was that we could buy bog roll from the British Embassy shop...We were allowed to spend £15 a month in the embassy shop.

I can tell you that I had a lot of supplies with me when I went to Leningrad for the three months...

I do recall that Soviet ice cream tasted really good.

We students found it really amusing that people imagined that a visit to the Soviet Union might turn you into a Communist/Soviet sympathiser. As one of the girls said, "If anything else, it would make you fight like mad to stop this kind of life being imposed upon your own country."

And that's without touching upon Soviet male chauvinism. Equality, my foot.

@WearyAuldWumman wrote
We were housed in a Leningrad Teacher Training College Hall of Residence. When we got there, I was delegated to check out the loos.
"Right, girls...Do you want the good news or the bad news first?"
"Good news."
"They have proper toilets and they're beautifully clean."
"What's the bad news?"
"Nae doors."

Yes, yes! We stayed in a hotel away from the centre and were given the equivalent of £60 each to buy our own food, tram/bus fares etc, so we were more independent. The whole trip had only cost me £60, which is why I remember it.

We went to a Training College Hall of Residence one evening for a social. We were entertained downstairs, but went upstairs, where the bedrooms were, to use the loo. There were partitions between each loo, but no doors on them so if you turned round while washing your hands you could see anyone else using the loos. We went in one at a time.

(Can you remember the evidence in the loos of the training college itself of what they used for internal sanitary protection? Perhaps there was a better system a decade later.)

Apart from directed time in lectures, visits to schools and other places (Winter Palace, Nizhny (don’t know how you spell it) Novgorod and a village which was a museum of churches which had been brought there) we had time to ourselves not as a group. I imagine we were watched, but we got on the tram and pottered about on our own. I stayed in the hotel when I got ill, which was probably suspicious as I wasn’t where I was supposed to be. I shopped for food in the supermarket next door, so was with local people to that extent.

I can’t remember if we did the Moscow <-> Leningrad train journeys at night, probably we did, but there were at least a couple of days well out of the city during the day where we saw the countryside.

Perhaps they were wiser or more careful when you went there a decade later. Most of us didn’t speak any Russian and I only had 2 years of an O level course so had less scope to communicate with Russians than you did.

We went to a Training College Hall of Residence one evening for a social. We were entertained downstairs, but went upstairs, where the bedrooms were, to use the loo. There were partitions between each loo, but no doors on them so if you turned round while washing your hands you could see anyone else using the loos. We went in one at a time.

Yes, that's it!

Oh, God...The plastic wastepaper baskets full of used newspaper and cottonwool...

The Moris Torez in Moscow was the worst for that. The mens' loos were upstairs but some of the men from other countries couldn't be bothered making the trip upstairs so barged into the women's. Used to see the heads bobbing above the partitions as they squatted on top of the toilet. At least those loos had toilet doors.

The girls used to leave any spare sanitary protection behind with their Soviet roommates. Even in Moscow, you could only get cotton wool from the chemists.

We had time to ourselves, but we weren't supposed to leave the city limits according to our visas. I do recall our being able to go as far as a former country estate at the outskirts of Leningrad...Pavlovsk, I think? (My brain has atrophied.)

Our lectures were held in the Philosophy Faculty. Below us were the labs where Pavlov had conducted his experiments. We'd see men in white coats walking several dogs at one time. The poor things had electrodes embedded in their heads and walked with splayed legs.

So far as being watched was concerned, it was most obvious in Krasnodar. In Moscow and Leningrad there were Soviet students who were known to be KGB informers and our mail was definitely opened.

My Russian was pretty good by the time I was in Leningrad, but I've lost so much of it now and meanings have changed. Remember 'simpatichnaya' used to mean that a girl had a nice personality? Now - from what I gleaned from Russian speaking pupils at work (before I retired) it seems to mean nice looking.

I had plans to be an interpreter, but finished up teaching English in Scottish high schools, though my last big promotion meant that I was the middle manager for English plus Foreign Languages. (Scottish schools combined departments to save money.)

We should have an "Order of the Survivors of Soviet Exchanges" @AsWithGlad !

Goodness, @WearyAuldWumman , every paragraph of your post is a revelation, shared experiences and sadnesses about other people’s health. I got away lightly in comparison.

Someone told me afterwards that I probably wouldn’t be allowed into the USA after my two visits. They must have thought I’d been secretly undertaking some Communist training there. Starting when I was barely 15?

One member of my knitting group spent a year or so working in Moscow as a nanny for a family connected with the British Embassy. I imagine that was in the ‘80s, too. If she’s at the next online meeting, which is in the morning, I must talk to her about what you have said. So I’d better get to bed or I won’t wake up in time for it.

Fascinating, though, thank you ❤️

Yes, I'm heading off too. So lovely chatting with you. :) @AsWithGlad

Oh good, the bomb near my house has been removed.

Always welcome news.

Is your evil genius nemesis lurking somewhere nearby, cursing and plotting even bigger revenge?

Only if he has a cat on his lap.