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.

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Goodness…leave this thread for a bit of kip and you never know what you’ll come back to!

DH has ‘smart chinos’. Since retiring he has two good, properly tailored suits (black and navy, otherwise identical) for weddings and funerals, and many pairs of Debenhams chimos. He bulk bought when he heard they were likely to go under. There are new ones for ‘best’, older ones for everyday and then others for ‘painting and gardening’. Except in practice, he dives into a filthy job like cleaning the garage in a ‘best’ pair.

mine is not to reason why…

Mr Magpie commutes in chinos, and changes into his suit at the office if he's got external meetings. His chinos are not smart, because they also get worn at the weekends for everyday life. I have jeans for casual and smart trousers for smart. He has chinos for everything.

😱Fuzzy!
Was it one of those WWII ones that get unearthed occasionally? Glad they've dealt with it😓

AsWith and Weary, I've enjoyed reading about your Soviet Union experiences very much. There is so much knowledge and experience in the Bluestocking

That's a bit of a...well...a bombshell.

I had a weird 'Who's on first' type conversation with my youngest. She told me her friend worked for someone who was mean. Which entailed a long discussion about which 'mean' she meant. Did she mean 'mean' average, 'mean' miserly, 'mean' cruel or some weird millennial meaning of 'mean' that meant something else like sick or fat...phat?

A bloke I worked with took a trip to Russia, I think this was after glasnost. He said the tap water in, I think, St Peterburg was dreadful. Someone told him it was due to all the bodies that had been buried there after WW2.

I've never heard this before or since so I hope someone was pulling his leg.

Yes it was a WW2 bomb. Reasonably regular occurrence here. It was detonated in the sea overnight. < Scared fishes>

Bomb the bass.

😂

Because our posts are time-stamped, I can see that it took you 3 minutes to read Fuzzy's post, think of your response, and type it.
Respect!

If you look up 'quick-witted' in the dictionary, there's a picture of a Cake😁

Drinks are on the Darlington nurses!!

They won!

https://x.com/i/status/2012121321677746363

Victory for the Darlington Nurses

BREAKING: The Darlington nurses have WON their landmark Employment Tribunal case.

A judge has ruled that the NHS policy allowing a biological male into the women’s changing rooms was unlawful harassment and discrimination.

Historic moment for women’s dignity in a landmark case supported by the Christian Legal Centre

See more👇

https://christianconcern.com/ccpressreleases/victory-for-darlington-nurses-as-judge-rules-policy-that-allows-men-into-womens-changing-rooms-is-unlawful-harassment-and-discrimination/

Squeeee! Good start for the weekend.

Woo hoo! 🎉

Yay!!!!!!!!!

Off tomrrwd the judgment.

One of my lecturers was a little girl during the siege of Leningrad. She told us that when the thaw came, she had to help dispose of the bodies to prevent plague.

I don’t think that that is what caused the problem with the drinking water, but…

Brilliant news!

Wonderful news!!

Great news for the nurses!

As for the USSR, I knew someone who went to Moscow during her language course in the 1980s. They arrived in autumn and were amazed by the quantities of cabbage, onions, carrots etc that the locals were buying in the markets, and assumed that they must have existed on cabbage soup.

Then during the winter they discovered that fresh fruit and vegetables could not be obtained for love nor money and realised that the market purchases had been going into versions of sauerkraut. They began to develop scurvy and sent urgent letters home for Vit C tablets.

Wow! You have a day away from t'internet to get some jobs done and it all happens!

Who knew tractors and country clothing could be so exciting?

Loved hearing all the stories of being in the old USSR in the 1970 and 1980s.

And Hurray for the Darlington Nurses!👏👏👏

Yes. I was in Leningrad in April. Oranges came into the supermarket next to the hotel, we knew because a queue formed.

The friend I mentioned above, who spent a year in Moscow and went on courses to the Soviet Union later, said Russians always carried a string bag with them in case something beyond the usual came in for them to buy. “If you see a queue you join it, and then ask what it’s for.”

I think the Soviet Union at the time didn’t want to (or didn’t have the currency to) buy food from outside its borders so their supplies of fresh food were restricted.

The knitting group friend I mentioned earlier, @WearyAuldWumman , confirms what you (we) have said. She was in the Soviet Union in between the times you and I were there.

I was lucky enough to catch the Darlington nurses’ press conference live and thought they were very dignified, pleased by but not overreacting to the judgement. The speaker was clear that they blamed the Trust for the policy and not Rose who followed that policy by using the female changing room.

I’ve got a terfy night out tonight, so we’ll be drinking a toast to those brave women 😀.

Any champagne left, @Boiledbeetle?

The Soviet students in Leningrad used to get food parcels sent by their parents who lived in the countryside.

I recall that we'd been warned to take vitamin tablets when we were in Moscow. Our Soviet pals in the hostel told us that during the Olympic Games, you could buy anything you wanted in Moscow. By the time we got there, October, 1980 you could get: sausage; bread; butter; sour cream; curds; chocolate; ice cream. Street vendors used to sell little sausage pastries. Once or twice, a wee hatch in a building would open and you could buy caviar on a bit toast...but I can't recall whether the caviar was Moscow or Leningrad.

Basically, the distribution infrastructure was rubbish. You could get eggs all the time in Leningrad, but not so often in Moscow. It was much easier to get good cheese in Leningrad too. Moscow had a chocolate factory, hence it was easy to buy that.

We'd treat ourselves to a meal in a hotel from time to time, but even then it wasn't "The menu, please..." Rather it was "Do you have meat?"

On my birthday in Leningrad I went to a restaurant. I was able to get a fried egg.

There was a long queue and a manager came out asking for someone who only needed a place for one...That was me.

To my consternation and embarrassment, I was shoehorned into a table with a family of Azeris from Baku. However, they were very welcoming.

I recall the dad insisted on pouring me a glass of blackcurrant juice from the jug they had ordered.

We discovered that the Pribaltiskaya Hotel on the outskirts of Leningrad had a Swedish Table where you could eat all you wanted for 2 roubles.

After that, we went there for a decent feed once a week...right until the tourist season started in June when my pal from Leeds Uni and I were stopped by an older doorman. We pretended only to be able to speak English, but he declared "You can't fool me!"

Apparently he thought that our western jeans etc meant that we were Russian prostitutes.

I once queued for hours for green bananas.

I tried to explain to the Soviet students that we could buy bananas any day of the week in Scotland. "Don't lie! Scotland's too cold to grow bananas!"

The green bananas never did ripen. I left them for my roommate.

ETA An earnest Russian wifie in a queue once told me that the reason for the shortages were that they were 'giving so much support to developing countries'. Aye. Right.

Thanks all for the fascinating chat about Russia, and for the wonderful news about the Darlington nurses.