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.

her lower lip was all trembly...

Does she need a Rosie cuddle? She can wear whatever she wants. It makes her cuter.

I concur that the choice of cheese in America is truly dire.

The older I get, the more I seem to enjoy the stuff.

Just be a bit wary if you ask the gerbils to do anything musical. They have a full orchestra (or was it a brass band?) 🤔

But little Gubbins is very...........enthusiastic, on her triangle.

I hope she’s never injured anyone in the process.

Only in the ears!

I love little Gubbins. Such innocence and enthusiasm and love for her triangle. We should all be More Gubbins in life.

That too! And @BeMoreGubbins would make a great user name 😁

Hello Kitty😁

The gerbils had a sourdough a couple of threads ago. Iirc it gained sentience and became a bit of a handful. Fortunately, we left most of it behind when we moved to a new thread.

We had the fuzz outside the house all morning! White morias, polis tape. I was concerned because we're due a bin collection tomorrow and a book delivery today. But they've just gone. There was an ambulance and a paramedic just before the rozzers showed up. Word on the street is an old bloke found injured on the pavement. He must've been out of it and perhaps it was thought he'd been assaulted. I'm assuming, as they've cleared off, whatever happened to him must've been an accident. The copper who was guarding the end of the road looked so cold, I offered him a brew which he declined. I should have offered sooner, they went a few minutes later.

The snow and ice we had disappeared overnight but it's got windier and feels colder. I think the old bloke may have tripped or just collapsed, there's nothing left for him to slip on.

@EmpressaurusKitty I experimented with your user name & the AI (third one was inspired by Kitty on the Victoria Wood show).

Alas, I have no sourdough starter & my bread for lunch was supermarket part-baked baguettes. But I also made homemade veg soup with about 10 different vegetables, so I should live forever now.

They have a string quartet which can be very soothing, if you ever need that sort of thing.

More snow again last night. It's at times like this we need willing gerbils to come and shovel for us. As it is, we have freezing rain forecast for later in the day so the options now are: a) go out and shovel while it's all relatively dry snow and hope the freezing rain doesn't just turn into an ice sheet on the driveway later or b) hope the freezing rain washes away the snow before it freezes and hope scattering salt will take care of anything in the way of an ice sheet. Right now we're adopting option c) ignore it all and hope it goes away.

I remember freezing rain unfondly from the period when I visited our Boston office regularly. This was around 1990; one of my colleagues had a remote which allowed her to start her car from inside the office so it was warm and defrosted when she left work.

Little Gubbins is currently outside. The pups arrived home from school just as Maud’s taxi arrived.

I wouldn't go near her bag though, by all accounts she's packed all the battenberg cake that was at Knotty and Pistey's house.

It's nice to have Maud home.

Oo-er.. We're solidly in the Wales bit of the amber snow warning, but our local forecast from the Met Office is just for sleet all night, presumably because we're in the valley, not up on the hill. Only time will tell...

Thank you!

This is Empress Kitty-Bella-Caramella, you can see how imperial she is. I’m afraid she won’t be up for helping the gerbils to shovel snow.

We might have a bit of an emergency 😳 we're hip deep in all sorts of cheeses but the Gloucester twins say we're low on water biscuits😱

Really? Our Carrs selection box had far too many water biscuits this year. We’ve still got some left after eating the more interesting ones.

Do be careful with the Gloucester double-act, someone needs to make a start on their wheel before they succumb to the temptation of rolling it down Peak Woo.

I am a fan of digestive biscuits with cheese. I hope this is not too controversial. I do also like a sourdough cracker or two.

I agree with a digestive biscuit. It's that sort of "sweet and sour" combo, and the substantial nature of the biscuit.

Digestives with cheddar, glued on with butter, good any day.

We're just forecast cold, unpleasant, breezy dampness.

I walked Brains and Batshit this afternoon, and as I crossed the churchyard I thought, this isn't too cold at all. Then I turned the corner by the hedge into the teeth of the wind.

So am I. It's why DH and I prefer the Tesco biscuits for cheese selection box to the Jacobs, which has no digestives and too many cream crackers.

Our forecast for tomorrow is just cold and grey. It was quite bright and sunny today but annoyingly I had DHL scheduled to pick up my work computer etc to return them to the office. The window was given as 10-3, and unlike the stream of communications which attends deliveries nowadays, I heard absolutely nothing re ETA. They eventually turned up at about 3:45. We virtuously immediately went out for a brisk 40 mins through the village, which had streetlights.
But I got my desk and filing cabinet cleared out during my enforced time inside, so I guess that was useful.

I can eat cheese with most types of not-too-sweet biscuits, including oatcakes, rich tea, abernethy or even gingernuts. If all else fails, bring out your last wedge of Christmas Cake, lop off the icing and have it with your cheese.

Then eat the icing 😬

First week of 2026 daily task complete and amongst the other things I've done 100 items have been evicted.

On my other resolution I'm just gearing up for shower No 7 (this one is so not going to last the year)