The Bluestocking Women’s Pub: Where Clever Women Sit and Think, While Gerbils Run the Bar.

[MyrtleLion]

Come in. Yes, you’re in the right place. No, you don’t need to explain yourself.

Coats will be drycleaned before you depart. Bags won't be stolen because Gubbins will play her triangle. And you really don't want to hear it.

The gerbils run the bar.
They are small, brisk, and unionised.
One is polishing a glass with unnecessary seriousness.
Another is keeping the tab and will remember what you ordered last time.
There is a triangle involved. No one knows why. It keeps Gubbins happy.

Sit. Think. Drink. Join in.

The gerbils have it from here.

Previous thread...
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5481554-the-bluestocking-womens-pub-definitely-full-of-ludicrous-halfwits-who-refuse-to-get-a-grip-with-unionised-gerbils

Random!😁

I sometimes feel I could write a guide about all the strange things you're likely to find if you get into genealogy. In my case...

• Weird sex ratios in certain family lines meaning many more girls than boys
• Massive emigration (common Irish problem)
• Some ancestors who did not speak English (and, knowing what rural Donegal used to be like, probably couldn't read or write Irish)
• One GGF who was quite the rascal - he lived to nearly 100, had at least three wives none of whom knew about the others, and if Ancestry DNA is to be believed, had a side hustle of impregnating his friends' wives
• Some ancestors who were a bit shady and used aliases for their shady activities
• Transportation to Australia (this used to be a common punishment for stealing cows)
• Mormon polygamy (this includes eg three sisters who all married the same man, which sounds like something out of EastEnders)
• Unmarried mothers who told outrageous lies on birth certs eg inventing fathers with whole biographies who never existed
• Women telling outrageous lies on marriage certs eg claiming to be 7 years younger so they won't be older than their husbands
• Emigrants marrying into indigenous communities in North American and Australia (there's a ton of the Aboriginal community in Western Australia that has Monaghan ancestry; that's my folks)
• Stealth Catholics pretending to be Protestants, many of whom eventually just became Protestants
• Irish Protestants who emigrated to the US and married into non-Irish Catholic communities (Sicilian in New Jersey, Slovak in Pennsylvania, Polish in Illinois...)

Crazy stuff. All human life is here.

I don’t think @RandomHypatiahas graced this iteration of the BS yet

And according to a genealogist pal, more people than you'd expect who never got birth certificates, into the 20th century.

Like - not many, but not none either.

I'm currently away on holiday, so I'll need to listen to that when I get back to UK.

Oh for the laugh emoji!

That's an amazing list, Sionnach!
The Monaghan Aussie Aborigines is a rare one all right😄

@SionnachRuadh I can sympathise. I have done far too much exploring of my parents' families. Establishing the place and year of one grandmother's birth was a major triumph - she made her way through four five countries over the course of her life.

Your GGF sounds like a .... character.

It's so amazing to learn how resilient and brave our elders were.

Like a grand-uncle of mine who went to the US when he was 17. On his own. Wearing the first pair of long trousers and proper shoes he had ever had. Never saw Ireland again - his grandchildren have been back though.

Or the emigrants who arrived in New York never having been to a big town before in their lives, let alone a city.
They survived, against all the odds.

I was carrying on the work my dad has done on our family treeans discovered one ancestor who has two sets of marriage records both fir the same date but two different women's names. He also either got married in Barbados or North England (I can't remember the place names). I did mean to look more into it but my Ancestry membership expired and I couldn't remember his details.

There were also a couple of ancestors with the first name Tegon/Jegon/Geggon which all seem to be versions of John. I quite like the name Jegon.

There's a man in my family tree who left bequests to multiple women, all using his surname but not married to him. I do wonder if they knew about each other!

• Weird sex ratios in certain family lines meaning many more girls than boys

@SionnachRuadh I can see how that might happen down a paternal line in that sex is determined by the father's sperm and I think it's possible for the tendency to have predominantly male-making or female-making sperm is hereditary. Not so obvious down the maternal line though (although I believe the tendency to release more than one egg at a time and thus create fraternal twins is hereditary).

Well there's quite a story in that, isn't there?😦
They are interesting first names - I can see how they are related to John, which was Jehan in old French. H>G isn't a big step..

I think the two women had the same surname, so sisters? Or maybe someone who used a middle name sometimes. This is going back to 15/1600s so it all gets quite confused with records. We do share a surname with a town in Jamaica so potentially a link to the Caribbean there (maybe the Barbados marriage was the start of the Caribbean side). I find genealogy and history fascinating but, despite my best efforts, my brain is too lazy to become obsessed with it.

I am aware that drinking gets in the way of productive activity so please don't blame yourselves.

Dragan and Dragon are Slavic names, Serb I think; meaning darling. Didn't catch on here, probably because a war criminalbhad that name. And British children being what they are would remorselessly take the piss.

We are having the garden landscaped and all laid to patio because our decking is rotten through, used to have rats living under it until it became too wet even for them and was frankly a death trap.

They came in and started lifting the decking and it had been laid directly on the old patio. What a lovely surprise. Our landscaper immediately identified the slabs and so we decided to make the old patio good with new grouting and new slabs to match the old ones. Then the bit of the garden that is peashell and weeds will also be laid to patio.

Must have saved ourselves at least £1,000 if not more.

Sofa company are being a bit threatening. Called at 4.30 to say the technician said the photos showed it was the mechanism which is not covered by warranty so tomorrow's visit will cost £250 including postage for the new part. I said it was an inspection not a repair so how could he know and would they send me his report. And presumably he wouldn't be attending if he didn't have the part. And I'm exercising my statutory rights.

Next thing I know they email at 5pm to say it is an inspection but it will cost the money to fix. I've said I'm not paying for a fix or an inspection and I want to see his report.

I think they are trying to soften me up to pay and the Walrus is very much saying just pay the money. In which case I told him he can manage the visit and talk to them because I'm not backing down. He doesn't want to do that.

I have an expert's summary which says it's a structural failure and he will charge me £350 and travel to inspect it. Which I will claim back from them. It really will be cheaper for them to fix it free of charge. I'm just bloody furious that I keep having to fight for my actual rights.

But we already have a patio 😁

Dragan certainly is - Dragon might be in some countries, but I'm not sure.

"Dragi" means "Dear" in Bosnian/Croatian/Montenegrin/Serbian. [NB At one point, I just knew a bit of Serbo-Croatian; now I know a bit of 4 separate languages, so how clever am I! Also see: Melania Trump who now speaks Slovene plus 4 other Slavic languages.]

There are various old-fashioned names that include it: Dragutin, Dragomir, Dragoslav, etc.

You could always bury the inspector under the new bit of the patio…

@MyrtleLion Huzzah for the patio. Boo for the sofa people.

Years ago, Mum took delivery of a new suite from Reid Furniture. After they'd gone, she discovered a tear underneath one of the cushions.

They tried to say that someone with something sharp in their pocket must have sat on it...In the end, Mum got the cushion replaced, but she had to stick to her nerve. She might have threatened the with The Sunday Post.

@SionnachRuadh When I looked at the records for one set of maternal great-grandparents, I found that GG's age was different, depending on which census you looked at. (G-GD's is also different on various records.)

I asked Mum "Was your Wee Granny the kind of woman who would lie to a census taker?"

"You bet!"

I couldn't find her death certificate. It turned out that as an old, old lady she emigrated to Australia with her eldest daughter.

For @MarieDeGournay

bunch of nuns in a car stop at the traffic lights.

bunch of drunken men pull up next to them

Youth shouts out the window show us your teets penguins.

Mother superior says to Sister Mary immaculate do they know who we are

show them your cross

Sister Mary immaculate winds down the window and says fuck off you total morons.

Then turns to mother superior and says was that cross enough…

Oh, I have so many posts to catch up on. I have had another frustrating evening trying to return something to John Lewis online which I bought online, but when I try I get the message “Order cannot be returned online.” Online chat with the same person twice ended with “Go to our online returns portal and arrange an online return” followed by the person immediately ending the ‘chat’. The third time I was told I’d be connected with an agent in approximately 1 minute. After 15 minutes it disconnected me.

Royal Mail delivered something but left it at the door, and ran away (DH’s description) without picking up the parcels for which I’d booked collection.

Went to the Post Office with the parcels at about 4:05pm to be greeted by a notice saying that from today they’ll be closing at 4pm. Understandable as they open at 7:30am, but still.

So, I don’t drink alcohol, but may I have a very large G&T, please, BarGerbil. Bombay Sapphire and full-fat tonic, something like Fentimans if possible.

Rule #1 of knitting, quilting & any other handicraft = never attempt it after intake of alcohol. You'll only have to undo it later.
My knitting group started in a bar, bar closed so we moved to a pub. In the afternoon. Everyone else drinks alcohol. Some of them knit complicated lace and manage to keep track of the conversation. Not me, though.

Apparently, on my father’s side for generations, families had exactly 2 children, both boys. Seems a bit unlikely, but that was what I was told. My parents had two children, a boy and then…me.

I have considered elbow patches for it. I might look into acquiring a pair but the hole needs darning anyway to stop it propagating.

If you’re covering up the thin part there’s no need to darn it. If you want to save effort, like me, just run some thread through the stitches at the edges to stop the stitches running.

For decades DH had a job which seems to involve him resting on one elbow while thinking. When the elbows of his jumpers started to wear thin I put leather patches on, but they are expensive, need removing before the jumper is washed - and I’m vegetarian.

I’ve belatedly realised that I can knit patches, with none of those disadvantages. Rectangular ones are just as good as oval shaped ones, and much easier to knit. Also, when I knit jumpers for him I now make them top-down so that when the elbows or the cuffs show signs of wear i just unravel the sleeve from just above the elbow and reknit that part of the sleeve. He is worth knitting for because he wears the jumpers I knit.

Just make sure he’s recorded a favourable report on a machine you can access before you do. Or delete, if not favourable.

How very annoying, @AsWithGlad. Perhaps such things are a plot to drive us back to physical shops?!