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

Natasha is another one that's made its way westwards.

I came across 'Noémi' in France - No-ay-mee. Never heard it in these parts.

I think it's a version of Naomi, which is Nah-oh-mee in French, and doesn't roll off the tongue as well as Noemi, so maybe it's prompted by euphony..
[insert 'Euphony, euphony, they all have it, euphony' if you are so minded😁]

I was surprised when Kevins started to pop up in France - a very Irish name, originally Caoimhín, and not one that is widespread in the English-speaking word, so I don't know how or why it took off in France...
They pronounce it Kévin, as if it was a French word.

I’ve worn a hole in the elbow of my favourite slopping about the house cardi. As it never leaves the house (it has a hood so no good with a coat over it) it’s probably worth darning. So… first find a bodkin … this prompted me to tidy up my sewing box. No joy but I’ve got rid of the nasty tangle of random thread and wunderweb. Fortunately DD has left her sewing kit at home and that came with some basic kit including a (plastic) bodkin. Then to find some sort of yarn … excavation of the bottom of my wardrobe didn’t get as far as my 40 yo bag of knitting stuff, I found some yarn I didn’t remember I had which must have been my mother’s though I can’t remember her giving it to me. I think some of it is remnants from little woolies for DD she got someone at church to knit for her. Anyway, it included some navy which should be ok.

Myrtle: I did get rather drunk yesterday...
Also Myrtle: I have given up on knitting for a bit. I had to rip the stripey hat about four times.

Rule #1 of knitting, quilting & any other handicraft = never attempt it after intake of alcohol. You'll only have to undo it later.

We should've told you when you first started knitting. We are all guilty.

Kevins have been around in Germany for a while too. I strongly suspect it has to do with Kevin Costner.

All those stories in a bag of knitting stuff - the Yarns of the Yarns
I had to look up 'bodkin' in this context - all I could get at first was that it is a 'black comedy thriller series' on Netflix, set in an Irish town with the highly unlikely name of.. Bodkin!

Google says a bodkin has a blunt or rounded end for drawing cord etc - I think a boringly-named darning needle is what's used for darning.

I thought maybe it was the name for the wooded mushroom thingy used for darning socks. Which is something I was surprisingly good at as a child, though I wasn't a great at needlework in general - darning was nice neat up and down backwards and forwards keep the needle straight stuff

Have you considered rocking the 1970s Polytechnic Lecturer look, and putting elbow patches on?😄

Or with Home Alone.

The same is true in France. During our summer stays in Normandy after I retired, we used to buy the local paper to improve our French. Among the fascinating minor items were the birth announcements and the names given showed how far this has gone. The names we all think of as typically French, barely featured, especially the traditional double names such as Jean-Pierre and Marie-Helene. Many of the names were obvious imports and for some reason Noah (with various spellings) was particularly popular.

Noah has become a hugely trendy boys' name in Germany too. I don't know why.

I also know that if I meet a woman called Ingeborg or Hildegard or Lieselotte, she's probably over pension age.

Lots of Kevins among the French birth announcements I mentioned, but I used to put that down to Normandy being next-door to Brittany with its own Celtic language. Names beginning with K are quite common in Brittany.

I started reading (and didn't finish) some book a few years back where the protagonist met a German woman who would have been born in the 90s and she was called Helga. No girl born in the 90s would have been called Helga. It was so jarring I had to stop.
Some older German names made a bit of a comeback, the daughter of the next door neighbours of my parents who is 20 has friends called Paula, Dorothea, Margarethe, Franziska, all names girls about my age weren't called because they were considered oldfashioned. The grandson (about 8 years old) of one of my cousins in the deepest Lower Frankonian countryside however is called Emilio which does sound very weird to me but is popular it seems, along with Emil.

There used to be a law in France that you could only give a child a name that was on an official list, which was almost entirely the Catholic Calendar of Saints. It was in place up to the 1990s.

So the names were fairly predictable. The Bretons objected to this because lots of Breton names are not on the Calendar of Saints, and obviously people of non-Christian religions were also discriminated against by this law.

When the restriction was removed you got all these Neomis and Kevins and Kylians [from the Irish Cillian] and so on..

I bet there's going to be a return to traditional names like Bertand and Rémy and Charles becoming fashionable - like the little Harry and Molly and Ivy and Alberts I've met in England!

Kilian is the patron saint of Wuerzburg, he got martyred there for spreading Christianity. I'm from a village a few miles to the West. I know at least two Kilians.

We used to have a paperboy, he couldn't have been more than about 11, called Stanley. That pleased me. You don't get many Stanleys nowadays.

I'm afraid, thanks to Irish naming customs, my own family tree has a massive preponderance of Maggies and Sadies. Sometimes a Sarah Margaret or a Margaret Sarah. I think parents started scratching their heads when the third daughter came along.

I will say though, my family has some really strange sex ratios - my GGM had two brothers and ten sisters - so all the girls got names eventually.

My German school exchange penfriend back in the 60s was called Renate and she became a lifelong friend. Her daughters, born in the 80s, were named Constanze and Dorothee. No idea whether these were unusual names to choose back then. It really didn't occur to me to ask her. Sadly she died 8 years ago and I still miss her wry emails.

Batshit latest...

I was out gardening, not too far from the back door. I had a chair there, to stand to allow me to reach a climber. I'd got down of it to do something else.

Brains was loitering next to me, suggesting I should get with the (her) programme and let her back inside, it was damp and miserable out. Batshit was snuffling about at the end of the garden... and then decided that she would ambush Brains.

She raced across the lawn, leapt onto the patio, missing the pots, but also missing Brains and colliding instead with the chair, which rattled across the paving.

Brains just gave her a look of 🙄

But Batshit just bounced about, 'Ha! Jolly fun! Surprised you!'

I do love the "Tales of Brains and Batshit".

It was quite sunny first thing this morning, with just a small chance of showers in the forecast (hurray!), so I washed a load of towels and put them outside. It has now clouded over and I'm now hovering every few minutes to dash out and rescue them if necessary. There is still a good breeze though, so if the showers hold off they should just about dry.

You do still find boys being called Stanley occasionally in the North West of England. It is a toponymic name, from an Anglo-Saxon origin meaning "stony meadow". It is also the family name of the Earls of Derby, whose ancestral home is Knowsley Hall, near Liverpool. The first Earl of Derby, Thomas Stanley played a decisive part in the downfall of Richard III, by weighing in at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485 on the side of Henry the VII.

I’ve heard of little girls in England getting what I think of as old lady names - in fact I remember one family in the oughts having three daughters called Mabel, Agnes and Elsie. Daisy seems popular too, which was an old lady name when I was a child.

Back when I was very small, my granny used to go to the chemist and pick up prescriptions for the neighbours, and sometimes that could be funny.

Chemist: Patient's surname?
Granny: I don't know her surname
Chemist: Then I can't dispense a prescription
Granny: I just know her as Big Aggie
Chemist: Well why didn't you say so

That's a coincidence - I'm currently reading a book about the Irish in medieval Europe - many centres of learning were founded by Irishmen - Luxeuil, Bobbio, Reichenau, Metz, St Gallen, Nuernberg, Taranto..

It says that St Cillian was born in Co Cavan in the 7th century. When he converted Duke Gozbert's wife to Christianity, and encouraged her to leave him,
the Duke had him murdered, along with his colleagues Colman and Totnan.
Their relics are preserved in the Neumunster, which was built on the location of their martyrdom. There are statues of the three martyrs on one of the bridges.
Wuertzburg University holds many manuscripts by Irish monks.

There was an exhibition about this in Dublin last year, and it included some of the Irish manuscripts from St Gallen library, from the 6th ad 7th century. It was amazing, the colours looking as vibrant as if they had been done yesterday!

In the version of Kilian's story that is told back home it's the Duke's wife who sends men to kill Killian, Kolonat und Totnan because Kilian told the duke that he couldn't be married to her because she had been his brother's wife before.
We celebrate Kiliani every July, there is a fun fair with beer tents on the Mainwiesen and a market fair on the Marktplatz in the middle of town.

Well a darning needle is what I’d use if I was darning with thread, but I think a woolly needs darning with yarn and a bodkin is (I think) what I need. Blunt so it pushes between stitches rather than through them, and a big enough hole for yarn.

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

I’d forgotten Bodkin the series - we did watch that, iirc it was funny and included Pauline McLynne in a very un-Mrs Doyle-like role.

Just turned on the radio, ‘you’re dead to me’ on r4 is about Hypatia of Alexandria!