The Bluestocking - Best Pub on the Internet

[EdithStourton]

Welcome to the Bluestocking women's pub. Excellent (if sometimes wilful) gerbil bar staff, varied cocktails, splendid cakes, cracking Sunday roasts...

Voted Best Pub for the umpteenth thread running, join us for conversation about tractors, units of measurement, films, wildlife, and even, sometimes, women's rights.

Just keep Glenda off the gin.

Any men, you can trot along to the Staunch Ally just up the road.

NT just sent me a scone recipe

https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/discover/food/recipes/cakes-bakes-desserts/lemon-and-white-chocolate-scones?campid=email_central_Newsletter_12032026_MESE-Mod4-COL2&subkey=003Tl000003Q63GIAS

Splendid!

Oh! Oh! Ow!

Gosie is scuba diving at the foot end. I think she's just harpooned me.

You're my sort of woman, Boily!

Sympathies to @MyrtleLion, that all sounds hugely frustrating. Sending you another sympathy camel 🐫 (my phone now autosuggests camel as the word to follow sympathy 😂).

Ha!

Ha!

Ha!

Want to guess who's been ignoring me since last Summer...

Sigh.

An ombudsman.

I have emails from them that now cover 2023, 2024, 2025 and 2026.

There's a town in Iraq called Erbil.
Almost....

Ewww... 🤢
I'd just stopped feeling sick, too!

Nope!

Be gone vile lemony stuff!

The letters for gerbil are worth 9 points in Scrabble. 2 1 1 3 1 1

I love lemony stuff. Pass it all over here please..

I like lemony stuff but the whole point of scones is that they're not too sweet. Or even not sweet at all.

Me and Magpie right now

Bad luck, Boily, I've done well with an ombudsman once. The first time (different ombudsman) they told me that BT paying my phone bill for months compensated adequately for approx 1,000 phone calls and emails, being cut off for 24 hours (landline and computer) and I dunno how many working weeks of my time. BT are extremely shit. A friend of mine used to work for them, progressing from linesman to complaints department and said they were completely shit, though the staff benefits were good.

I make very good scones, but sugar has no place in the recipe. White chocolate isn't proper chocolate, and as for the lemon, well...

The lemon I could handle, but the white chocolate and iced!

I was unfortunate enough to get a rogue caseworker that didn’t actually do their job, ignored anything that would mean they'd have to do their job and based their decision on one email from the other party that the caseworker actually knew contained incorrect information. Then they lied to their boss. Who operates in the same manner!

Mind you, I have found the ASA to be absolutely fucking useless (excuse my strong language). They rejected a complaint I made (they don't tell you that they're doing this). I complained, pointing out that the ad in question breached various sections of the relevant code. No acknowledgement. Tried again. Ditto. You're meant to hear back within 48 hours and they've have a fortnight.

True! I love lemon but white chocolate? Just no.

I'm currently limbering up to do a SAR. It fills me with dread though. The last organisation I did a SAR on they pratted around for 7 months until their lawyer had to get involved and it went from them saying there was just over 20 files to them having to send nearly 200.

Boily your shell is a lovely shiny rainbowy colour in the bath pic
👌
I like the sound of those lemon and white chocolate scones even if I'm on my own with that choice!! I'd certainly give them a goood try

I reckon it's the oil from the massage I got off the capybaras earlier!

That's it - Melodicas! Thank you, the name had escaped my memory.
I notice that they have a little sideways mouthpiece which the original ones didn't have - an ergonomic improvement - I recall that blowing directly into it meant that your hands were at a very awkward angle to play the keyboard.

A local cafe used to make coconut and lime scones - delicious with lime curd.

Have you checked the ICO? When I was getting stonewalled by an organisation way beyond the legal time limit, the ICO encouraged me to report the org to them. In the end I didn't, but they were keen as anything to get their teeth into the org's behind.

Ah, looking at their w/s, something happened in 2025.

We’ve had some good run-ins with BT. When we moved here in 1995 we had problems getting a line at all (it was a new build) - DH wrote or called the number ostensibly of The Chairman, which resulted in a very large van turn up the next day - a Sunday!- out of which came two very large men, one of whom said “I hear you’ve got a problem” in the sort of Glaswegian tones which suggested it might be followed by “…Jimmy” and a thump. Fortunately they were merely highly competent engineers who sorted out the problem rather than us.

Last year we had a massively convoluted issue with trying to get our mobiles and broadband aligned … so complex I can’t even remember wtf it was about but we had to have their tech folk do something special. That was BT/EE too.

However, I was an early adopter of the internet for work, at a time when it was rare and expensive so my company paid for a business contract. And guess what? The customer service for that was excellent.

I did. The ICO said "what's your problem you've got the information now? And honestly I didn't fancy getting into another ombudsman "are you fucking kidding me??" position/ argument.