The Bluestocking women's Pub- spring is sprunging and MN's name generator can do one!

[lcakethereforeIam]

Welcome to the Bluestocking women's pub. Men are directed to the Staunch Ally just down the road. Otherwise all are welcome. Pull up a chair, give your order to the Wait Gerbil or the Gerbil behind the bar.

Don't forget to name change if you wish to.

Thank you dear Marie

Let's be honest: once he cut his hair, he just didn't look the same.

Sleep gerbils?
Sleep gerbils anywhere?
Even just one?

<stares wide-eyed into the dark>

Oh dear Edith, I hope the sleep gerbils found you eventually.

I've just woken up with a headache and a sore throat. And I wasn't even on the gin last night.

Tea gerbil, an entire urn please.

IIRC sympathy camels were because the site was loading so slowly someone (not me) almost gave up waiting for the flowers to appear and was contemplating sending a sympathy camel instead.

ETA it was @DeanElderberry https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5494423-the-bluestocking-inn-cocktails-and-cocoa-and-all?reply=150699556&utm_campaign=reply&utm_medium=share

that seems suspiciously like fighting talk

Well yes in the Bluestocking we quite evidently can imagine hugging (nice sympathetic) camels etc. Just don’t try it at home or at a zoo. Like when DFil tried to stroke a penguin at Birdland in Gloucestershire and it beaked him.

The sleep gerbils round these parts did an amazing job, probably helped by my finally tackling the very overgrown and tussocky grass in what should be my front lawn (never recovered from my years-ago idiocy in falling for 'no mow May' - just don't do it) and then being too tired to think what to cook and eat (a rare problem for me) so that dinner was a little leftover pork from Sunday followed by porridge, eaten out of the saucepan.

I usually set the table properly and use cutlery and plates and stuff, honest I do.

But sleep - 9.15 to 5.30. Luvverly.

The sleep gerbils finally fitted me in at about 2.30a.m. I was awake again at 6.30, so with the sleep I had between 11.30 and 12.30, that's five hours. I have to be alert this evening. That may prove challenging.

High caffeine cocoa, the proper stuff made with milk, and a large fresh croissant to dip in it, please, bar gerbil.

Gosie has booked herself in for a week's sculpting course when she gets to Insouciance. She hopes to find a little boutique en route where she can buy herself a beret and a smock.

It's very fetching!

Anyone else having trouble posting?

I hope Gosie meets with a better response to her fashion choices in France than I did many years ago. My DH1 and I were admiring the view from the top of the Arc de Triomphe and I was wearing a sundress and matching short-sleeved jacket that I had made myself from some of that fabric you used to be able to buy that was smocked up one edge with shirting elastic. I was rather proud of it as I had crafted the jacket without a pattern by copying another one I had. A couple of French women were up there near us and their eyes swept me up and down. One turned to the other and said, obviously thinking the dumb English tourists wouldn’t understand, “Fait à la maison “. I was crushed.

Yes, me! it seems to be OK now but a while ago it wouldn't allow any emojis😱and kept telling me to write a message, when I just had😠
Looks OK now though.

I'm having problems generally with Mumsnet. It keeps freezing and I have to go out and back in again. Very frustrating.

I also noticed that Hedgehog was having problems on another thread earlier.

So i wasn’t the only one then….

Is it a raspberry beret - the kind you find in a second hand shop, @EdithStourton? 😉😂

Dh has made me a pint of coffee, and I am working up the motivation to do some knitting. If the gerbils could help with the knitting, I’d be very grateful.

She was jealous.

Ha ha possibly but I doubt it!

As well as feeling knackered, I feel heartsick and miserable today. I realised when doom scrolling in the early hours that the synagogue that had its windows blown out in the ambulance attack was Machzike Hadath. I used to know a family who worshipped there.

I've let myself be sucked into the AIBU thread on the topic. It's made me even more miserable.

Sorry to be a downer. I'm just fed up.

Oh, Edith! I'm sorry.

It's really horrible for Jewish people in Britain right now. We lived next door to a Jewish family in London before we moved to our current location. He is the CEO of a Jewish charity but couldn't have his address public in case of reprisals. All the local Jewish schools had barbed wire fences and private security guards. This was during the pandemic, so it must be worse now.

I remember they had great parties in the garden, when the men would all sing traditional songs and dance. It was so joyful watching these young people in their 30s uphold their traditions.

How awful to be frightened of terrorism in your own country. Thinking of you and yours 💐

Thank you, Myrtle. I'm not Jewish and I feel like this, so I wonder how the families who use that synagogue feel, going in there to sweep up the glass and get the windows boarded over, and how their neighbours feel.

Some of them will inevitably be the descendants of Holocaust survivors. You think that the world has grown up and moved on, but no. It hasn't.

I live in a very Jewish area - 3 synagogues within 2 miles - and the tension is horrible. I feel sick for all my friends and neighbours.

I usually email good wishes to my local Jewish community group for holidays, but I hadn't the heart to wish them a 'Happy Purim' this year, there didn't seem to be much scope for happiness.
That said, they've been managing to have Happy Purims for centuries, millennia even, in even worse contexts than today ....

I have managed to find a fairly restrained Passover card to send them - again, the cheery ones don't seem appropriate at present.

It's not much but it's all I can do.

I'm reminded of Thomas Pakenham/Lord Longford who used to raise his hat to any Black people he encountered in London in the 50s, to show them that at least some people welcomed them. Quixotic, but at least he was doing something....

It's very sad, Edith. My best friend here is Jewish, and I regularly read at an open mic that happens in the synagogue here. Many Jewish people in America right now are not supportive of the Israeli government's actions, but they're getting the back end of other people's hostility anyway.

I simply cannot get my head around the amount of hate there is in the world today. How did we come to live in such a polarised world? Particularly sad that the organisation targeted is one which volunteers medical assistance to all, regardless of race or religion.

Really dismal day here today, with biblical amounts of rain and more to come. I now have a pond on what is supposed to be my seating area and when I looked out of the window during a short lull in the deluge, there was a group of magpies having a pool party. Hard to believe I was out there planting my pots yesterday. I hope they haven't all drowned😕