The Bluestocking: To the moon and back gerbil style.

[Boiledbeetle]

Previous thread of chat and general madness below

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5506124-the-bluestocking-womens-pub-spring-is-sprunging-and-mns-name-generator-can-do-one

Women: from an orderly queue at the bar or take a seat and grab a passing gerbil.

Men: turn left at the end of the road, keep walking until you find the Staunch Ally.

Bar gerbil a full fat coke please and a packet of Scampi Fries please.

I could really do with Gosie's holiday. The last 18 months or so have been bloody rough, one way or another. Various IL issues continue, Disastrous Diagnosis is back in the hospice, various MH issues continue (not mine, but I seem to end up handling a lot of the fallout).

Part of my problem is that I am naturally a cheerful, upbeat sort of person and I carry on like that even as the tanks are slowly drained. So nobody notices what's happening.

And then suddenly, BOOM! Edith loses her shit.
It used to be that even I didn't notice the little red 'Refuel urgently' light coming on, but I've got better at scrying the runes. It's currently flickering...

One of the things that is pissing me off is that the other people living in the house are utterly crap at tidying up properly. They either don't, or do a half-arsed job. It's minor, in the grand scheme, but the idea of hiring a sports car and buggering off to Carcassonne is very tempting.

@EdithStourton

I sympathise. There were times that I fantasised about grabbing Betsy Bongo [who has been in the camping ground in the sky since January last year], leaving everything behind me and finding a campsite on the outskirts of London [improbable though that is].

I would eventually find myself a grotty bedsit somewhere [under an assumed name] and a job on a market stall, where I would be paid cash in hand.

If you can survive having lived in a grotty bedsit/former brothel in Glasgow, you can survive a grotty bedsit anywhere. [In Western Europe. I wouldn't chance Eastern Europe. Oh no. Not unless I was absolutely sure that I'd always be able to buy toilet paper and have a real W.C. Oh, and have a room that didn't have cockroaches.]

swigs latte

I want to live Gosie's life so badly!

Fancy company, Edith? I mean, you probably don't, but I have been having the same thoughts.

Easter holidays have just started for me - two weeks during which I need to catch up on marking, apply for a job (don't need to do that but I would be stupid not to), get some work done on the two qualifications I'm currently studying for, attempt to have a social life and pretend I'm not a complete slattern. Mr Magpie has decided I need to add researching and planning our summer holiday to the list. I'm torn between telling him where to shove it, ignoring him, and running away to the south of France (with my work laptop, of course).

No mandolin accidents, but I do have a slightly shorter finger on one hand from when I fed it into a spindle moulder whilst making some doors.I still go cold whenever I see a pair of saloon doors.

We could each hire a car and meet up for meals or visits to chateaux and see how we got on...

I'm being frustrated by the opposite problem, which is that DH seems to have very limited interest in having a summer holiday. I think he can't think past the current crises, so it will suddenly be all systems go in a few months.

In the meantime, shall we just share the hot chocolate bowser?

Sharing the hot chocolate bowser sounds like an excellent idea.
Bar gerbil, the hot chocolate bowser please. Two straws.

And all the trimmings, bargerbil, if you'd be so kind.
Including a slug of cognac.

whimpers

It was always clear that Gosie was a wrongun. Anyone who was genuinely following that insouciant, sort of art and finding yourself journey through the less well travelled parts of France would have done it in a 2CV rather than a sporty 2-seater ragtop.

Boily, I have come across several people who have lost a bit of finger to horses. Hands caught in reins.

It never seems to put any of them off.

WAW, when the DC were little and DH was working all hours God sent, I used to fantasise about emptying the bank balance and buggering off to Rio. He'd have come home from work to a note saying 'GONE' and the DC in the care of a more-or-less reliable local teenager.

As it was, I made do with trying to hide for 10 minutes to read a page of the newspaper without a chorus of little voices needing me.

I'm continuing to declutter.

Have gone through the contents of a small cardboard box. At the bottom were some pieces of white plastic which I appear to have cut from the bottom of a milk carton. I also found a couple in the bottom of a container in the kitchen.

I have absolutely no idea why I sat (presumably) and cut out those pieces of plastic.

I'm getting flashbacks to when I had to phone the GP when he put Mum on fluoxetine. "I think she's had a reaction to the medication, Doctor. My cousin tells me that something similar happened to my mother's eldest sister when she was put on it. I believe that there can be a genetic component?"

"What makes you think that your mother's not herself, Mrs Weary?"

"She's wrapped all 4 legs of the kitchen table in toilet paper. It looks like the Andrex puppy's been in here."

In my case, I'm blaming the cut-up plastic on the Diazepam that my GP prescribed 5 years ago...It's definitely from a plastic carton: I can see "pints" on one of the pieces.

My first thought was of a musical mandolin....how???

WAW, were you making plant labels? A friend always uses cut-up milk cartons to label her seed trays.

Oh! That might have been it! One end of each is a bit on the pointy side, though a bit straggly looking.

<preens>

<and has another go at the cognac-infused hot chocolate>

I seriously thought about moving to France- back to France in my case - a couple of years ago.
I realised that I was very much on my own, and that people who used to say that my care and attention to other people would 'come back to me' when I was older were completely wrong, if I was going to be isolated anyway, it might as well be somewhere in France where I had been happy.

It lasted for about 40 minutes till I thought about the realities of actually physically moving and setting myself up there, and I dropped the idea.

In that life where we have all run off to France, let's meet up for a glass of wine or three

J'arrive tout de suite!

Moi aussi!

Et moi.
Je parle le franglais tres bien.

Eh bien sur, nous peut parler en Franglais !

C’est le X poste avec Edith. Les grandes minds penses le même chose!

This is shaping up to be a lovely parallel existence in France💙❤🍷

Pourquoi est ce que nous parlons en français tout d'un soudain?