Bluestocking Women's Pub - cheapest bar on the internet.

[EdithStourton]

The thread in which Gosie's mysterious adventures will continue. All women welcome to join us for a virtual tipple, fun, support and arcane knowledge. And tractors.

Yes, the lace! Oh my goodness, how did they do that?

I was thinking of Niccolò in Bruges too, Android. Did you visit the Adorne family chapel where Nicolas & Marian de Charetty married?
My favourite bits were probably the canal tour & wandering round the Beguinage, which is exactly where I’d have wanted to be if I lived in those days.

@EmpressaurusKitty I think you may mean me, and I absolutely did visit that chapel, for that reason. We also did the boat tour and visited the lovely Beguinage. The church with the Michelangelo sculpture was undergoing some renovations so there was a lot of scaffolding around but the sculpture was still visible. So much to see! And the chocolate!

'the only thing I regretted missing more was when I went to the loo thinking a show was over, & missed seeing a tank drive over a car. 😥'

Not yours, I hope?.😂.

Last year a cricketer at a local match in England hit a monstrous six out of the park, and was cheered to the rafters by the crowd, which was lovely, until he found out that he had hit it into the car park, and it had smashed the windscreen of a car.
His car.

And the waffles! I did mean you, sorry @Chickadeeinme.

@Boiledbeetle To be honest I thought they were up to something the time they all started walking around in vegetable costumes and whispering in corners. Turns out they were just dressed up in order to be fired out of a cannon aboard a gallon ship. Most of them nailed their landing on to the pub roof.
It was a glorious show.

I have photographic evidence

No, not mine. 😂 There was a car in the arena & I'd hoped they would drive one of the tanks over it, but that never happened. And then I thought it was over, so...

Re: Swimming

I’m envisaging something along the lines of the one in “It’s a Wonderful Life”.

I hope that this doesn’t mean that we’ll have to watch out for sudden floor disappearances. I don’t think that I could pull off looking as unfazed as Donna Reed.

I'm aware the tank business makes me sound like a philistine compared to the Bluestockingers at the next table who are discussing Bruges, so I'd just like to say (loudly) that I have a book on van Eyck within arm's reach as I type.

I've just checked it. It's in Italian, so not a clue, but the pictures are glorious.

Happy memories!

I'm not quite sure what the white vegetable is. A spoonful of mashed potato maybe?

Lowering the tone massively, but did anyone else expect the words "the big boobies" to follow "the Madonna with"?

Sorry.

Probably started off as an onion? Cauliflower? Turnip?

I've found the shots taken earlier in the day which shows the progression from onion (?) Garlic? To mashed potato.

Yes, a nice little white onion, dried off and ready to do its duty, would fit.

Some evening shots.

I'd forgotten it was the young gerbils doing it.

I've found my contributions. I remember someone misspelled cannon as canon and I couldn't resist...

Probably me!

This my absolute favourite self portrait by a woman, Elisabeth Vigée LeBrun.
She looks so human, in a time (18th century) when most portraits were stiff, staid and about showing off. I want Elisabeth to be my friend.

I have seen it twice in Bayeux where the crowds are almost nonexistent. I suspect it will be heaving in London.

I love synchronised swimming and got tickets for it for the London Olympics on the grounds that if I went for the second cheapest I would be guaranteed seats. We really just wanted to be in the Olympic Park.

I did get seats but even at £65 or so a pop they were nosebleeders in the gods and some of the routines had to be seen on screen. About twelve sets of scaffolding stairs to climb...

Scaffolding stairs sound no fun, Myrtle. Were they a bit rickety?

Fuzzy, I love this one, too. Especially the rendering of the fabric textures, of course. The background looks a bit like Turner's.

There aren't many (historic) female artists who have enough extant work or who have been written about, compared to all the male artists. There's LeBrun, Gentleschi, maybe a few others, but I suspect so many female artists are known only as "after so-and-so" or "from the workshop of." I've often thought it might be worth a PhD attempt (the stifling of female creativity by patriarchal forces and norms in Western European art c. 1450-1850, or some such), but it's always fallen by the wayside in real life.

Yes, my fear exactly. I hate crowds. Even if I go on a Tuesday, 10am, during term time, in the dead of February, there's always the risk of school trips. That's what happened when I went to see the Magna Carta exhibition. Queues and queues of very nice but very excited, loud schoolchildren. Not conducive to the careful study of one of the only remaining copies of the Charter, as well as a letter from Thomas Jefferson.

Still, very glad I saw them!

Did anyone else go to the exhibition of women artists at Tate Britain a few years ago?

I loved it. There was a very different feel & it was astonishing how many more of the women in the paintings had clothes on.

I saw a sign just now that appeared to say “Ferret Carriers Only.” When I got closer it was “Permit Carriers Only.” Not nearly so good.