The Bluestocking Pub: Infinite Cocktails, Questionable Logistics

[MyrtleLion]

Welcome to the nth iteration of the Bluestocking women’s pub, where gerbils are staff, the drinks are free, and alcohol has no effect except to get you to the sweet spot just before the drink you really shouldn’t have had.

Men can go to the Staunch Ally next door.

It’s OK if you don’t understand. Just assume everything is normal.

Previous thread is here:

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5523989-bluestocking-womens-pub-its-maytime

Freedom for the Gerbil One!

<Parades with placard>

👻

Just caught up. Apologies for lack of recent contributions.

Yup. That's it. Where's the justice, I ask? I got Dad's flat feet, knees and Mum's saphenous vein with the missing valves (one leg only!) and peely wally skin.

Dad took a brilliant tan and didn't wrinkle. Meh.

I had forgotten all about that so it took a moment - but no, I won't

G'night all, sleep well and dream pleasantly🌛

My husband was absolutely convinced that he was part Maori - his grandfather had lived in New Zealand for many years and had been married twice. DH only knew his step-grandmother.

DH had dark eyes and the most gorgeous blue black hair and had Americans asking whether he had Native American ancestry.

It finally turned out that his granny was Scots Irish. Mind you, years later my BIL took an Ancestry test which showed up a teeny amount of Polynesian DNA...but who knows where that comes from.

My mum was a genealogist & we spent a lot of childhood holidays exploring graveyards & record offices in search of our own ancestors - which was more fun than it sounds, as far as I was concerned at least.

I have (had?) an 11 x great aunt who was rumoured to have sold love potions while working in the family chemist’s shop & made excellent use of them to avoid getting herself arrested for witchcraft after she stood up to the local rich bully.

Edith's friend meant that she was unusually beautiful, as are all Irish people, but she was too modest to say so directly, as indeed are we.

Could all interested parties gather in Pedantry Corner, please, so I can share a fascinating bit of etymology.

I watched a documentary on James Brown the other night and at one point somebody said that one of his pieces of music was 'Basically all vamp.'

I knew that 'vamp' means the noodly repeated passage of music while the singer says 'Nowladeezzzandgennulmenheresaliddlenumber...'
I also knew that it means the front part of a shoe - so to 're-vamp' originally meant to repair an old shoe by replacing the vamp.

I googled the etymology of 'vamp' and it comes from the old French 'avant-pié', the front of the foot. Makes total sense when you lose the 'a' at the beginning

I've yet to work out how it came to mean a noodly musical intro... anybody know?

Oh - where are my manners, I got over-excited by etymology🙄 -
good morning, everybody🌞

I think Edith was taken aback because it was a perfect stranger!
I'm she was just deeply disappointed that such a lovely woman was not in fact Irish
If she had read any of Edith's wonderful nature notes, she'd have been even more keen to add her to the pantheon of Great Irish Writers

Seriously though - I was 'tidying' some books the other day, which inevitably morphed into finding one I had forgotten about and sitting down to read it for the next hour or so🙄, it was about the Sussex countryside [a book about a book - it was about "The Roadmender" by Michael Fairless aka Margaret Barber] and honestly, the descriptions of nature were not a patch on our Edith's.

If you ever thought of 'doing something' with your writing, Edith, they are all here in one place on MN, fortunately not on random scraps of paper or the back of envelopes!

Morning All 👋

Marie I think one of the uses of the word 'vamp' is to describe a woman who uses sexual attraction to manipulate men <men never do that, of course! 🙄> . I suppose an extension of that idea could lead to describing a sort of musical schmoozing?

A bit far fetched, but that's as far as my brain will take me this morning. I was doing my ironing at 7.30 a.m. before it got too hot. I am now sitting with a coffee watching a children's animated film featuring a blue tractor.

Another coffee and a croissant please gerbils.

I wonder if it's a back formation from revamp. Since revamp means making something look new again, if you didn't know the etymology of it, it's not outside the bounds of possibility to assume that vamp therefore means making something new, which could be extended to the sort of making it up as you go along, filler type music.

All a bit tenuous, but it's too hot here for deep thoughts. I did like the Wikipedia entry on the matter, which confidently states the foot derivation in a way that makes it sound like the connection with music is so blindingly obvious it doesn't need stating.

I vaguely remember a line from A Taste of Honey where a character starts singing & then says to the orchestra ‘Come on, vamp it in with me’ which I took to mean improvising.

In the band in which i sing, it just means "the leader will now improvise for an unspecified period of time, and no one knows when you'll be expected to sing again".

Can you tell I'm not a fan?

Lots of songs in 'the great American songbook' have not just a musical 'vamp' at the start, but a sung intro as well, which isn't always played.

It would be a fun musical quiz to ask people to ID the song from the intro,
e.g.
Summer journeys to Niagara
And to other places aggra-
Vate all our cares
We'll save our fares!
I've a cozy little flat in
What is known as old Manhattan
We'll settle down
Right here in town!

Got it? yes it's:

We'll have Manhattan
The Bronx and Staten
Island too
It's lovely going through
The zoo
It's very fancy
On old Delancey
Street you know...

Good morning, everyone! I'll have another cup of coffee, please, gerbils, and an apple pastry, for a change, thanks.

I had no idea that vamp came from shoe repair! <gets out trusty old dictionary >

1vamp vt (1599) a: to provide (a shoe) with a new vamp b: to piece (something old) with a new part: PATCH <~up old sermons> 2 INVENT, FABRICATE <~up an excuse> …vi: to play a musical vamp —vamper n

2 vamp n [ME vampe sock, fr. OF avantpié, fr. avant- fore- + pié foot fr. L ped-, pes —more at VANGUARD, FOOT] (1654) etc. as per Marie

ps. vamp, meaning short for vampire or "to practice seductive wiles on" seems to have come into common parlance only in 1915.

It's very warm already, although still a tiny bit of a cooler breeze so the windows are still cracked open. Going to be too hot to do much of anything today, so perhaps I shall sit in the cool part of the house and read my dictionary... (love doing this - if ever I am forced to move to a deserted island with only one book, it will be my dictionary!)

I was out early feeding a friend’s cat in the next village, then walked the long way back along the river. Loads of dogs out enjoying themselves before it got too hot.

I'm using the hot weather to start filling up my diary for next academic year, in a similar vein. I'm not working this week, but it's a job that needs doing, and doesn't take many brain cells. Which is good, because most of my brain cells have melted.

Morning, all! I was watering the garden at half seven before the heat really hit, and I've retreated to the north-facing rooms of the house with damp tea towels taken from the freezer and a fan.

I'm delighted to hear Gosie is free - well played to all. Even Batshit.

And then there's dark brown/auburn hair, pale skin and hazel eyes, which are more common in Ireland than anywhere else.

Thart's me (although completely grey in a rather fetching stripy way these days). Dad's side is Welsh, Mum's side is Scouse Irish, I burn to a crisp, except my freclked forearms, which can tan a little. My bastarding brother has red hair and turns a rich golden brown in the sun.

How is that even allowed?

I have thinned my stash of unused craft supplies mightily to accommodate eldest son's regularly used craft supplies, but I still have quite a lot.

I have been wracking my brains for how I can best contribute to Gosie's quests. I grow a lot of fruit and vegetables, keep poultry, am a bloody good cook and baker (I earned my living that way for quite a while) and am an extremely thorough planner. But that's nothing much in the face of the skillsets of the Bluestocking clientele.

However, if anyone needs a mezze, or some Mexican food, or a damned fine curry, perhaps with eclairs or home made fruit ice cream, I'm happy to oblige.

Another rarely sung intro to a famous song:

The sun is shining, the grass is green
The orange and palm trees sway
There's never been such a day
In Beverly Hills, L.A
But it's December the twenty-fourth
And I am longing to be up North.

Éclairs and home made ice cream, you say???

YESYESYES. Please.

I am English through and through, at least back til the Norman Conquest. I have my family tree back to 1190 and a surname that may well connect me to the French invaders. ( Sorry, Anglo Saxons)

And someone once asked me if I was Irish! Maybe it's just a conversational opener.

I used to make make gooseberry ice cream for my dad, coffee or pecan for my mum, raspberry and Cointreau sorbet for my best friend, and then almond biscuits with all the left over egg whites.

Just pop over in an hour or so, Fuzzy, and you'll be well looked after. Or leave it a fortnight for when the strawberry patch is productive.

I'm making asparagus tart for lunch today.

Afternoon! Nothing much happening in the Starry household today other than youngest doing A level revision. She has just moved study locations to the back garden which took at least half an hour of prep! I'm staying inside in the shade like any sensible person.