The Bluestocking Women's Pub: Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs

[AngleofRepose]

Croeso/Welcome to the Bluestocking Women's Pub, with our lovely gerbil staff, the icy Mojito foot-bath for those of you fed up with the heat, a Quilting/Craft Nook, lots of yummy food and drink with zero calories, gluten, or allergens, the Gerbil World Cup, and a brand new magic pool that becomes a babbling brook whenever you want it to!

Come on in! All women welcome! (Men welcome at The Staunch Ally pub down the road aways)

(security provided by the capybaras, lovely folk, but try not to get in their way)

(oh, and don't mention triangles, please. Gubbins gets very overexcited)

(did we mention the Gerbil World Cup?)

@EmpressaurusKitty that was horrid, but your walking on near-oblivious to him was probably the best and most squelching reaction to his inappropriate and creep carry-on.

On a happier subject, one is good for chats in the garden, one used to be good for FREE stuff, do not muddle them up.

I assumed he was going to ask for money, because that’s practically always why it is, & so was already in quick brush-off mode. I give to women on occasion but never to blokes.

Somehow I don’t think this chap will be visiting the Staunch Ally any time soon.

My DH1 and I bought a bed from what used to be Tesco Home and Wear in 1972 and got three books of Green Shield stamps with it. I can't remember if we ever redeemed them!

It's always good to think you may have obtained something for free, even if you know the system behind it. I have finally given in to the temptation to buy an air fryer, having rejected the idea when they first appeared because I try not to eat the type of foods they were advertised for very often e.g chips. However, this hot weather has made me very frustrated because I don't want to turn on the hob, let alone the oven and I have a freezer full of food that I can't eat uncooked. Then one of my friends told me she cooks fish in hers without using oil. I eat a lot of fish, so I was tempted and when I was up in Lakeland I went into the shop of the same name and found they had an air fryer on offer, suitable to cook for one or two people, so I decided to buy it. When I reached the till I was asked if I would like to use my loyalty points and agreed, so the price was reduced by another ten pounds! A bargain!

The fact that I had built up my points by buying lots of other things I don't need, is completely immaterial.

I'm delighted to say that it works beautifully and also fits into a cupboard, so will not clutter up my work surface.

That's incredible, Deano - the Green Shield stamp and the Green Shield bug

The inimitable Éanna Ní Lamhna was on top form in the Irish Times on Saturday, identifying photos of bugs sent in by readers. My fave was:

I captured this lad leaving my lettuce plants after his breakfast. What type of snail is this? Joe Reid, Termonfeckin, Co Louth

A considerably less hungry snail than when it entered your lettuce patch.😁

She went on to give a serious answer,
This is the Garden Snail – Heilx aspersa – whose brown shell can grow up to 40mm across. And it is not a lad either, or indeed a lassie. Garden snails are all hermaphrodite, which means they have both male and female reproductive organs. They must mate with another snail for genetic diversity, but both then go off to lay up to 100 eggs each. No wonder it is so common.

I really liked her first sentence!

Do you remember when I asked Bing to show us a scientist based on my description of Éanna? It wasn't a million miles out.

I do rather like Boots points - one can buy lots of essential stuff (using whatever buy one get one half price etc) and then have some free frivolities.

Slugs and snails are the only commonly-encountered sentient beings whose pronouns are difficult. While I have no problems at all using ‘they’ for a being of unknown sex, it’s not entirely satisfactory when you’re talking about one specific snail. There was recently something on the radio (I think an episode of In Our Time about “shells”), the bit I heard included mention of a snail who had a shell with the opposite-handed coil to the norm. There had been some publicity and ‘he’, known as ‘Jeremy’ was relocated to a garden which had other such snails to allow “him” to find a mate with compatible configuration. Well, Jeremy wasn’t a “he” but using “they” in the context of a lonely oddity wouldn’t really have worked either. A head scratcher for our Pedantry Corner?

I get frustrated by the default male. Partly why Bagpuss and Brian are she in the Gerbil World Cup.

I once took a picture of a very large house spider, who I named Henrietta and posted on Facebook. A male friend asked how I knew it was female. Fortunately larger house spiders are female, but I wondered if I called it Henry whether anyone would have asked how I knew it was male.

Which leads me up to this amazing and wonderful story. https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jul/14/ancient-dna-analysis-reveals-upton-lovell-shaman-was-woman-wiltshire

The Upton Lovell Shaman, metal worker from the Bronze Age is female.

A detailed analysis of the bones suggested that the individual would have been tall for a bronze age woman (165cm or 5ft 4in) and robustly built. There was also evidence of arthritis in the right (but not left) wrist, suggestive of having repeatedly used the metalworking tools she was buried with for much of her life.

I imagine a male revision of the story might say that metal working was obviously not that important … in the Bronze Age. 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣

Women have been economically important for thousands of years. Something women have always known.

That's fascinating @MyrtleLion thanks.

I get frustrated by the default male. Partly why Bagpuss and Brian are she in the Gerbil World Cup.

I love that everyone is female in the Gerbil World Cup.

If England win will the gerbils have a bank holiday?

It’s just as well the GWC is strictly female - tbh that’s the only reason Nanny Ogg didn’t insist on bringing Greebo along. He is 100% tomcat (even if morphed into human shape), and I fear might have wreaked carnage among Bagpuss and her mice.

Kitty doesn’t like tomcats so probably just as well.

Why is everyone glaring at me?

🤣🤣

We were very skint and collected both Co-op and Green Shield.

At one point the local Co-op did a whole range of fairly ugly crockery in exchange for its stamps. It came in a choice of plain oatmeal, or oatmeal with hideous flowers, and proved wildly popular as it was oven proof. Half the town, even the posh, was eating off it by the time the promotion ended. It was indestructible stuff (I still have one of the plates, having chucked out the rest - it didn't break), and survived the advent of dishwashers and microwaves better than a lot of stuff that claims to be able to cope with modern kitchen appliances.

On another topic, good to hear that Hunter is on the mend. I know how horrible it is when dogs are ill.

@Boiledbeetle Showed hubby over at staunch alley it made him laugh

😄 I'm Scottish. I am duty bound to support whoever is playing against England.

I got very tired of the default male in children's books when the DC were young. I went looking for books with lots of females in them, and came across one that featured a really arsey mother with a toolbox and an attitude.

Much later, I discovered that at least one of the DC had found it quite scarey. I think there was some concern that I might take the book as an instruction manual...

But the Bank Holiday Friday if England win….!!!!

One of my favourite children's books was Mister Seahorse, by the same guy who wrote the Very Hungry Caterpillar. It's all about male animals who do the majority or all of the childcare. I don't think I was very subtle about why I liked it.

Every day is a Bank Holiday for me!

Nature Notes

There has been a combine grinding away somewhere to the north of us for most of the day, drawing slowly closer. I can't work out quite where it is and the view-blocking lines of trees don't help. It's probably the back-end of the barley - the fields close to us were all cut by the end of last week, and the last few fields in the area are going now. They've started on the oilseed rape, and anyone who has got beans has probably cut them already. It won't be long for the wheat, then it will be spuds, then onions, then sugar beet. And interspersed with the harvesting will be frantic cultivation and drilling, because after the weather of the past two years, everyone wants to get the crops into the ground in the autumn. It's all just madly busy.

But someone, somewhere, has been spreading or carting pig-shit. The smell is lingering in corners of the garden. Who, in the middle of harvest, has the time to deal with pig-shit?

It's also the season of juvenile birds. The sparrows who nest in our eaves have another brood (at least their second, probably their third) cheeping away madly. All was silence up there yesterday, so they must have just hatched.

One morning recently I was upstairs by a window and heard some very loud and piercing wren-like noises, and there on the facing angle of the roof was a very small wren, beak still yellow at the join, barely-there tail bolt upright, hopping about shouting with the bolshy confidence of a stroppy teenager. It flew down to the ground to another wren, and there was a brief barney. I suspect the other wren was a parent, telling it to bugger off and fend for itself, since it already thought it knew everything. Wrens are remarkably obstreperous for birds the size of large insects.

I'm also seeing young birds when driving around: a pale young buzzard sitting on a telegraph pole pretending it knows what it's doing, and then looking slightly alarmed when the wind hits it. Or, as I saw yesterday, a fluffy, leggy little grey moorhen with enormous clown feet following its mum across the road - and then suddenly panicking about the approaching car and running back the other way and then deciding it should stay with mum and... I slowed right down, as it zigzagged about on its black stilt legs and its giant black feet and finally headed hedgewards with its very calm and sensible parent. A whole little moorhen clan lives along that stretch of road, and they generally seem to develop excellent road sense. I was glad to be of service.

You paint beautiful pictures.

Scottish, Scottish you say, i would never have guessed 😁

Given the FWS judgement i can forgive all Scottish women.