The Bluestocking Women's Pub, in which we wait excitedly for the next instalment of Gosie's adventures. Gosie, Glass and the Gerbils' Dilemma.

[AsWithGlad]

Previous thread
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/womens_rights/5559589-the-bluestocking-womens-pub-in-which-gosie-returns-to-the-trail?page=1

Welcome to The Bluestocking, the best (perhaps only) online women's pub. Nothing in the food or drink can harm you, everything is served by a very enthusiastic crew of gerbils, and any curious menfolk are welcome at the Staunch Ally down the road.

Certainly not easy for Chickadee, either.

The Fens being very flat, as you’d expect, you can see the cathedral from a long way away. If you are on the train from the Peterborough direction and look west it comes into view, before the river (marina) which Edith mentions.

The first time I went there was to sing Evensong with my choir. It was March/April time: I remember standing by one of the side doors, feeling the warm air rushing in.

Here’s a double picture which I borrow from Veronica in the Fens.

im very impressed. I have only found about 10 answers.

I got the final one - PM me if you’d like any help!

This chickadee will be in England for the first three weeks of October…

Our TV adverts are mainly various medications for diseases I’ve never heard of, all of which medications list (at high speed) so many horrifying side effects that one wonders if the disease itself wouldn’t be preferable.

The road up from Cambridge to Ely feels like a long straight road but you realise it isn't when at different times you can see Ely Cathedral on different sides of the road ahead. You can see it for miles.

We went on holiday to the Welsh Borders once.
It would have been quicker to fly to Spain.

Bore da, everyone!

I have got to see the flat country before I die! It's on my list, and I've read a few books about it, but never seen it. I always imagine it will look a lot like South Dakota, one of my fav places in the world, due to its wide open skies and seemingly infinite space. Sometimes Britain is just too small and cramped for me. The only places in Britain I've experienced any proper space were the Highlands and the Llŷn Peninsula (and a few sections of the SW Coast Path).

I'm a wide open spaces kind of girl. These hedged-in lanes in Wales that seem to be what most people call "roads" still give me the creeps, although I have learned over the years to just "get on with it."

However, as Fuzzy and Not have said, the Fens are a ridiculously long, convoluted journey from Wales and the SW! someday, though...

Thank you Myrtle for the latest chapter! Looking forward to discovering what I've discovered 😀

sorry @ChristmasStars didn't mean to quote you! (and now I've just tagged you... I need more coffee)

At one point when we were driving along yesterday, I realised just how far I could see across a particularly flat bit of the county. I find the Fens a bit too flat (especially in the winter), but I like where I live as there are dips and rises, and long shallow valleys eroded by meltwater at the end of the last ice age with streams wriggling along them, as well as wide open spaces with enormous skies.

I was talking to someone at lunch yesterday who's from the Fens, and he said his father went on holiday to Scotland and came back rather of the opinion that once you've seen one hill, you've seen them all, and had concluded that he much preferred the huge skies of home.

Parts of East Anglia (and Lincolnshire) have wide open spaces and big skies for sure, especially on the coast. Some of the Pennine moorlands have pretty big wide uplands too.
But on a human scale so there’s usually a pub or teashop in reasonable reach.

A lot of Yorkshire has wide open spaces too.

No, Google and Amazon: a hamster is not the same as a gerbil. 🤦🏽‍♀️

https://substack.com/@marybrown600974/note/c-314133595?r=3lkp1

I've just read this and it's so perfectly Mumsnet.

I've screenshotted it but it may be easier to read the post.

I noticed that the last time I was in the US! It’s a wonder that anyone takes any medication over there… and not a surprise that people are medico-sceptics re vaccinations etc as a result. It has made me questions the strangely schizophrenic willingness to fast track YP through GAC and shove PBs etc down their throats, but I suppose if there is a real fear and distrust of pharmaceuticals and the medical profession it does lend itself to a climate of ‘feelings’ trump science?

God I love this.

Can add, that DH has taken on the burden of the garden this year for obv DC related reasons. He is home 6 days a month with his new job (in our ‘primary home’ dahling, LOL) and spends 4 of those days in the garden, shirtless, getting bitten and sunburnt (‘cos suncream is for wuses not blokes from the Midlands). A large amount of time he is swearing at: the mozzies, the dog poop he missed before mowing, the fact that the kids are still in bed, the drip feed watering system that isn’t working because Coop decided to eat some of the water dispersal thingies, and possibly [likely] at me because I forgot to wheel the green bins out last Monday [or renew the direct debit for green waste collection with the council… again] and thus the bins are so full and fetid you could easily believe I have finally hacked one of our annoying neighbours to death and added them to the compost therein.

We also have regular head scratching consultations with my PlantNet app trying to remember - did I plant that one or is it a weed? Dunno. Quite like the flowers, so shall we leave it until the autumn and consult someone with more knowledge than would fill a postage stamp, maybe dig it out then? [We won’t - he’ll hack everything back to 30cm and we’ll repeat the cycle next year.]

We also have the battle with bindweed and Ivy because there is a railway line at the end of the garden [fab for steam trains as - outing I know - but Ropley/Alton are down the line they pass for Thomas the Tank Engine days and VE day celebrations, and grandad worked on the Nunney Castle for years when he retired and would wave at the kids from the footplate when it passed], but our lovely neighbours on t’other side are GPs with younger kids who really should employ a gardener, don’t, so we have all sorts of shit trying to invade and strangle our Portuguese Laurels, camellias and newly planted cherry blossoms.

But as much as he hates every second of it, he actually adores it too. Especially, when we declare Cocktail Saturday to have started and sit on the patio, music playing [moderate volume as I’d hate to be the subject of a MN thread], BBQ fired up [again, having checked neighbours have brought their washing in, see previous comment], and the dogs bringing up balls to toss from our comfy seats before collapsing in a panting, drooling heap on my lap.

Bliss really.

In our previous house we were on an acre and a half lot because we were not on town water and in that area all plots were that size so as to ensure separation of the septic system and the well. For the first ten years it was fine. We backed on to seven acres of wooded common land and I had a veg garden with five raised beds, fenced to keep the deer out. We did make the garden lovely. But. As we got older and I saw my 70s and his 80s approaching, and it took an hour and a half to mow with a ride-on lawnmower, spirits quailed. I saw older friends become unable to drive, and our nearest shop was two and a half miles away. So we moved back into town with a small plot we have done no more than mow because all our money and time has been spent renovating the house to be suitable for two people now in their 70s and 80s. Once we get the front porch built (long story) we’ll turn attention to the garden but in the meantime it’s grass and we bribe a neighbour’s son $30 to mow it.

Prescribed medication is not allowed to be advertised to the public in the UK. Though when I worked for Big Pharma 😦I saw plenty of adverts in magazines for GPs and hospital doctors.

In the US, the regulations say that in any public advertising you have to state the side-effects, which they speak very quickly, as people may demand a drug from their doctor and not know what they are and might not read any leaflet.

It's like reading the side effects list in the Patient Information Leaflet which will include really rare effects. We list them by probably: affects 1 in 10 people/1 in100/1 in 1000/extremely rare...

It was once my DH’s dream to retire back to the midlands, get a 10+acre plot, maybe have some llamas or reindeer [yeah, no flipping idea where that came from other than we had quite a few llama small holdings where we live, M/c hobby projects that entertained the kids on dog walks]. Then we started getting older, time has become scarce rather than abundant and our garden - which is about 1/3 of a acre and already a bit much tbh - made us realise that the burden of a large plot would be a nightmare. It was actually the isolation from neighbours that he craved.

We now have a second home for DD when at uni and for him during working week when not travelling. A 3 bed flat with a balcony, no gardens, and he loves it. No nagging by Mother Nature to go out and mow. We think we will end up living there when we age as the hospitals are within 5 mins, as is public transport, access to museums/theatres and we can access all of London’s green spaces without having to so much as get the secateurs out. He has even pushed back from me filling the balcony with plants (I will ignore this if I am ever living there full time). Flowers bring out my happy - there is something about the changing colour scene, the sudden discovery of a bud one morning and then a fully open dahlia or peony that just makes the soul soar.

If you’d have told me that, even ten years ago, I would have scoffed. Gardening is for old people, isn’t it? Oh… but then I guess we are getting old after all?!

I did once get prescribed some anti depressants (PND) and when I read the leaflet the first page was just about the increased change of suicidiality. And I thought f*ck me, did you really just prescribe this for a woman largely alone, with no local family, husband working away and a 6mo baby with colic who cries from 12 noon until midnight every blinking day? Really?

Didn’t take those meds at the time, naturally, but I now read all the leaflets in detail. Most of them are unconcerning, but some are just 🤯

The flat sounds ideal! F we ever run out of teenagers boys to bribe I may consider such a thing :-)

Honestly the flat has been a revelation. We don’t think we’ll be able to keep both properties when DH retires unless I have that uni job/funding to supplement his pension (esp with the proposals that the Labour govt is making), but the ability to enjoy this now and have the best of both worlds is such a privilege. We pinch ourselves every day - obviously we’d trade it all for our DD to be well, happy, settled, but knowing that we have the means to protect her and look after her when we pass on is a blessing we keep having to remind ourselves off.

I did a therapy training course once - never practiced as I felt like such a fraud - but one of the best exercises I learned was the three gifts exercise: every day, take a moment to note three wonderful things that happened and thank the universe. It might be someone holding open a door with a smile, your DC giving you an unsolicited hug or ‘I love you’, it might be a rainbow on the HogsBack when driving the kids home from school. Simple things, but once you ‘train’ yourself to look for them, you see the good stuff more readily. Even when life feels dark and you forget, it is easier each time to pull yourself out of the well if you just start to practice it consciously.

I also supplemented it (taught both my own kids and the ones a childminded or managed at Brownies/Guides and Beavers) to look try and do 3 kind acts every day - holding the door open, smiling at a stranger, helping an elderly person at the automated check-out in M&S [🤬] explaining that you never knew how much that little gesture could impact a lonely person, someone who was struggling, and it had the plus of making you feel just a little bit better about yourself. My DC are sick of the pay it forward lecture too…

The adverts I've been plagued with shown are for mattresses, pillows and duvets, RSPCA and RNLI, followed by betting adverts. Very strange combination

Betting? i see those on the sports channels DH watches all the time. I think they should be bloody banned as even kids watch those, and the very presence on those channels subconsciously normalises betting to young people.

Wondering why I don’t get the bedding ads… though I do get the comfy chairs and disability aid ads (I reckon that as I often leave the TV on for company/white noise, the TV/Sky has decided I am an old and/or physically disabled person trapped on their sofa… I have started putting the animations channel on as the U/PG grade makes it suitable for my furry kids…)

Many's the time I can be found watching the Lego Movie, or Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, or a Minions movie, or Flushed Away. Sometimes that's exactly what I need!

🎶 Everything is awesome. Everything is cool when you’re part of a team
Everything is awesome, when you’re living out a dream. 🎶

You can all thank me for that ear worm later.

It was my pleasure 😇

While checking local roadworks, I stumbled across this establishment! I'm now wondering if there's a gerbil equivalent.

Or indeed if we are the gerbil equivalent, and in fact it's all an elaborate double bluff. 🤔