2024 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

pixtotts

Evening folks, hope all are well. I'm afraid I've been a little MIA for nearly a month, and it shows.... 

I have a jumper, a t-shirt, and dungarees to confess to. The dungarees were an absolute steal second hand buy because they have ink stains but I'm going to dye a little darket and maybe some embroidery or painting to hide them (I'm an artist so they will be my work dungas and covered in paint soon enough! It'll be nice to have some "work" ones.) 

I make that 16 coupons out, taking me to 22 / 66. 

I may have to buy some tights this week too though, the company I like are putting their prices up in March so I might have to add 3 pairs before then to make the most of the multibuy offer. 

But I am still trying to do my items out too and another 11 clothing items sold on vinted - taking me to 18 / 66. I'm counting an item sold as one token earnt. My goal is to finish the year with less items in my wardrobe than when I started - hopefully! 

We sadly lost one of our cats a couple of weeks ago, he had heart failure at just 4 so his brother is rather lonely so I'm currently tiding to make space for a new kitten friend for him later this week! So a wardrobe sort out is underway, I have too many clothes >.< x 

thriftwizard

PS - my uncle escaped across Vichy France from Dunkirk, having volunteered to stay behind & fight a rearguard action - just a handful of those who did, got away - and stole a fishing boat in Marseille to (eventually) return home. (They weren't sailors and apparently went in the wrong direction to start with.) He would never talk about it, though, except to mention the odd minor incident like stealing a chicken when they hadn't eaten for 3 days. Bit off topic, though, sorry!

Laura_Elsewhere

@thriftwizard  - blimey!!!!!

florianatwobob

Another Golden Age of Crime fan here. 

I’ve just been listening to some BBC adaptations of Wimsey on the wireless (Audible). My all time favourite is Murder Must Advertise. I do enjoy the early Peter/Harriet books but can find their drawn out courtship a little trying. Edward Petherbridge is definitely ‘my’ Wimsey. 

As an aside The British Library (if I remember right) did release some more classic crime novels (about 100 lesser known ones). Some are a bit hit and miss but good overall entertaining fun. 

Oh and Margery Allingham’s Tiger in the Smoke is meant to be the first published recognised psychological thriller. 

PipneyJane

@pixtotts sorry to hear about your cat.

thriftwizard said:

PS - my uncle escaped across Vichy France from Dunkirk, having volunteered to stay behind & fight a rearguard action - just a handful of those who did, got away - and stole a fishing boat in Marseille to (eventually) return home. (They weren't sailors and apparently went in the wrong direction to start with.) He would never talk about it, though, except to mention the odd minor incident like stealing a chicken when they hadn't eaten for 3 days. Bit off topic, though, sorry!

@thriftwizard it’s a pity your uncle didn’t tell the full story.  

@retiredinfrance I love the story of your village.  Life must have been extremely tough for the villagers during the War.

florianatwobob said:

Another Golden Age of Crime fan here. 

I’ve just been listening to some BBC adaptations of Wimsey on the wireless (Audible). My all time favourite is Murder Must Advertise. I do enjoy the early Peter/Harriet books but can find their drawn out courtship a little trying. Edward Petherbridge is definitely ‘my’ Wimsey. 

As an aside The British Library (if I remember right) did release some more classic crime novels (about 100 lesser known ones). Some are a bit hit and miss but good overall entertaining fun. 

Oh and Margery Allingham’s Tiger in the Smoke is meant to be the first published recognised psychological thriller. 

@florianatwobob, Murder Must Advertise is the first Wimsey book that I ever read.  I liked it a lot and that inspired me to buy the others.  However, knowing what I know now, I think if I had started the series with the very first book, Whose Body, I wouldn’t have bought any more of them.  It has pages and pages of Peter wittering on while not making any sense or getting to the point or adding to the plot.  (Perhaps I have less patience now.).  I think DLS’ later books are definitely better written.  Before I started the exercise of re-reading the entire series, I re-read Gaudy Night. I’ve always been a Harriet Vane fan and that book doesn’t disappoint. If it had, I might not have started the re-reading exercise.  

I’d love the 1980’s TV series to be re-broadcast.  (Wonder if it’s on iPlayer?  Must check.). I have the BBC radio plays on Audible.  Not listened to them yet as my massive podcast queue has to be prioritised (circa 900 podcasts, even after pruning, but at least 100 are each only 10 minutes long).  

Good on the British Library.  Definitely worth investing in the paper copies of those, if only to encourage the BL to keep printing them.

- Pip

Laura_Elsewhere

It's probably worth pointing out that the Wimsey books start in 1923 and end in 1937, with just one 1942 short story after that. So most of them pre-date much of the crime fiction we are used to (Poirot is 1921, but Marple not until 1927 iirc) and are written for a time when you really needed a book to last, because your lending library only permitted so many books per week in your subscription... 
Also (can you tell I actually teach lectures on these books?!), we no longer have the understanding that the readership in 1920s Britain would have done, of the brief period after the Armistice for perhaps 5 or 6 years, when there was a very high-profile collection of aristocratic young people, mostly in London but at some of the big houses too, who lived life so hedonistically that they make the 1960s look seriously tame; serious alcohol and drug-taking, injecting and smoking of heroin, cocaine, the lot, public nudity and sexual activity, surprising quantities of extensive tattoos on young women especially.... and this is not the arty crowd or the bolshevik activists or any of the odd and unusual people- this is Wimsey's type of people, although a few years younger than he was. In addition, the returned soldiers of all ranks had serious psychiatric problems to a greater, not lesser, extent, and the returning officer class in particular (a group who died disproportionately) had terrible 'survivor guilt' amongst other problems, cf Wimsey's nightmares and breakdowns).  Once you realise that the readership in 1923 would have been completely familiar with scandalous news stories about goings-on in high society and the breakdowns and shellshock amongst people they knew, Wimsey's blitherin' !!!!!!-about-town makes a lot more sense. He's hiding serious psychiatric damage beyond a mask that would have been completely familiar even to lower-middle-class people in country towns... 
Because that particular set of stereotypes, the blitherin' !!!!!!, has vanished completely for the last 50+ years, we find it ludicrous and unbelievable, and most of us don't know anything about the brief few years of hedonistic self-destruction of the younger aristos that Wimsey would have seen firsthand... but the original readership would have known both. 

retiredinfrance

I I also love the British Library ones and always look out for them on my CS jaunts. Early crime fiction is fascinating and is as much social 
history as fiction. I love the ones  with everyone drinking cocktails . 

maryb

Even in Agatha Christie there are quite a few references to bohemian carryings on.  I think it's in Murder at End House, one of the major character's friends is deeply into cocaine and the plot of one of the short stories, Muder at the Victory Ball revolves around cocaine addiction.  But it was definitely becoming much more frowned upon

florianatwobob

It’s one of the things I really like about the Wimsey books. They very much capture the flavour of the times. There’s a section in The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club where Remembrance Day is being discussed and it’s how it’s not universally accepted or appreciated by those who returned. Quite different to the ‘accepted’ modern view.

I had a flighty, tattooed (wedding date under her wedding ring) flapper grandma who had been in service and also loved the Wimsey novels. Grandma would’ve  had no truck with them if they had been stuff and nonsense. 

PipneyJane

@Laura_Elsewhere - yes, I understand about the post-war period and the 1920’s. Those who could afford it went wild on drink/drugs/risk taking because a) they needed the adrenaline rush to make themselves feel better/take away the ache inside/drown out the memories, and b) they’d witnessed so much death and destruction that they wanted to LIVE and not get to their own deaths lamenting that they’d missed out.  Even Nancy Mitford novels hint at the drug use and self-destructive behaviour of the “Bright Young Things”, so it didn’t die out at the end of the decade. 

Peter’s episode of PTSD in Whose Body is well portrayed by Sayers. (I don’t know whether to consider myself lucky or unlucky to have witnessed a WW1 survivor suffering from “Shell Shock”.  He was aged about 90 at the time and a patient on my first ward.  We held his hand, and told him that he was safe and in the hospital.  When he calmed down, he asked for his mum.  Heartbreaking.)  

IIRC isn’t cocaine use mentioned in Murder Must Advertise? 

I agree, @florianatwobob.  Sayers books do capture the flavour of the time.  She doesn’t shy away from the politics of the day, whether it’s feminism - think of the impact on Lady Mary, who was not able to control her own fortune until she’d married someone deemed suitable by her oldest brother - or characters making comments that show they are communist or Nazi sympathisers. 

- Pip