2024 Fashion On The Ration Challenge

Wraithlady

Laura_Elsewhere said:

, surprising quantities of extensive tattoos on young women especially....

A friend of mine works in a morgue and he mentioned how many of the little old ladies Of A Certain Age he dealt with had tattoos 'some in the most surprising places'

diminua

Just popping in to log that I've spent 7.5 coupons on foundation garments   

florianatwobob

Wraithlady said:

Laura_Elsewhere said:

, surprising quantities of extensive tattoos on young women especially....

A friend of mine works in a morgue and he mentioned how many of the little old ladies Of A Certain Age he dealt with had tattoos 'some in the most surprising places'

@Wraithlady to quote from Strong Poison ‘there is a surprising amount of vitality in these old ladies’ 

Cherryfudge

@Laura_Elsewhere, fabulous bit of detection there! I am still following Bunter around as he charms the maid and surreptitiously sneaks off with samples of mud, blood and gravel.

@Wraithlady, that information, along with your name, is a great combination! 

@florianatwobob, nice one!

PipneyJane

Cherryfudge said:

And going back to what we were saying the other day (and completely off-topic for the thread in general, so please ignore if you aren't down this particular rabbit hole), on reading the above I came across the word 'refection' and wondered if it were a misprint for 'reflection'. I looked it up and came across this glorious conglomeration of words which essentially mean one thing but have nuances to keep us on our toes:

Whether you sit down for nourishment or sustenance, aliment or pabulum, a meal or a repast, you are unlikely to encounter a shortage of English words for food or the partaking of food. Refection is just such a word...

Synonyms: chow, feed, meal, menu, mess, repast, table

From Merriam-Webster.com.

I'm enjoying reading the book again, thanks Pip!

@Cherryfudge I hadn’t put 2-and-2 together before, but that must be why University cafeterias are often called Refectories.  (University of Sydney, I’m looking at you…)  

Laura_Elsewhere said:

Cherryfudge said:

And to return to Dorothy L Sayers. One of Lord Peter's lines that's always stuck with me was 'The first thing a principle does, if it really is a principle, is to kill someone'. I can't find it on an Internet search so I may have misremembered. Does anyone have a clue?

It's from 'Gaudy Night' when they go out for dinner and he can't pick up her napkin because of his broken ribs.

"Now that you have the age of national self-realization, the age of colonial expansion, the age of barbarian invasions and the age of the decline and fall, all jammed cheek by jowl in time and space, all armed alike with poison-gas and going through the outward motions of an advanced civilization, principles have become more dangerous than passions. It’s getting uncommonly easy to kill people in large numbers, and the first thing a principle does — if it really is a principle — is to kill somebody"

@Laura_Elsewhere thank you for finding the quote.  (This time around, I read Gaudy Night first because it was easiest to find.  I just didn’t associate the quote with it.)

- Pip

Laura_Elsewhere

'Refectory' is the term that has been used for centuries for communal eating areas in monasteries and boarding schools, universities, colleges, and eventually the long tables got known as refectory tables. Monastic bods tend to pronounce it with emphasis on the first syllable, but everyone else emphasises the second. 

maryb

I went to a convent school so I call it REfectory

annieb64

alicef.I have a complete set of Miss Silver novels bought from charity shops. It took me ages to find them all . 

Has anyone read Jill Paton Walsh's Lord Peter Wimsey novels ?

Laura_Elsewhere

annieb64 said:

Has anyone read Jill Paton Walsh's Lord Peter Wimsey novels ?

I have- I was tremendously excited by the first one, much of which was written by DLS, and I still do re-read it. But I don't think the estate should ahve permitted her to write subsequent ones as I think they are so poor and poorly-researched as to be unreadable. I have tried. I have tried reading, and I have tried audiobooks of them in case that was less bad, but no, they are just awful. 
Things like a village having an air-raid practice at using the pub-cellar as the bomb-shelter, yes, that's fine, that makes sense- but the idea that, when one of the choirboys pipes up with "Hitler has only got one ball," the response from Lady Peter and the Vicar's wife is that they smile and laugh as the entire village sings it through, twice, just strikes me as really off-key. Not because I think Harriet or the Vicar's wife are prudes or humourless (although
Harriet certainly is normally shown as quite reserved in public), but because both of them were women who were well aware that they were representatives of their husband's jobs, and that in a public setting, they had a public function to fulfil, a role to play, and in the early 1940s, I have not found anything to suggest that boundaries broke down in that way, and from reading DLS's books over and over, I have never found any indication that those two women- or the Vicar- would have just joined in the laughter. I think they would have tactfully withdrawn themselves and moved right away to the far end of the cellar, or gone to find something to do, fussed about with the tea-urn, checked on the sleeping children, just something so that they were not a part of the group singing, which is described as "everyone". 
Times were different then, and I do not believe JPW has done enough research to write a convincing period book, not even when she had bits of it in detailed note form from DLS' wartime 'Wimsey Papers' letters. 

I really did try- for one thing, I really *wanted* to have more books to spend more time with them. 

But no. 

But of course, others loive them- just really not for me. 

PollyWollyDoodle

I am with you @Laura_Elsewhere, I couldn’t have explained it in as much detail as you have there but the JP-W books have never felt right for me, even though she was an excellent writer in her own voice. 

Another Patricia Wentworth/Miss Silver fan here, they are not the calibre of Dorothy L Sayers but make for very pleasant reading.