General Chat

been discussed on here?

I say this because looking at one thread I have just added to, and googling the topic in past threads on here ( some I know have been reported/deleted so there would have been more) it struck me and not for the first time lol, that I have 'said it all before' ;-)

Is there any subject you would like to see discussed that to your knowledge has never appeared on the board? :-)

False teeth haven't been talked about much.

Or wooden legs :-D :-D :-D

A topic to get ones teeth into

but with not a leg to stand on?

sorry ;-)

The most important leg of a three-legged stool is the broken one. :-S

Best I hop it then :-D :-D :-D :-D

Undoubtedly so Dermot :-)

which leads to the question, have you ever milked a cow?
and is milk the same now it comes in plastic containers, not glass or even a churn? :-)
( I think not, unless you go all out and buy Jersey gold top).

I like reading history books ever since school days.

There was a comment on the radio the other day that history books are written ‘the wrong way round’. What the speaker was trying desperately to explain was that a history book should start from ‘now’ & work its way backwards - just like doing a ‘family tree‘, he said.

What do you think?

Dermot I think that's an excellent idea!

I never had any sense of how things connected up in time when I studied history. Hated it then, if you can imagine.

Finding that an ancestor of mine signed on to the military just after Waterloo, and being able to count the generations back from me and knowing the names that made up the chain, even if not much more about most of them, made '1814' a lot more real ... and also gives me a much better 'feeling' about what was going on when Jane Austen was writing.

My father's father's mother's mother's father was the ancestor in question - I knew my grandfather, and he knew his grandmother, whose father signed on in 1814 ... even a little kid can get the feel of that.

Learn about 'history' when your grandparents were young ... then their parents and grandparents ... and so on back.

It just doesn't seem so far away when you look 'backwards' at it like that ... and that gives you a better understanding for continuing on backward from there.

I like it!

I always liked history lessons at school and remember 'bits' about serfs and demesnes, then agricultural history and crop rotation. I was interested in Henry VIII, largely down to reading historical novels as a teenager when I lived in Cornwall, the library there had numerous Jean Plaidy books as she lived nearby :-)

But I took more interest in history 'seriously' at college. The English Civil War was more interesting than the Bolsheviks, but both were less interesting to me than WW1 & 2 because I could relate those to family and American history for similar reasons. Irish history of course because that was always hovering in the background somehow.

I have learned a lot more about the Boer war and military campaigns that ancestors took part in while pursuing their lives ( see my post on gt gt uncle's medals on Military chat board) not sure how much of it will stick in my mind but I aim to write some of it down at least so that each ancestor has something attached to them rather than just dates and census.

So much still to learn, so little time!

Rose you must have read 'A Traveller in Time' ... I read it every summer for years when I was in school ...

Then about five years ago I decided my young nieces should read it, and I would like to again. I discovered that it is still enormously popular, and got a copy for each of us.

Then I discovered that I was apparently more literate when I was 12 than I am now. I could barely make it through the first paragraph of prose without a headache ...

If you haven't read it, you must! but I am sure you have. :-)

I read all sorts of historical fiction too, of course ... Ivanhoe when I was eight years old in hospital ... the times and years just always seemed to be floating unconnected in space. A century is an inconceivably long time when you are 12 or 13, not so much when you are of the generation born more than half a century ago!

I have read it Joonie, but it was so long ago! My mother got it from the library I think, the one mentioned above ( Looe Cornwall).

I know what you mean about the prose, I struggle with a number of writers that I read quite happily when young ( Paul Galiico is one I think and Edna O'Brien) as I do with an absolutely riveting book that my mum read to me as a child and which I have found unreadable as an adult, past the first few pages. 'The Crippled Robin', it's rather Dickensian in style and period but very wordy. The first chapter is very visually descriptive of London, regarding Patrick who lives with his old grandmother, sleeps on sacks in the corner of the room with rabbits hung above, and sells water cress in the streets, and his friend Bessie, they find an abandoned baby the 'crippled robin ' of the title. :-D it would have made a good film if stripped back, a set designer's dream.

I must have been soothed more by my mum's reading voice than the content I think, it's not your average children's book and I can't have been more than about 6 when she read it to me.

I dont think we have had a topics about

SEXIST!!!!!

Yes Rambling Rose, I have milked a cow.......many in fact... The old way... No machines......The milk tastes totally different cooled but not
pasturised/homogenised or generally messed about with

When Iwas about 12 I won half a crown when the farmer in the new village we had movd to didn't believe me..

Keyboard Tourettes Robert? :-S

:-D

Churning cream to make butter. It's been a decade or two since I last did that.

Marmalade!

Marmalade to you to SRS ;-)

Chunky marmalade or clear? I don't like the peel in mine. I used to have Rose's lemon and lime when i was little :-)

I don't eat it very often but I loved Rose's Lemon and Lime too. Named after you no doubt! ;-)