I put a laugh emoji but then just put it to sad. I think I should probably get revenge on my daughters and send them some sort of the current kids' craze media, but I think these days everything is streaming and no one has DVD players, CD players, etc. (back then it was VHS not DVDs LOL)!Forgot about Barney! Fortunately he never figured large on our screens. Teletubbies, Tweenies and Bob the Builder though.. aaargh
On repeat! I can still sing all the words to Tractor Teds
Muck Spreading 
Unfortunately, yes. My 5-year-old granddaughter LOVES Ms. Rachel. My DD and her husband are appalled and can't stand her.On repeat! I can still sing all the words to Tractor Teds
But they still have their crosses to bear. Heard of ‘Ms Rachel’?
My brother has to watch that with his 1yr old all the time and it is more painful than anything I endured. At least there was some sort of story with the programmes we had to watch, now with youtube you just have to do a few minutes pulling a silly face
It’s for the bestLuckily I have no idea who Ms. Rachel is
And I think I will keep it that way
The middle classes were and still are painfully aspirational so that’s a major factor.Another from my Victorian ghost stories for Christmas collection… “clem” which is either the state of being very hungry, or the act of causing someone extreme hunger, regional to northern Great Britain.
I wish I could talk to Lucy Worsley, she’d have an answer - after a good half-century of reading Victorian fiction, I have to ask…considering the audience for such books and stories, what was the middle-class’s obsession with the aristocracy? For every story about this street urchin or that shopkeeper, there are dozens, if not hundreds, about Lord Greedsmuch or Lady Connivingstone.
I suppose it’s still true today, but geez, every Victorian collection I pick up is set in some posh apartments in London, or a country manor in bucolic Devon, or in a dilapidated family estate on some windy moor.
I always laugh at the contemporary depictions of said landed gentry. In the story I’m reading now, some Londoner fifth cousin twice removed has unexpectedly inherited the family estate up north, 20 miles from the middle of nowhere, and he’s just been dropped at the closest station, in some distant village, and has only just managed to find an old man with a horse and cart to take him the several miles to the house.
He tells the old man, “Hey there, I’m famished! What about some supper, then?!”
The old man understandably replies words to the effect of “I’m an old man with a horse and cart whom you’ve only just hired, and now you expect me to just conjur up a meal for you? Really?”
Off they go in the cart, and the entitled twit’s inner monologue was along the lines of, “The mere thought that I should be denied my supper after traveling from London all the day and night is preposterous! Surely this man has some morsel, a sandwich perhaps, about his person, and surely Christian kindness dictates he forfeit such to me, seeing as I’ve been without for so long! Yet if I were to strike him down for his ungraciousness in the matter, no doubt his remaining family would feel they were the injured party and seek recompense from me, a starving stranger!”
When I watched Downton Abbey I identified with the servants more than I did with the gentry.The middle classes were and still are painfully aspirational so that’s a major factor.
Plus it’s no different to film, most of its escapism.
People always imagine themselves as the person of wealth or influence or beauty in what they’re reading of viewing. They never have a realistic view of where they’d likely be in that world - pulling pints or doing the laundry
I suspect you’re one of the marvellous few who’s planted in realism!
Doesn't matter how many English novels (where the plain-and-poor but well-educated governess ends up marrying the master of the house) I read when I was a teenager, does it?
Not prone to believing fairytales then?!
Surely there is an author who wrote about how the governess got used and abused then kicked out of the grand house and into the streets, yes? Maybe she ends up with a poor but kind sheep farmer?
Ah well there are plenty of fast falls from grace into destitution tales but none where they actually end up alrightish with a nice sheep farmer
