Mme Isaac, ll
I don’t see how anyone could resist this rose. Jack Harness to the contrary notwithstanding.*
* For those of you who didn’t memorise it last time: ’This has shaggy double flowers in which strident pink fights a losing battle against the inroads of magenta. . . . The flowers, revolting in colour, frequently ameliorate that sin by failing to open at all.^ Few shrubs can rival [her] ungainly habit, to avoid which the experts propose [she] should be grown as a climber; and for a wall facing a neighbour one wishes to annoy, [she is an] ideal subject.’ She grows very nearly dead centre in my little garden, and I tack her down over the daphne odora. You get more flowers out of a horizontal branch than a vertical one. I want as many flowers as I can get.
^ Not my experience at all, just by the way. She opens really well. Maybe her feelings were hurt by his attitude and she didn’t see why she should come out to be ill-treated.
Mme Isaac Pereire
It’s AUTUMN. It’s been autumn for at least a fortnight but I keep trying to IGNORE it. (Those are not yellow, mown fields I’m walking over with the hellhounds. They’re . . . they’re . . . uh, give me a minute.) But it is now black dark when I come out of bell ringing at 9 pm so I can Ignore the Turn of the Season No Longer.
Meanwhile all my second-flush roses are doing their second-flush thing and I realise to my horror that of what are probably the top three cannot-live-without roses in my life, which are Mme Gregoire Staechlin, Mme Isaac Pereire, and Koenigin von Danemarck*, I’ve only given you photos of Mme Gregoire. Permit me to rectify this damning oversight. And because you read everything in this blog with close attention, you will remember that Graham Thomas specially noted that Mme Isaac’s autumn flush is particularly fine.
* Yes, to be on my unlivewithoutable list, you have to have an unspellable name. And if you look these three up, you will still find them spelled variously. This is the way, or these are the ways, that Graham Thomas spells them.
Ratbag days
It has been a* . . . £$%^&*(!!!!!, %${{]~@???”+=) couple of days. I wrote about LOOKS** last night partly as a way to get away from my life. Have I mentioned that the vet thought it was probably worth trying to back off on the anti-campy treatment to see if it had wrought a real change or was still just damming the flood***? Guess. The day after the first day that they’d had only one dose rather than two Chaos had the streaming yellow squirts and I mean STREAMING . . . for the first time since they went on the anti-campy in the first place. There have been a few breaks in the dike since but they haven’t been yellow or streaming. Meanwhile the vet has been trying to circle warily around and try a buttressing attempt from a different angle . . . and that remedy has merely inspired them to STOP EATING. AAAAAAUGH.
Meanwhile meanwhile, all four, yes, FOUR of my computers are misbehaving. Two of them were misbehaving anyway–one of these has the excuse of senile decrepitude, it being a laptop of advanced years, like three or four; the other one is merely a pain in the . . . † Of the remaining two, one of them is NEW, for pity’s sake, NEW NEW NEW NEW, even for a laptop . . . oh, all right, early middle aged then. But it wouldn’t go on line, and I live on line, any more. †† And the desktop–! Even the desktop! And Computer Man is on holiday this week. WELL OF COURSE. So I spent quite a bit of yesterday morning crawling around under my desk and getting entangled in the amazing number of wires, cables, flexes and cords††† there arranged. No, deranged. Whilst on the phone to Alternate Computer Man. One of the little peculiarities of the cottage is that the phone is on the other side of the room from my desk, so Computer Men are always trying to tell me to do things that I have to put down the phone to rush to my desk to do, by which time Middle Aged Brain has lost whatever. It was. I was supposed to do. Um.
And then . . . there has been yet another setback in the saga of the weight bearing attic floor at Third House. Remember we had to go through this little i-dotting, t-crossing charade of checking that the ground floor walls of Third House would hold the steel beams they’re going to run upstairs to put the floor on? It’s just a formality. Bungalows of this vintage are always built on good sturdy hardstanding with proper solid walls. So we had the structural engineer around‡, and . . .
No, they won’t.
They what?
No, the walls at Third House will not hold the steel beams for the attic floor. They are going to have to put in steel legs for the steel beams to rest on. This means . . . the structural engineer has to draw up plans. Then the architect has to draw up new plans to go with the structural engineer’s plans.‡‡ And then the builder and I get to look at the plans, and I get to burst into tears, and the builder gets to figure out how to make the steel legs not look like steel legs. Whimper. Meanwhile meanwhile meanwhile, a month ago the builder was going to start work in September. And we’re now sitting around waiting for somebody to get their finger out and give us some plans, and meanwhile x 4, of course the builder has started on another job.
And when I turned up for bell practise last night . . . I’d forgotten it was district practise at the abbey. No local practise. I stood there in the gathering dark‡‡‡ and thought . . . no. If I’d remembered in time I might have pulled myself together and gone. But there isn’t enough of me left to pull together. So I went home and wrote about LOOKS instead.
That was yesterday. Today . . .
. . . My head seems to be hurting. I think I’ll go to bed. And if tomorrow isn’t a whole lot better, I’m moving to Alpha Centauri. Where all hellhounds eat enthusiastically. I’ve already checked this on the immigration prospectus.
* * *
* GRLMMMPHGKKKGHRRRGH!!!! –Suppression in action.
** Does anyone have any suggestions about something to call book blogging other than book review or book report (or book blog)? Book review sounds like something that goes through more than one draft and preferably before ten o’clock at night, and book report really does sound like sixth grade. And book blog is just . . . boring. What do other people call book reviews on line? –I’ve just been for a bit of a cruise, and I’m not finding they call them anything. There are the dedicated book review sites which just get right in there and start talking about books, and then there are other places where people occasionally bring books into the conversation like any other topic. Label! I want something to stick in the virtual ground with writing on it!
*** Pardon graphic metaphor. I’m feeling a trifle graphic, and not in the least metaphoric.
† GRLMMMPHGK!, etc. But I’m beginning to suspect it of being the reincarnation of my first whippet.
†† This is all your fault. You’ve taught me to cruise.
††† Not to mention several weeks’ accumulation of cobwebs, since the last time I was crawling around under my desk. The word has gone out among Hampshire spiders: Pssst! If you fall in the bath she’ll rescue you! So of course they all come to me, bringing their sisters, cousins and aunts. Have I told you that the bath mat at Third House hangs at a sharp angle, so one corner reaches the bottom of the bath? So that any spider that falls in can get out again, in case I don’t get up there–or anyway not into the bathroom–to rescue them for a day or two.
Meanwhile, I’ve learnt something. I’ve despaired of the speed at which spiders drown: if you don’t fish them out IMMEDIATELY they turn into tiny little scraggy motionless lumps with a fringe of too many legs, and by the time you’ve turned the taps off so the vortex isn’t constantly sweeping the frantic little atom away from you it’s already too late. It’s been only recently that I’ve discovered that if you carefully lay the little scraggy lump on the edge of the bath it furtively comes to life again and runs away when you’re not looking. I thought I was imagining this for a while but I finally actually saw one pattering wetly off. Guilt. Guilt. Years and years of throwing away perfectly good spiders on the unwarranted assumption they were ex spiders.
However there has been a revolution in my life recently that has had an effect on the habitability of the underneath of my desk as well as the rest of the house. I bought a Miele Cat and Dog Vacuum Cleaner.^ Yeep. My carpets are carpets again, instead of felted hellhound hair. And I only have to do the hands and knees and dustpan shuffle every other day! I’m sure it would do a number on the cobweb problem too, but . . . Sunshine and I leave occupied webs alone.
^ To my considerable amusement the Warnings and Safety Precautions tell you that you’re only allowed to use it on floors, carpets, and furnishings. You are not allowed to use it on your cats and dogs. Snork.
‡ And what a good thing I’m not fond of the fitted carpet they keep peeling back to look at the floor. And the nonexistent hardstanding.
‡‡ And why didn’t the architect and/or the structural engineer check on the weight-bearingness of the walls before the plans had already been okayed by the building regs people that are requiring me to build a^ LOFT when all I wanted is a weight bearing floor? Oh, well, the architect should have done that, says the structural engineer. Oh, well, of course that’s the structural engineer’s job, says the architect.
^ GRLMMMPHGK!
‡‡‡ And it’s the end of August and it’s getting dark again. Waaaaaah.
Looks
Looks by Madeleine George is brilliant.
Meghan Ball is the fattest girl at Valley Regional High School; Aimee Zorn is probably the thinnest. They are both, in their different ways, invisible: Meghan because of her fatness, Aimee because she’s new this year, as a sophomore. They meet on the very first day–although by high school rules of engagement they do not speak–at the nurse’s office, each of them there as a way of escaping her classroom. They have nothing in common but their outcast status, and as anyone who has ever survived high school knows, the last thing an outcast should do is make friends with another outcast.
And at first it looks as if Aimee is going to be accepted. She writes poetry, and she joins the group which produced the award-winning literary magazine last year, and is taken up by the charismatic leader of the group. Cara and Aimee meet at Cara’s house and read each other’s poetry and discover in each other the tone-perfect ear, the perfectly understanding heart. . . . And then it all goes terribly, horribly wrong . . . in a way that Meghan tried to warn Aimee it would, but Aimee didn’t want to hear it, especially from fat outcast Meghan.
There’s so much to praise in this book it’s hard to know where to start. Perhaps with the fact that George can write. I’ve just finished a book which is a clever piece of alternate history, with a scary and intriguing plot and interesting characters, which I read as fast as I could because I had to know what happened: but the writer also gave you nothing to linger over; the prose existed to heave the story along and grace is strictly superfluous. LOOKS however is so beautifully written you can flip through it at random–when, say, you’re trying to write about how wonderful it is for your blog–and pick up lovely throwaway lines like these: Reluctantly Meghan breaks away from the wall, like an ice shelf breaking off the Antarctic. . . . A small, flattered smile detonates like a tiny bomb across the lower half of Aimee’s face, then clears again quickly, like smoke. . . . He’s gazing calmly at Mr Handsley, leaning back comfortably in his chair, his face as serene as a field of wheat. . . . “Yeah, and I really like the rhymes,” offers Laurie, a girl so boring even her voice is as bland as a dairy product.
And speaking of food, George is masterly* about both Aimee’s and Meghan’s very different yet strangely similar obsessions with it. During the first literary magazine meeting, while the rest of the group are discussing the poem Aimee has (anonymously) submitted: . . . . The carrots begin to thump like drums at her feet, and Aimee feels a surge of electricity come off them, a staticky pulse of carrot energy that shoots out of the backpack and through her legs . . . Aimee needs to make the carrots shut up somehow, maybe shove the backpack away from her with her foot, or bring the Ziploc bag into her lap where she can stick it up her shirt and muffle it . . . The carrots begin emitting a tiny high-pitched whoop, like a miniature siren going off by her feet. Surely the other girls can hear it. Surely any second now she’ll get up helplessly from the circle . . . and cram a whole carrot stick into her mouth, bite down on it and explode the beautiful hunger she’s been building like a glass palace in her body all day long. . . .
And Meghan at the end of a binge: . . . . The tingling has spread up her arms and legs now–a buzzing blankness, like a staticky TV channel. Soon it will swirl up through her gut, slip up over her heart and lungs like lukewarm water, flood through her throat and mouth and head–drown her in nothingness. Meghan slows down–she can coast to the end now. . . . .The final collapse into oblivion that accompanies the last mouthful. Bursting–the pressure of her gut against the waistband of her pants the only feeling left in her body. Meghan undoes the button of her fly and unzips it . . . Surrounded by the wreckage of the binge, eviscerated wrappers like the husks of dead insects all around her, Meghan leans her head against the wall and blacks out.
I particularly admire the way George presents Aimee as a member of her family: Aimee unreachably spiky and hostile and her well-meaning mom a little too well meaning and a little too earnest–and yet what should or even can her mom do? . . . ”Look,” her mother says, a tiny bit desperately. “Obviously I want to respect your body, and its needs, and its innate, ah, wisdom, about what belongs in it and what doesn’t. But I also feel like, sweetheart . . . what’s left for you to eat?” . . . “String cheese is left,” says Aimee. “And carrots and yogurt. And peppers and broccoli and kale. And Jell-O–is there any?”
. . . “There are three batches in the fridge,” her mother says.
“Sugar-free?”. . .
Aimee is furious with her boring, earnest, well-meaning mother for breaking up with Bill, boyfriend number four, by far the best of them, English professor and poetry nut, who had lived with them since Aimee was nine, and first turned Aimee on to poetry. Aimee is sure the break-up is all her boring mother’s fault, her mother who only cares that things look right . . . but you the reader see at once what a charming weasel Bill is. And yet, and yet: there’s substance and virtue to all three of them, in their different ways, and Aimee, by the end, has begun to see the cocky, careless side of Bill as she has perhaps even also begun to see the love and intelligence in her mother.
There’s the awful humour of the awfulness of high school here too. LOOKS has a running gag about Ms Champoux, head secretary, who reads the morning announcements over the PA system: ” . . .our principal Dr. Dempsey. Has decided to institute a new meditation period as part of morning announcements. Every morning we will share eh. Short inspirational poem by eh. Well-known writer followed by eh thirty-second silent meditation period during which students and staff are invited to think about what. Thee poem means to them. . . .” Oh, gods, and remember gym class? You don’t have to have been the fattest girl in the school to remember gym class with horror and loathing. I went to this high school.
I went to this high school forty years ago, and I don’t read high school novels any more (unless they have witches or dragons in them). The last high school novel I read with this kind of rapt attention was Laurie Halse Anderson’s SPEAK. The two books are nothing alike except in excellence; perhaps there’s a similar kind of vivid urgency; and perhaps similar too is the wretchedness, the world-endingness of betrayal. Some people manage to have enchanted childhoods, where the sun almost always shone and your parents almost always understood you and your friends remained your friends. I don’t think many people manage to have an enchanted adolescence. Adolescence is, I think, when most people find out about betrayal, and all the things that inevitably come with it: the great lumbering structure of society that doesn’t want to know, the people who think you shouldn’t make a fuss, the political scapegoating of the powerless so that the powerful can remain powerful.
SPEAK was also forced on me by someone who insisted that I’d find it worthwhile. It’s a high school novel! I said. I’m not interested! Merrilee gave me LOOKS. I am hopelessly unplugged in to the happening literary scene, and mostly I’d rather stay that way, but I do occasionally bleat at Merrilee about wishing I knew anything at all about new books. I was bleating a year or so ago and she interrupted me to say, I have a book for you. It’s about . . . she paused. It’s about a fat girl who befriends a thin girl . . . . Is it a high school novel? I said suspiciously. Well, yes, she said, but I think you’ll like it. She was right. I read it the first time in typescript, losing pages off the side of the bed as I read, and having to fish for them when I wanted to go back and savour a paragraph or a scene. A month or two ago when I decided it was time I started writing about other people’s books on the blog I asked her if it was out yet, and she asked George’s editor to send me a copy. I’ve been rereading it now as I type (and trying to keep chocolate fingerprints off the pages and my keyboard). And I recommend it to you, whether or not you read high school novels any more either.
* Mistressly, if you prefer
Well I once again feel like extract of old dead car batteries,
. . . with maybe a few flat tyres thrown in, but I’m listening to Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis (announced by the presenter as Tallis Thomas: you didn’t quite hear him slapping himself on the forehead before the mike went off, but I could intuit the sweep of the palm of the hand toward the upper part of the head) so I cannot be anything other than happy. At least so long as I don’t try to move and find out that I can’t. Sigh. When the ME first landed* there were days when I couldn’t even type. As I remind myself now when the bad days seem to be going on rather a long time.
I did ride this morning. Which may have been a mistake, but flrilp** it. I don’t want Connie to forget me. I don’t want her not to whinny when she sees me. Mind you, I can see the speech bubble forming over her head as she points her ears at me: Carrot Lady! The fact that she’s going to have to suffer through a lot of girth-tightening, trotting, cantering, half-passing***, cows,† and other devilry first is a bit daunting, but Connie believes in bearing one’s trials hopefully. And that’s Carrot and Apple Lady, I’ll have you know. Last time I ran out of apples for horses†† there weren’t any little ones at the greengrocer††† and I found myself balking at paying large-apple prices. I’ll just bring her another carrot, I thought. We have more carrots than we know what to do with.‡
Connie was outraged. She kept looking for her apple. She didn’t want me to leave because I hadn’t given her her apple. So, oppressed and browbeaten, I crept off to the greengrocers again and bought large apples. She was grandly and gallantly glad to see me again today despite my dereliction of duty last time, and was obviously perfectly confident that she’d got her point across and there would be an apple. There was an apple.‡‡
Jenny was conspicuously gentle with me however. Although maybe she was just being gentle with Connie: the vet was leaving as I was arriving, having given all the horses on the yard their flu jabs, and you don’t want to work them hard right after this. Jenny says flu jabs aren’t nearly as dramatic as they used to be, however, and, for example, Connie will be fine by Saturday. She’ll probably be scintillating with fresh antibodies and inclined to cavort in the treetops, like someone in Crouching Przewalski, ‡‡‡ Hidden Orthomyxoviridae.
* * *
* Houston, we have a problem
** Fram, fotzit, fandango, farthingale, fistula, festinate, F%$£”!!!! it. You get the idea.
*** Especially half-passing: I mean the suffering part. Make up your mind up there, her ears say trenchantly.^
^ Certainly ears can be trenchant. Any rider can tell you.
† I think I’ve mentioned before there are cows in the field next to the outdoor riding ring. Every time we go out there Connie has to look them over closely to make sure before she turns her mind to higher matters that none of them has morphed into the Black Beast of Devon (and moved east) since the last time we were out there. Today they were all lying down. Our cows lie down a lot. And it rains a lot. I told Jenny the Ten Cows in a Field Method of Forecasting the Weather^. She, a farm girl born and bred, was amused. She said, One of my clients said, do they have legs?^^ –That’s how much it rains here.^^^
^ I’ve already told you this. Four cows lying down, 40% chance of rain. Eight cows lying down, 80% chance of rain. Etc.
^^ Hellhounds and I were recently walking past a field full of sheep, as we so often are. I wish to emphasise that there was a fence between us and the sheep: when we’re all on the same side of the fence I keep hellhounds on short lead. Sheep, for obscure reasons, often lie next to the fence with their backs to it: I’m talking about a naked wire fence, so it doesn’t give much visual impression of protection, although I guess it must to sheep. The hellhounds are thrilled by sheep.+ I attempt to be quelling about this thrilledness, but ‘safe to stock’ is never going to be a testworthy proposition with hellhounds, so it doesn’t matter all that much. I keep them somewhat reeled in, and we keep going. We passed, however, what was evidently an especially tempting sheep, lying against the fence, and Darkness made a little rush at it. It was really a very little rush; I didn’t even hit the brake. But the sheep leaped to its feet, began to dart away . . . and fell over. Rolled over on its back and waved its feet frantically in the air before it scrambled back up again and tried with the darting thing again. They just don’t make sheep the way they used to.
+ Shoulder development ahoy. One of these days I’m accidentally going to pull a bell right out of its frame in the belfry.
^^^ But speaking of cows: http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2008/aug/26/1 You have to scroll down to the bottom. I always thought things clustered around having their tails to the prevailing wind.
†† ‘Horse apples’ being open to misconstruction. Fram, festinate and horse apple it.
††† The size called fun size. Tell me why a small apple is any funner [sic] than a large apple.
‡ Our organic veggie box scheme is always thrusting carrots on us. Most popular veg in the UK: carrots, onions, potatoes, cucumbers, tomatoes, peppers. I will only eat carrots and onions, and Peter is not wildly fond of onions. That leaves a lot of carrots. Some of which now get passed on to Connie. And the problem with this country is obvious: it doesn’t like its dark leafy greens.
‡‡ I think I’m just so intoxicated by having some animal in my life eager to eat something I give it that I get a little light-headed. I’m obliged to be happy because I’m listening to Vaughan Williams, but I’m feeling a little under siege by the fact that I have two hellhounds lying on the floor next to their untouched dinner bowls looking fixedly in the other direction.
‡‡‡ Also while out walking hellhounds, although not the same walk or the same day, we were passed by two dazzlingly beautiful and well-turned-out horses, both of them with ‘I am expensive and I am worth every farthing‘ stamped on them like one of those enormous German warmblood brands. The big grey in the lead in particular looked like the sort of horse that judges automatically give top marks to because he so obviously expects it.^ He gave us a friendly if lofty look and was undismayed by hellhounds, who were behaving themselves,^^ but about ten feet past us–I was grateful for the ten feet–he did a proper Connie shy, which ends in the Four-Legged Spraddle, the butt well down and the tail flat . . . and is about the most undignified thing you can imagine. When you’re sitting on it its lack of dignity is probably not the first thing in your mind, but I was greatly entertained by seeing this paragon of high-mettled steeds shying like a middle-aged, grass-bellied Connemara-cross mare. Oh Percival,^^^ said his rider fondly, who appeared to be glued to her saddle, drat her.
^ Yes, I know grey horses never win. This one does. And don’t forget Blue Horse Matinee. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zKQgTiqhPbw&NR=1 –Gods. I’ve just been rewatching this, I think for the first time since I started riding again. Gods. Half-pass at the canter. And I’ve seen Jenny riding Connie: Connie could do canter pirouettes now, and make a start on passage. I have to get good before Connie gets too old.
^^ Although I had them by the harness so it wouldn’t have mattered if they weren’t.
^^^ Mortimer, Pauncefoot, Cloudesley, Winstanleigh, Aelfric, one of those type of name