London
I’m on the train. I’m wearing a skirt. I’m not wearing High Tops. No, wait, this can’t be me. I wonder where I am?
Hannah’s been over here on business most of this week and I’ve been telling her–frequently–that she’d better be saving me a day or there will be trouble. She’d made the mistake of telling me where she was staying* so I was going to go up today and lay for her if her Sunday off suddenly disappeared.** How to keep your friends: distrust, suspicion and the judicious application of ultimatums. I caught her sneaking across the haunted reception gulag*** bearing a fresh supply of caffeine but she yielded with barely a struggle when I challenged her .†
We went to the National Portrait Gallery†† with the laudable intention of looking at pictures and improving ourselves, and ended up having the longest cup of tea on record at the café, and talking. I admit this was my bad: I have never been good at crowds, and I’m getting worse fast, and a wet Sunday afternoon at a good museum? Brrrrr. Hannah, as a Manhattan working stiff, is accustomed to these things. But I had come up to see her, after all–in theory London is only a couple of hours away from me, aside from little questions of hellhounds and needing thirty hours per to get through my average day–and all those amazingly British faces on the walls of the maze will be there next time (I hope).†††
So we sat in the National Portrait Gallery’s café and talked, and then we went for a walk down Pall Mall and past Buckingham Palace and talked, and then we walked back toward the National Portrait Gallery again and on up Charing Cross and found a restaurant that sold champagne by the glass and went in and had menopausal-women food, which is to say olives, vegetables, and grilled fish, and fortunately it was the sort of restaurant where you have to order bread, which we didn’t, so I didn’t have to tie myself to the mast or anything. Oh, and we talked some more. And I wouldn’t have had to wear a skirt after all, but hey. It’s probably good practise or something. Every now and then I need to pass as a girl.
And now I’m on the train back to Hampshire, and the Great Question Is, Did the Hellhounds Eat Either Their Lunch or Their Supper?‡
* * *
* One of these cutting-edge modernist hotels^ that looks like a big slab of nothing inserted in an old Victorian-brick street and you’re walking by thinking, this is a funny place for a warehouse, or maybe it’s a cinema?^^ And why is there a taxi stand here? And then you notice that you’ve just passed the street number you were looking for . . . Oh. Inside it looks like a bankrupt factory–the bailiffs have taken all the machinery but you think you can see the marks on the floors and walls where it used to be. And not much else. With gloomy indirect lighting and candles on funny blobby end table-y things, and benches instead of chairs, and sudden attacks of dark depressing colours on the walls (gods forbid they should indulge in anything so bourgeois as pictures), and the people sitting at reception look like they’re on trial for particularly nasty crimes. And the lifts^^^. . . the light is purple and it’s so dark you can’t read the control panel. When you get on you have to punch your floor really quickly before the door closes and you can’t see it any more. As Hannah said, if it got stuck you wouldn’t be able to see the emergency button. And there are tiny video screens set into the walls with waving greenery, as if you’re looking out a window, possibly from your submarine, and it’s seaweed.
Her room, after all this^^^^, is tiny but disconcertingly pleasant: the whole outer wall is window, and everything inside is white–except for the very flash black and silver flat screen TV–and the bathroom is a proper bathroom and not a cupboard with a fold-down loo and a fold-up shower. And only one bar of soap. Okay, here’s my question: why haven’t hotels discovered soap-in-a-bottle? Dispensing liquid soap? That they’d only have to top up? So you could have like two soap experiences, one at the sink and one in the shower? Waterloo station has dispensing liquid soap. The ladies’ at Waterloo station, I have to tell you, is actively cultivating the tragically hip vote. It has dispensing soap, electronic eye controlled water, what looks suspiciously like black granite counters and Dyson Airblade hand dryers, which are deeply thrilling and make you feel like you’ve just wandered into Deep Space Nine. It’s also now 30p to get through the turnstile to use all this fancy kit.
^ I wouldn’t know cutting edge if it bit into my flesh. But it looks like something out of a William Gibson novel, okay?
^^ As Hannah emailed me+: Hotel so hip its invisible. Look for taxis in front.
+ From her BlackBerry, where apostrophes are fustian. Please.
^^^ Elevators. Or elevators
^^^^ And I’m sparing you the corridors, which are designed like larger versions of the lifts, only slightly bluer, and without the video screens. But the indiscernibility of the numbering is similar, as is the sense of oppression, and the expectation that Rod Serling will step out of a side corridor any moment now.
** Serious business people travelling on business don’t have weekends, I’ve noticed this before. Serious business appears to be quite a lot like book touring. I’m very grateful I was never drawn to serious businessing.
*** And almost didn’t recognise her in the lighting.
† It’s been a hard week, obviously.
†† Which, long long ago in my tourist days, was ritually my first stop after arrival here
††† I did somehow manage to buy four books at the bookshop however. These things just happen to me.
Antonia Fraser, The Warrior Queens, because I liked her book on Boadicea, and the one on women in the 17th century
Anne Laurence, Women in England, 1500 to 1760, a social history, because how did I miss it?? It’s been out something like twelve years
E H Gombrich, The Story of Art. Yes, that book. Phaidon reissued a really nice, neat, hand-sized, decently bound paperback edition, with, so far as I can tell, all the plates intact, the colour repro not half bad and crucial details like a good legible typeface.
Richard Marsh, The Beetle. Well, that lowered the level. Penguin is apparently reissuing a bunch of classic horror stories: I’ve got most of Gaskell–both her straight stuff and her ghost stories–and more of William Hope Hodgson than is good for me, never mind . . . ahem! . . . looking at the list, everything else on it, (Lovecraft, MR James, Ambrose Bierce, Bram Stoker–he didn’t only write Dracula, you know–Vernon Lee, EA Poe, Wilkie Collins) . . . but I don’t know The Beetle. I know it faintly by rep–it came out the same year as Dracula and, according the blurb, was initially even more popular. Well, have to have that. I read the first chapters waiting for the Leicester Square tube to take me back to Waterloo, and our hero (at least I assume he is our hero) is being scaled by a monstrous beetle. . . .
‡ Yes! YES! YESSSSSSSSS!!!!!!!!! . . . Good gods, do you suppose it would happen again, if I went up to London again, on a weekday, say, to check on all those British faces at the National Portrait Gallery?
The rich complexity of life
So, guess what! The WordPress updates mean IE now crashes me off the blog as well as the forum. I love technology. I love the implacable Sisyphean awareness that as soon as you start getting close to the top of that hill, the boulder will leap out of your grasp like a rocket from a launch pad* and roll, sniggering, to the bottom again. I wonder if Sisyphus’ boulder sniggered?** Computers could give Molesworth lessons in sniggering.***
Sigh.
And then I’d managed to forget, in the wildness of despair, that the Lyke Wake Dirge is part of Benjamin Britten’s gloriously magisterial Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings–Oisin reminded me, when I took my first Lyke-Wakean scratchings in to him yesterday–so, just how fabulously superfluous can a flimsy little re-setting be? For my next trick I think I’ll rewrite Otello.† Oisin said, just don’t think about it. Uh-huh. There is no elephant in the room! There is no dead rat in the soup! There is no Bush in the White House!
On the other hand I rang a perfect (short) touch of Stedman Doubles last night, which I think may be my first–I did start to ring touches of Stedman, as opposed to fail to ring touches of Stedman, a little while back now, but I’ve generally continued to need someone to yell at me or at least hover at my elbow breathing heavily.††
And today I had a good ride–I mean school, not hack–on Connie, which is unfortunately a little more unusual on Saturdays, when we’re on our own, than on Tuesdays, when we have Jenny yelling at us.††† Can’t remember if I told you that I managed to damage a shoulder ringing a heavy bell down in peal a fortnight or so ago–entirely my own stupid fault, and the classic moment for stupid injuries, because of the physical facts of staying in your place in the row while you’re ringing down and the increasing inertial resistance of a bell that is swinging down from 360 degrees full-circle standing mouth up to hanging straight mouth down–so I’d reverted to the stronger bit to ride Connie in while my shoulder reconnected the loose wires and checked for shorts.
Today I put the plain snaffle on her for the first time since my aggravated-twit moment in the tower–and we did rather well. You do have to get used to the fact that she hangs on your hands something wicked in the easier bit, but she’s also–if you don’t simply go numb from hanging on back–more responsive to it. I came away thinking, gee, I may get this horse thing licked some day after all.‡ Jenny is also beginning to take Roland out on little short hacks to let him see some countryside under saddle and Miles is grumping that he and his (nearly) bomb-proof pony have to play nanny to Mum and her young gentleman. So I offered to go out with Connie some time. This could be pretty funny, since while Connie is a nice cooperative sensible middle-aged mare she also has her moments–and indeed Jenny had told me in some amusement that she’d had one of them last week when she was shying all over the landscape, at leaves, cows, crows, and invisible monsters. I’m delighted she does that with you too, I said. Oh yes, said Jenny. So this could be a case of the fruit loop leading the seriously deranged. But it might make a good blog entry.
* * *
* or a hellhound out the front door on the first walk of the day
** The version of this story I grew up with was out of the D’Aulaires’ book of Greek myths. That boulder is definitely sniggering.
The D’Aulaires are also responsible for one of the best sea-monsters I’ve ever encountered, and it haunted me when I was little. None of this serpenty dragony thing: this one is a gigantic maggot, with a horrible human mouth, big fat pink lips and big square white teeth. Shuuuuudder.
*** Molesworth totally rules. Anyone who doesn’t know this already, check it out:
http://www.stcustards.free-online.co.uk/
Although I admit to being a trifle disturbed by this site. Do they have permission to use all of this stuff? I never found the ‘about us’ button
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Molesworth
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v22/n04/jone01_.html
And this last is probably more than anyone but a hardened Molesworthian wants to know, and a hardened Molesworthian would be offended. Molesworth, the ultimate ghastly English public schoolboy, made me cry with laughter when I read him for the first time as a grown-up because I was a hardened anglophile–the hopeless wet kind of anglophile, mind you, who comes to England looking for Tolkien and the Shire–and, what’s more, finds them.^ I agree that Molesworth is almost unbearably cosy, but I’m an American–it’s an exotic cosiness and furthermore my particular chosen exoticism. I enjoy Molesworth, I suppose, as I enjoy cream teas or Christmas pantos–perhaps because they’re not my culture I find them easy to avoid worrying about the context of.^^
^ Can’t remember if I’ve done you any of my riffs on learning to live in this country, where you can still see Middle-earth and King Arthur among and behind the industrial estates and the relentlessly multiplying car parks. History–including imaginary history–is an extra dimension, as tactile and inescapable as height, width and depth.
^^ Don’t get me started on the royal family however, which is really only Molesworth taken to his ultimate evolution. Peter keeps telling me that Parliamentarian monarchy may not be a great system but there are worse ones, and I can’t feel that I should be waving the American flag as an example of honest, practical and effective representative government.
*** Or Monty Python. Or Beyond the Fringe.
† Yes, Otello. Verdi, not Shakespeare. Shakespeare can use the rewriting.
†† Stedman, as I keep telling you, is a very volatile method because while it has the tenor-behind to help keep you anchored it does not have a treble doing something similar at the other end–the treble in Stedman is ‘inside’ like the other four working bells, with the same jaggedy ‘line’ rather than the straight simple line of plain treble methods. When I was first trying to ring Stedman touches I just went wrong every time a ‘single’ was called. This is normal. Then I began to catch on to the ‘cat’s ears’ calls, which is also normal. The ‘coathanger’ calls^ are harder and I was beginning to have wobblies about the possibility that I wasn’t going to learn to ring them, that I was going to hit the ceiling of my limited bell ringing ability sooner than hoped^^. Then I began staggering through coathangers occasionally, especially when I had someone yelling at me. The stage I’m in presently, I’m afraid, is the Getting Through the Scary Coathanger and Then Going to Pieces Afterward stage. Sigh. I’m not sure this is normal, but last night gives me hope that I will get through it too. But I was very, very grateful when Edward called ‘That’s all’, which meant we were back to ‘rounds’ and at the end of the method. Another of Stedman’s peculiarities is that you can make calls almost anywhere and any time–which is another reason it’s so volatile: usually calls come at fairly specific points in the ‘circle of work’–and when it looked like we were rolling into our third course my heart sank. No, no! Let me have my perfect short course! If we go a third I’ll probably disintegrate! –But we didn’t and I did.
^ I know I’ve told you that these somewhat . . . fanciful . . . names have to do with the shape of the ‘line’ drawn on the page, except for the fact that the coathangers look nothing like coathangers.
^^ I want to ring surprise! Surprise are a whole drooling category of advanced methods, like the difference between being able to walk, trot and canter your horse and being able to do the capriole, courbette, and jump six foot fences.
††† I perceive a pattern. Yes, and I yell at myself when I’m writing stories. And, lately, music.^
^ Benjamin Britten did Lyke Wake Dirge! Find someone your own size to pick on!+
+ But I don’t think there are any musical gnats.
‡ Naaaaah.
Voice
What I’ve done . . . is to read your stories for the FIRE anthology. . . . Of course I read the “Hellhound” story first, and how could I help but love that, with horses and hellhounds both. So I was surprised to find that I loved “First Flight” even more. I think you’ve developed a whole new voice recently – not that you’ve lost the old one, because I’d say CHALICE is written in the voice I associate with you traditionally. I don’t have the critical language for this, but it’s as if with DRAGONHAVEN you experimented with a more colloquial voice, and you’ve refined that with “First Flight.” Do you think there’s any truth to that? I expect it’s the way the character’s voice comes to you, not anything you’re “experimenting” with, so that’s a wrong way to express it. Anyway, it’s a terrific story. Also that’s an adorable new picture of the hellhounds on your website, on their leashes looking back at you.
[Yes, it is adorable, isn't it? Aren't they. Beam.]
This is one of the editors I work with, although she’s not publishing FIRE. She and I–and Merrilee–go back together to the beginning. We’re the Three Crones. Beware us. If we don’t like you we’ll slug you with our canes. Well, no. Only I would slug you with my cane. Merrilee and Lily are way too nice. I’m not sure Lily even has a Rude Switch.* But when the three of us are sitting on the porch of the old folks’ home together, I’m the one you want to stay more than cane’s-length away from.**
But I digress.
I’m delighted that someone wants to talk about voice, because I’ve been thinking about it quite a lot lately: yes, Jake is the ‘colloquial’ voice and CHALICE is back to Traditional Modern Sub-Forsoothly–as is PEGASUS, although ALBION will be colloquial again, which is to say first person, which appears to be the dividing line for me, which is perhaps a tale for another time.
I was going to say that it all started with SUNSHINE, that colloquial voice, but really it began with BEAUTY. I’ve told you this both here and in the FAQ, I think: I wrote BEAUTY by accident.*** It was a writing exercise of sorts, to get me away from Damar, which was threatening to bury me. Beauty’s story just began ‘I was the youngest of three daughters.’ Lily’s right, it’s the way the character’s voice comes to me, I wasn’t sitting there thinking ‘okay, to make this writing exercise as useful as possible, do I want first person, third, or omniscient?’ One of the ways I know, or anyway guess, that a story is ready for me to start writing it down is that I see the first sentence on a page in my mind’s eye, or possibly hear it in my mind’s ear–or both. BEAUTY was the first time this had happened to me so strongly, however, and at the time I thought it was part of my fury at the bungled TV special ‘Beauty and the Beast’, which was how I came to be pursuing this ‘writing exercise’ at all.
But as I think about it, trying to write it down for you here, I can tell you there’s more individuality in that first sentence’s presentation than mere words on a page: there’s a, well, a tone of voice. Beauty of BEAUTY would say ‘Good night, Beast’ in a completely different voice than Beauty of ROSE DAUGHTER would. I ‘know’ before I start what the voice of a story is because that is the voice the story comes in. Not ‘with’. ‘In’.
Having said that, when I was first thinking about DRAGONHAVEN†, when I was in the early stage of realizing there was a story there but not being sure what it was, what I did know was that it was about a teenage boy raising an orphaned baby dragon. That the protagonist was a boy was a given from the beginning. From before the beginning: it was part of the beginning. And I was beginning to hear Jake’s voice in my head, but I thought I was hearing it in dialogue. I started out assuming that I was going to be telling this story in third/omniscient, because that’s mostly what I’ve done before–except for BEAUTY, and SUNSHINE. And it wasn’t till I made the shift to telling Jake’s story as ‘I’–or letting Jake tell his story through me, which is always how it feels, or anyway always how it feels when it feels right–that I began to get comfortable with it, to hear it properly, to hear it well enough to write it down.
When you write your first novel you don’t really know what you’re doing. There may be writers out there who are brilliant, incisive and in control from their first ‘Once upon a time’.†† I’m not one of them. Every once upon a time for me is another experience of white-water rafting in a leaky inner tube. And I have this theory that while the Story Council has its faults†††, it does have some idea that if books are going to get written, authors have to be able to write them. The individuality of Beauty’s voice was my biggest break about writing BEAUTY as a clueless baby author, but part of that individuality was that the story arrived in first person. First person comes with a built-in framework: if you’re telling a story in first person, you can only tell the bits that person knows.‡ This is hugely useful when you’re young and stupid and floundering.
Part of what was interesting to me about writing DRAGONHAVEN‡‡ was writing a male protagonist–the only time I’d done this previously was in The Twelve Dancing Princesses in THE DOOR IN THE HEDGE, and while it’s a long short story, it’s still a short story, and it’s in Slightly Retro Traditional Forsoothly, which provides you with a useful structural distance from your characters, as for example when your hero’s a bloke, and you’re a girl with a serious fixation on Girls Who Do Things because when you were growing up and reading stories there weren’t any. I really liked my old soldier but he didn’t feel like an alter ego, the way most of my heroines do.‡‡‡
I couldn’t write Jake’s story when I was still thinking about it in third person. My error of course–I’m busy looking in the wrong direction while it’s jumping up and down waving at me frantically from another direction entirely–but I wouldn’t have been able to write it in third person. If it had come in third person, the Story Council would have had to give it to someone else. Jake didn’t start to make sense to me till I was writing ‘I’. Once I was inside his skin and going ‘oh yes I know’ about his generally rather wired approach to life I knew where I was. I was telling a story about a, well, about a friend.
To Be Continued. . . .
* * *
* Mine has been jammed ‘on’ since birth.
** I think you can rely on my being in a bad mood, if I’m sitting on a porch of an old folks’ home.
*** Yes, I do this a lot.
† Back when it was still a short story
†† Or equivalent
††† *(&^?<#^=**+}%$£”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
‡ Generally speaking as a reader I dislike books that swap from first person to third to omniscient chapter by chapter or whatever. Choose your horse and stick to it and stop playing hopscotch midstream. I admit that there are some very good books that have been written in various voices–and I’ve even liked some of them. But the voice shift never makes me happy.
‡‡ Stories don’t necessarily care if you’re interested or not, as long as you’re getting the words down right. They figure you can be interested later. At the moment, you’re busy.
‡‡‡ OUTLAWS is a bit different. It doesn’t stay in Robin’s voice for long, there’s Marian and . . . er^ . . . and also I grew up with Robin Hood. I never really thought about his being a bloke till I got older, and started thinking about Girls Who Do Things, and getting angry on my younger self’s behalf for the way Robin dies–in the version I knew best–by a woman’s treachery, for no reason other than that she’s a vicious cow.
^. There are probably blog readers who haven’t read it, and I don’t want to spoil the joke
The disadvantages of hellhounds and the stupidity of humans
About a fortnight ago Chaos caught his first rabbit. It was breath-snatchingly exciting for about fifteen seconds: if you’ve never seen a whippet-type sighthound out-jinking a rabbit it’s extraordinary. Rabbits can turn on nothing, and there’s forty pounds of long legs to Chaos, but he was turning with the rabbit as if he was glued to it, which is what whippets do. And then he calmly leaned over and picked it up mid-streak.
It went limp, and I assumed it had died of a heart attack which I believe is not uncommon. And Chaos trotted right up to me, bearing his tremendous prize, while I was still standing there like a doofus trying to get my breath back. Oh, gods, I’m an effete little useless middle-class wuss, what do I do with a dead rabbit? So I praised him extravagantly–and praised Darkness as well, who had been looking the other way when it all happened and was being very good now about not having done anything astonishing.* And then, taking a firm grip of his harness, asked Chaos to drop it. Which, after a moment, he did.
And it came to life again as it hit the ground and bolted. Chaos, for all his many faults**, is essentially a sunny-natured and forgiving hellhound, and he gave a little twitch of oh! But you let it get away!, and then looked up at me and wagged his tail: okay, whatever, you’re the Hellgoddess, now what?
Today we were walking beside a cow*** field, with only a couple of strands of barbed wire between them and us so absolutely no chance I’m going to let hellhounds off lead, although it’s a lovely big empty field we’re in. Usually I’m constantly scanning the ground for hazards† and usually I see them first. But I missed Chaos’ rabbit a fortnight ago . . . and I missed the rabbit today too.
This one was sick. There are suddenly a lot of mixy–mixymatosis††–rabbits around. This one was crouched in the middle of the field, looking like a bit of crunched-up autumn scrub. And the hellhounds were on it before I could hit the brakes on their leads. There followed a dreadful minute or so while I tried to drag them off it, and they were just rolling it over and over toward me as I pulled on the leads and it feebly tried to escape, and I’m screaming No no no no no which of course was making no sense to them at all. . . . And I’m a useless little middle class wuss, and while I know the theory of how to break a rabbit’s neck there is no way I’m going to experiment on a miserable dying rabbit which would probably be grateful for the help to get it over with.††† This one just about managed to creep away again once I got hold of the hellhounds, and I hope it came to its end more or less comfortably and undisturbed in a hedgerow.
There are a couple of additional things going on here, beyond the normal instincts of dogs and the wussiness of humans, that are blighting my mood at the moment. I keep these guys as pets when in fact they demonstrate several of the markers of good working dogs. One of them is that they both like carrying things around in their mouths. Another of them is how interested they are in the wildlife around them (although I would have said that any dog that wasn’t is dead). And the third and fourth, bang bang, are that Chaos brought me his rabbit ‘live to the hand’ as they say, which is what you want, and that he did so ‘soft mouthed’. I can’t swear to the fact that he hadn’t done it any damage because it got away, but the fact that it got away says he can’t have done it very much: trust me, it was going like the devil. But soft-mouthed is a big deal like bringing it to you is.
Some people say that dogs don’t like the feel/taste of a mixy rabbit, and a lot of dogs won’t pick one up.‡ So I can’t say that today’s performance proves anything about soft mouths, or about what they were trying to do with it, if I hadn’t got in their way. But I will say that in the condition it was in and with two of them, they could have killed it as fast as blinking, and they didn’t, and some of the time while I was screaming and pulling, they were behind it and rolling it toward me. So I’m sitting here thinking dolefully that here I have two working-bred longdogs who are obviously worth training‡‡ and I’ve probably screwed up their good, positive instincts about bringing prey to the hellgoddess in charge . . . and I just want a couple of companions, I don’t want dead rabbits. ‡‡‡
Sigh.
Tomorrow is another day. I just hope we don’t see any rabbits.
* * *
* Working sighthound owners of course see this every time their dog has a good run after a rabbit. It’s still amazing: it’s amazing that it can be done at all. The speed is exciting enough but the agility is flatly incredible. And the first of those 357.5 degree turns at blind-career speed should pop every tendon in the dog’s body.
** Let me tell you about his current eating ritual. On second thought, not tonight. I’m depressed enough already.
*** Well, steer field.
† You know I used to claim that walking was good plotting time
†† I’ve been trying to get on Wikipedia, which claims to have an entry, but it seems to be down as I write this. Wikipedia down?!? Mixy is a horrible disease–the rabbit develops lumps or tumours, and the skin around its eyes swells and the eyes themselves get infected, so the wretched thing can’t see which way to run, even if it had the strength to do so, which as the disease riots on, it doesn’t. And this is biological warfare–some criminal s.o.b. in a lab coat held up a test tube and said, Hey! Here’s the answer to the rabbit population! –And it isn’t even that. A few rabbits survive, and breed mixy-resistant children. And meanwhile it’s a horrible, horrible disease and even allowing for the fact that many people are stupid, clueless, and cruel, there are quite a few that aren’t, and I can’t understand how this plan was ever okayed and the salient test tube contents released into the countryside, both ours and Australia’s.
††† And I may be useless and middle class, but I’m bright enough to know that breaking the neck of something the size of a rabbit is going to take some skill
‡ I should note here somewhere that it’s rabbit-specific, or anyway that neither you nor your dogs can catch it. Non-wusses will eat mixy rabbit, and feed it to their dogs.
‡‡ Or would have been worth training: I think a hunter would say they’re a bit old to start now
‡‡‡ Although in the current economic climate, maybe I should get someone to teach me to break rabbit necks, and then to gut and skin them. And I’m an omnivore; it’s a bit like knowing how to sew on a button or give the Heimlich Manoeuvre: you may choose not to or never have to, but you ought to know how.
Computer Men
They came through my front door looking solemn, handed me the bag of doughnuts* and said, We’ve decided you have too much tech kit, and we’re going to take it all away. We’ve brought you some paper and pens. Oh, and you can keep your phone.
HA HA HA HA BLOODY HA.
Computer Men think they’re so funny.
Computer Men think they can get away with anything because if they ever fired me I’d be a drooling idiot within forty-eight hours.** And they’re right, of course. So, to begin with, our top level summit wasn’t as awful as, at 3 am***, I’d decided it was going to be: I’d decided that the only reason they’d decided to come here in person† and furthermore in force, was that they were going to fire me. Being fun to watch has its limits. And I was going to have to fall on my likeliest-to-impale writing instrument, because there was no other answer.
Ten hours later I’m not entirely sure what I’ve agreed to, but I’ll find out next Wednesday when my usual Computer Man†† plus Number Two Computer Man who was here today with Head Computer Man, turn up bearing my new replacement laptop††† and a list with a lot of xxxxxs on it about what they’re going to do to . . . uh, the phone, and all the pieces of paper and the pens. But one of the unredeemable disabilities that all my pieces of paper labour under is the homeopathic software. Which may very well be the answer–or rather the question–to most of my fiendish and paroxysmal problems–including my current interesting experience of the forum. Computer Men have, they say, exhaustively played basketball with this blog’s forum back at their office and can’t get anything to misbehave. But they aren’t playing with several gazillion KB of imperfectly domesticated homeopathic software.‡
Here’s the news however. At the end of all the negotiating‡‡ and after I had (foolishly) let them upstairs into my office where they were wrenching things out of the walls and laughing maniacally‡‡‡ I said One last thing. Can you pleeeeease stick all your scruples and clever ideas in your . . . er, aside, and just give me Firefox? Or Mozilla.§ And, flushed and sparkling-eyed from electronic mayhem, Number Two Computer Man complied. . . .
And at about this point, when I might have been in danger of sitting down and trying to find out (a) if I can use it and (b) if it will by any chance allow me to play in my own forum, I looked at the time and said, Yeeep! Leave now! I have to go ring a funeral!
I’d got home last night to a somewhat wistful message from the tower captain of my Wednesday bell practise asking if I might by any chance be able to ring a funeral this afternoon. Jeez, I’m so popular lately. But as I’ve told you I believe that bells should be a part of more of the rituals of life–births, weddings, deaths, birthdays, anniversaries–than they are, so it’s one of those situations where if I can I should, so I said yes.§§ This is at a tower I hadn’t rung at before§§§ but it is a trifle notorious in the area, and I said to Marilyn, er, what about the bells? You know my handling skills are a little lumpy. Oh, you’ll be fine, she said.
She lied. These bells make the ones at our once-a-month practise at the village-next-door look friendly and cooperative–and for similar reasons, which is that they are rarely rung. But you’re standing there frantically fighting with your rope and saying to yourself, Service to the community! This is a skilled, valuable service to the community! Clank! This particular ring of bells also sound like dented tin buckets, which is a little disheartening. But we rang. By golly we rang.
One of our number had come on his brand-new Harley Davidson, of which he is–ahem!–somewhat proud.¤ He rolled silently downhill past us who had parked our large clumsy more-easily-blocked-in cars a bit of a distance from the church, popped the clutch and started with a ROAR. Oh that Harley roar. We watched/listened to this performance and then one of us said to Marilyn, who is married to Motorcycle Dude, what does the thing weigh? Isn’t it hard to handle on the ground? Marilyn said, I haven’t a clue.
I said, Harleys aren’t so bad, because their centre of gravity is so low. Some of the other, taller bikes are trickier–
And the fellow who had asked the question said, And how do you know this?
And I said, Because I used to have a motorcycle, of course!
And Marilyn said, Yes, I’m sure you did. You look like a motorcycle chick.
I’m going to take this as a compliment. Even if it may only refer to the fact that Motorcycle Dude also wears high top All Stars.
* * *
* No of course I haven’t eaten any! Just looking at the bag is making my wrinkly, menopausal belt^ tighter! The bag has a little plastic window in it so you can see the doughnuts inside! They’re all plump and light golden brown and dusted with sugar and the one in the centre of this perfect framed picture of depravity has the little hole where the jelly-squirter went in facing out and a single drop of deep garnet jelly is poised there! I can see the calories beaming out at me! Especially the jelly calories! AAAAAAUGH!
^ Actually I’m not sure belts get menopause.
** All right, all right! Thirty six hours!! Maybe twenty four!
*** So like half an hour after I’d turned the light out, when I should be so deeply asleep only a howling hellhound could wake me up
† Bearing doughnuts
†† Who will have been let out of his darkened room by then, given a radical massage and put on a strict regime of vitamins and cold baths
††† The one with more memory than more memory than the entire pantheon, which isn’t enough. Which I’ve already paid for. When HCM passed me the invoice today I looked at it and uttered involuntarily, J—-. My eyes are bleeding. That’s why we keep you, said HCM. We enjoy your use of the language.
Fine. Buy some of my books. The money’ll come back to you in a few hours anyway.
‡ Or the OED, but I’ve never found the OED to be anything other than perfectly stable and polite. Or the bell-ringing software but that’s really teeny.
‡‡ I want some of my paper in notebooks. With pretty covers. And a proper fountain pen.
‡‡‡ No one can laugh as maniacally as a Computer Man
§ Some of you may have noticed a couple of random comments from me on the forum this afternoon, trying to get the damn thing to crash with a Computer Man looking over my shoulder. It took several minutes, but it whined and fell over finally.
§§ There are occasional advantages to being a fairly lousy ringer. If I were good, this attitude could get me in a lot of trouble.
§§§ Which meant I would get a tower grab out of the occasion. This might mean more if I kept track of the towers I’ve rung at, which I don’t.
¤ He has the complete kit too: the full leathers, etc. Well, I did the full leathers thing myself–after I’d taken my first header off my bike at speed, destroyed my nylon parka and developed a nice case of road rash. Furthermore, I had Harley leathers because those were the only bike leathers there were in those days. I should show up at bell practise some night in my old Harley jacket, which I still have, and freak ‘im out.^ But Motorcycle Dude’s new Harley jacket laces up the back. Okay, I’m jealous.^^
^ It has my Phi Beta Kappa key dangling from the breast pocket. I was a cow when I was young too.
^^ Perhaps this is the moment to mention my Harley Davidson fountain pen. No, really.