Whimper
PEGASUS has only just let me go. I don’t generally work this late in the evening; the mind starts behaving like feta cheese earlier than this.* But I made an Important Decision** about PEGASUS’ future about a week ago, maybe a fortnight, and it’s been behaving like a hellhound let off lead ever since. YAAAAAAAAAH! WHEEEEEEEEE! And I am toiling in its wake saying, please, this isn’t fair, I wasn’t dressed for an assault on Everest, I had more in mind a stroll to the shops and maybe a nice cup of tea.
Meanwhile . . . I bunked off bell practise tonight.*** Sigh. But I drove over to Wednesday tower practise’s village this morning to walk hellhounds† and while the road was reasonably okay, in broad daylight†† at twenty miles an hour†††, it wasn’t anything I was going to want to be driving on after dark if it drops down below freezing again. And if it’s going to drop below freezing, it will do so during bell practise because life is like that. ‡ I have already had the less than desirable experience of backing out of my parking space at the cottage . . . just in time to discover someone coming up the hill behind me. And starting from a dead halt I couldn’t get back up my tiny private precipice to let them past. I wonder if the British even know what snow tyres are? More to the point, do they need to know? I’ve had several conversations in the last few days along the lines of ‘Yes, and I’ll be perfectly happy to wait another eighteen or twenty years for a replay.’ I agree.
And my fruit trees are flowering. Uggle muggle grrrugglpfffffff [further bad language]. I am going to end up causing exactly what bringing them indoors was supposed to prevent, which is losing this year’s fruit to frost. I have no idea where they’ve been, and they arrived–as you may recall–in the middle of a stretch of very hard frost, and while the trees themselves are hardy, these are little baby trees in pots which at a guess haven’t been out of the greenhouse they were born in. So I keep bringing them indoors.‡‡ And after two blizzardy, sleety days sitting on top of the Brand New Hellhound Weight-Bearing Crate Housing‡‡‡ they’re frelling flowering.§
However I’ve just brought my hand-sized frond of black bamboo indoors. This is my second attempt at black bamboo: last time it sat there looking stuffed for two years and then died. This time . . . I only bought it last autumn, so it hasn’t had time to indicate total paralysis and refusal to thrive yet. The catalogue company insists that it’s fully hardy but I call that freezer burn myself, so I brought it in . . . and looked it up in a book, slightly belatedly, where I’m told it needs protection from hard frost. Sigh. The jungle is getting more impenetrable all the time: I had been putting off bringing my Christmas stephanotis home to the cottage because princesses and peas are the shallow end where stephanotis and draughts are concerned but it didn’t like it here at the mews either so after I got the growlight hung we made a bolt for it . . . and with the Aga on the other side of the wall and a small private sun overhead it has at least stopped dropping dead and is contemplating recovery, although it makes no promises.
Neither do I. There is still no sign of our county council getting up off that beach in Bali and coming home to run a snowplough. The temperature actually clawed its way above freezing today and everything with a gradient spent some time shaking off the excesses of the last few days. This includes my little hill, although both the top and the bottom are still pretty unfriendly. But the long winding driveway at the mews is flat and pretty well a frictionless surface at present–as I know from (gulp) trying to walk hellhounds along it.§§ I’m getting tired of wondering if I’m going to get back to the cottage every night.
* * *
* So I write the blog instead.
** I think I made an important decision. That is, I think I made it, that it’s a decision, and that it’s important. There’s a reason I don’t talk a lot about my writing, you know.
*** This may of course have given PEGASUS airs above its station. Hey, you, you behave yourself. You’re only the way I earn my living^. Bell ringing holds the universe together. Didn’t you know?
^ Including paying vast, inflated invoices from the (*&^%$£”!!!!!! building regs people, another of which arrived today. One of the most insulting things about them is that they always say things like ‘inclusive’ and ‘for all visits to the site’. They lie. Every time someone moves some crosshatching on the plans it’s a whole new job and you have to have the inspectors out again to pass another first judgement and start the whole frelling scheme all over again. Beginning with the invoice.
† It is astonishing and ridiculous how claustrophobic I was feeling after only two days trapped in town–and as the photos I’ve posted the last two days prove, we’re not exactly imprisoned in canyons of cement and steel.
†† In fact, sunshine. Real honest to goodness SUNSHINE. The reflection off the snow was so bright my eyes were watering. It was thrilling. Even if I couldn’t see the hellhounds plaiting me to a standstill.
††† Twenty miles an hour! Wow! That’s almost as fast as a hellhound!
‡ And if Wild Robert actually made it here from east Cornwall^ he’s even madder than I thought.
^ well, nearly
‡‡ Trees are expensive. Not to mention having to wait a year to start all over again.
‡‡‡ I seem to perceive a pattern. Yes, very like a miniature Third House attic floor, only without the staircase. And the building inspectors. And the invoices.
§ And the rose hedge is putting out little green flowerbuds almost faster than I can break them off. Stop it you guys. Never mind the Aga, this is still February.
§§ Hellhounds have never studied practical physics, brazen truants that they are. They have not bothered to think through the fact that if they, forty pounds, four legs and longer than they are high, slip and slither on sheets of glare ice, then a hundred and mumble mumble pounds of upright human on two legs is . . .
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.