Bitty
It’s been a bitty kind of day and I am feeling very bitty about the brain and disinclined to compose a smooth flowing blog entry moving thoughtfully and gracefully from one topic to the next Get real McKinley when have I ever done this??? Okay less than usual tonight. It’s a Sunday supper evening–now shoe* courtesy is a demonstrably variable item, as pursued lately on the forum, so how common is the leftovers supper on Sunday possibly after the big midday meal or possibly just End of the Weekend it’s Monday Tomorrow I Am Unmotivated**? I think of Sunday leftovers as a Fine Old Familiar Tradition that . . . I just have never somehow had much to do with, like beer drinking or wearing white gloves.*** As far as I’m concerned leftovers are always a good idea.†
And I have all these links stacking up in my ‘blog stuff’ folder. Hmm. [juggling noises]
So lying around in a stupor of digestion is the perfect time for a movie, right? So just before you hit the TV remote†† here’s a little one to warm up with, courtesy Blackbear:
http://upyernoz.blogspot.com/2009/02/star-wars-retold-by-someone-who-hasnt.html
And speaking of the stupor of digestion, you may or may not want to approach this:
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2009/02/passive-aggressive-cakes.html †††
Right. Now that I’ve got you and your clicking fingers all softened up . . . Something completely different: ‡
I can’t decide if this guy(s) scares or fascinates me more, but before those of you hitherto unacquainted with the faf, the gib, and the lob switch off after the first paragraph of the first entry on the opening page ( . . . as I write this, presumably someone reading this post a fortnight or a year from now will see something else), well, skip on down to the last two sentences which take my breath away for their sheer vicious accuracy about life in this world, whatever the specific politics behind them:
As much as we might all yearn for peace, history has shown that Palestinians understand only violence. Well, violence and Arabic, but Arabic is notoriously difficult to learn, while most of us can become fluent in violence in just under a semester.
I tend to come away from a read of fafblog‡‡ needing a strong cup of tea and a lie down‡‡‡ but it’s mind expanding in a way not dissimilar to hallucinogenic drugs. Which way did you say up was again? And the concept of ‘down’ again please? If Castaneda’s Don Juan were into modern politics, he might write like this. I recommend a scroll down the opening page, which will include:
The Second Coming
Snow Day
Pie Blogging
And the side bar is good too. Say, for example, George Washington’s thirty penises. No, sic. So go look already.
And now that I’ve managed to get us back on politics (sort of) let me offer you something Blackbear posted in response to last night’s entry about Obama:
http://www.theonion.com/content/news_briefs/black_man_given_nations
And don’t forget to click through to:
http://store.theonion.com/black-man-given-nations-worst-job-p-372.html §
Which made me laugh immoderately which laughter may or may not be a good sign of something or other. I fear the Onion’s readership is a trifle college educated and white which for better or worse would be me. But at least we now all have a particoloured president. Ha. Ha.§§
* * *
* Okay, here’s one of those links I’ve been longing to offer you and no idea how to plug it into one of my standard smooth flowing etc entries. FEET CAKES.^ View and be . . . slightly ill.
http://cakewrecks.blogspot.com/2009/02/thisll-cure-that-freaky-fetish.html
But you’re all fans of cakewrecks, right? One of the truly brilliant manifestations of the blogosphere: you look at something like cakewrecks–so simple, so inspired–and think, Yes, It Was All Worth It, Computers and Blood and Screaming, etc^^, we have cakewrecks.blogspot.com. ^^^
^ Courtesy southdowner, although several of you have sent me cakewreck links. Which says something about the unity and communality of this blog’s readership. Let’s just leave that thought right there. . . .
^^ I am not only very tired and brainless, I am listening to Beethoven’s Fifth, which always makes me feel a bit like Harry standing on the top of that mountain about to save the day in a grand and swashbuckling manner or, well, there’s a scene in One of the Third Damar Novels that has that effect on me too, but you wouldn’t know about that, would you?+
+ No, I am not a nice person. Hadn’t you figured that out yet?
^^^ And now, whilst still speaking of links I have been longing to offer you and clueless as to how to present them, aside from with a flourish, um, er, here’s one that made me laugh so hysterically that the hellhounds came to investigate+ but it’s very rude and anyone of a delicate disposition should eschew it. She Whom I Will Not Expose to the Calumny of Millions By Revealing Here suggested I put it in very small print down at the bottom of an entry, but I don’t know how to do very small print in WordPress, so you’re just going to have to PAY ATTENTION TO ME TRYING TO WARN YOU HERE THAT IF YOU DON’T LIKE BAD LANGUAGE, STAY THE FRELLING WHATEVER AWAY FROM THIS LINK, OKAY? For the rest of you, especially the Computer Challenged, click through immediately:
http://www.theonion.com/content/video/sony_releases_new_stupid_piece_of
+ Don’t you think you need to lie on the sofa to recover?
** I of course find these little observances of normality^ fascinating because Free Lancers Have No Normal. One can get quite wistful about other ways of life even when, for example, one knows one couldn’t keep a schedule to save one’s life. I have enough trouble getting to service ring at 8:50 every Sunday morning. Especially when I was probably up till about [MMMPH] the night/morning reading. You know I used to fall asleep over whatever I was reading, and that was the sign to turn the light out. Now I hear my chiming clock chime unholy numbers^^ and think, shut up! You’re lying! If it were that late I would be falling asleep!
^http://wondermark.com/488/ (also southdowner, who gets around)
^^ 666+
+ You all know this t shirt, right? http://www.topstitches-uk.com/proddetail.php?prod=1005
*** Although first time I started learning to ring handbells, I was ringing the handbells of a Careful Person Who Cherished His Beautiful Glossy Handbells, and we all had to wear gloves. This is not uncommon, by the way. But it did cast a pall of surreality over the proceedings that . . . actually suits handbells extremely well, and it’s probably where the glove thing comes from and nothing to do with keeping evil corrosive fingerprints off the bells. Niall is much too eager to get handbells into people’s hands, anyone’s hands, to obstruct the process with a question of gloves. If asked, he would probably say that his bells will see him out, corrosive fingerprints or no corrosive fingerprints, and his handbell heir can worry about it later.
† No cooking! More time to play piano/read/plant things! And nineteen bars of chocolate left from the box of twenty!^ ‘Over’ is perhaps a superfluous detail. . . .
^ So Peter has only just brought it home, okay? I haven’t had much time.
†† Which in this household causes an avalanche of hellhounds, who know what that noise means. Person on sofa! Yaaaaay!
††† Speaking of cakewrecks, which we already were, down here in the footnotes, and southdowner, who’s responsible for this one too. I feel that some of these people must be murder mystery readers and maybe they should get out more.
‡ It’s life, Jim, but not as we know it
‡‡ Which is Blackbear’s fault/blame/responsibility/daring/luminosity/twistedness/etc
‡‡‡ Yaaay! say the hellhounds. Hmm. Is Blackbear conspiring with the hellhounds? What are those special mod powers anyway?
§ And possibly apropos of views from different sides of a question
§§ And if whoever sent me the link to the grade-level comparison of Obama and Bunion’s first press conferences would be so kind as to remind me I’ll frelling credit you. I couldn’t find the email last night, but fortunately the link itself popped up on google very nicely.
Other people
This has been a day with too many other people in it. It’s another spectacular as-if-spring day, got up to 51°F this afternoon, the jungle is outdoors and humming to itself*, the sky is sunny and clear, out of town there are skylarks over every field as thick as house sparrows back in the days before house sparrows became endangered too** . . . and half the population of southern England trooping over the Hampshire landscape. Too many skylarks is welcome. Too many mobs of Homo sapiens is not. It’s true that I’m a misanthropic crank, but people in groups way too often become a practical case study in Othering. There’s a certain kind of organised group that is a jewel in the crown and reminds me why the British are/were notorious for politeness: the Ramblers** often produce this kind***. And of course there are lots of nice friendly polite miscellaneous groups of walkers whose dogs and children are under control. But I seemed to meet mostly the other kind today. Gaaaah. And these are the people who look at you as if you’re intruding on their space and bothering their dogs, because to them you are. You’re not them. You’re Other.
I came home snarling and ran full tilt into a big local garden opening, with attendant flocks and clusters of visitors, all moving at a it’s-a-beautiful-day strolling amble and mostly strung out across the street with no inclination whatsoever to move–because I was in their space too†. So having eventually penetrated this mêleé–nudging people aside like driving through a herd of sheep: the looks of outrage are similar too–parked Wolfgang and prevented the hellhounds from making any new friends††, I stomped out to my tiny garden at the cottage and started hoicking up celandine which is always suddenly everywhere about this time of year, and contemplated my atoll. You know, the one with perfect weather and perfect uninhabitedness††† and the perfect ferry arriving once a week with perfect supplies‡.
And so, speaking of Othering and that one of the reasons I would never make a public figure is because there are too many other people involved‡‡: There was an article in the Guardian a few days ago entitled: ‘When he fails, he will be a black man failing’.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/feb/16/barack-obama-election-race
The headline on the front page to make you flip through to look for it was: ‘Why the Obama presidency fills me with fear’. It’s by Hannah Poole, who writes a lot for the Guardian, and I usually read whatever it is, because she’s a good journalist and a classy writer. She’s also black and was raised by white parents. ‘When he fails–and he will fail, because he’s human–he will be a black man failing.’ I’m sure everyone who wants him to succeed is worrying about this: that not only has he inherited what may be one of the biggest messes not only for Homo sapiens but for the planet since the first amoeba stood up on its hind pseudopods so it could carry more alga home in its fore pseudopods, but he has to do it as the first black/dual heritage/anything but pure lily white‡‡‡ American president ever. Yes.
But in with all the good sense and thoughtful prose and awareness of an intelligent human being writing about an issue that means a lot to her, I have two buts to but. The first one is, yes, we live in an appallingly racist society, and the first nonwhite president is going to get it in the chops oftener and harder than another white boy would, because he is Other . . . but would you rather Obama hadn’t got elected?§ Maybe a first black president in twenty or fifty years would have had a slightly easier time of it. But maybe the second nonwhite president in twenty or fifty years will have an easier time because of Obama. Since we have Obama–since he was willing to run and to risk being the first–can we please remember to be happy about it?
And my second but: ‘Perhaps my unease is best explained by looking at the coverage of Obama we’ve already had . . . listening to commentators marvel at how articulate Obama is (what they mean is articulate “for a black man” . . .’ Uh, wait a frelling minute here! How about articulate after the witless buffoon we’ve tried not to listen to for the last eight years?!?
http://www.politicalbase.com/profile/Mark%20Nickolas/blog/&blogId=6233
(I’m of course sitting here thinking, okay, why is it only tenth grade? Aren’t we all grown ups here? How many ninth graders pay close attention to presidential press conferences? I’d say only the fast-track early-acceptance most-likely-to-succeed geeks, and they know more words than any of us anyway.§§ But the point is still a good one.)
PS: Did you know that said witless buffoon has been voted only seventh worst president? As Lucy Mangan says in the Guardian, we want to know who voted for the other six. http://www.c-span.org/PresidentialSurvey/Overall-Ranking.aspx
* * *
* Although some of the humming is the first bumblebee I’ve seen this year. Hurrah for bumblebees, which are endangered, and just by the way cute and furry and astonishingly mild-mannered and also astonishingly large.
* I think I’ve told you that Hampshire is doing extremely well on the conservation front in at least three areas: skylarks, brown hares, and English bluebells. And at least we have bumblebees.
** http://www.ramblers.org.uk/ There are a lot of Ramblers around here. Like skylarks.
*** Even if a large party of beautifully kitted-out walkers makes me giggle, me in my beat-up All Stars and muddy jeans. It’s even a bit mysterious to me that I’m not more into walkers’ kit than I am: usually kit is half the fun. But I’m not. Although I’d kill for a good pair of comfortable, flexible, lightweight, waterproof walking shoes that actually fit me ^ and if I found them that might open the dangerous door to specialised sports equipment so maybe I’d better just keep buying All-Stars. And skin recovery cream for my wet muddy feet.
^ I don’t want much, do I?
† And of course running over people in your car is overreacting and furthermore I don’t like blood and screaming or getting arrested
†† Hellhounds are such optimists
††† This is where it all falls apart. Peter wants to play bridge. That’s three more people. I want to ring bells. That’s at least five other people, plus a bell tower.
‡ Yes, I see lots of room for error and mishap too. WHAT NO GREEN & BLACK’S THIS WEEK??????
‡‡ No I’m not. I’m a professional writer who keeps a blog. And you don’t count as other people. You’re readers.
‡‡‡ Dual heritage is her phrase. She also says this: ‘. . . suddenly the debate seemed to be about whether or not Obama was “really black” . . . and by claiming him . . . black people were accused of “denying his white side.” Please. No one is denying him anything, but let’s be realistic: it’s not the fact that Obama has a white mother that has made his presidency such a historically astonishing event.’ No argument. But I’m one of the people who worry about ‘black’ as opposed to ‘white’ because it’s still about Othering. It’s about Us and Them. If we only call him black we’re missing a trick. I’m not saying we don’t live in an appallingly racist society and I’m depressed but not the least surprised at the stories Obama tells about being black in America, which means having any discernable trace of nonwhite blood because this is a racist society. I’m saying can we please grab this chance with both hands to start experimenting with the idea that you don’t have to be one or the other?
§ I’ve pretty much stopped having wistful Hillary thoughts. We’ve got what we’ve got, and he’s bright and motivated and a hell of a hard worker and I’m just concentrating on keeping my fingers, legs, hellhounds, chopsticks, All-Stars laces, etc, crossed for good luck: http://www.theweek.com/article/index/93167/Barack_Obama_A_rocky_start etc
§ Obama was probably one of them. I aspired to being one–although my pretence-of-normality thing was horses rather than basketball–but I didn’t really make the cut.
Shoes
Some Exceptionally Rude Person* emailed me today to say that she was shocked–shocked–to see in yesterday’s photos that I was not wearing All-Stars.
Those are my indoor shoes, of course, you silly person. Do you wear your ordinary outdoor shoes on the furniture?** –With or without the company of your dogs, cats, ponies, hamsters, boa constrictors, what-have-you.*** It’s true I don’t wipe the hellhounds’ feet before I let them up, but they had their feet wiped at the door when I took my All-Stars off. And that’s an old bedspread protecting the sofa†.
Never mind the caterpillar track on the soles: I have no idea what the makers of these shoes think those human-fly†† soles are for. The shoes are fleece-lined suede for pity’s sake: I don’t care how magnificently you’ve everything-proofed suede, it wouldn’t last a single hellhound walk in bad weather around here. Also the fleece makes them squishy, which is delicious in a wintertime house shoe, and hopeless in something you’re trying to cover miles in.
And furthermore I have a second pair of these lovely warm luxurious slippers with the joke all-terrain soles at the cottage. You’re shaking your head wisely: this is the drawback of living in two††† houses: you keep having to have two‡ of everything. Nonsense. It’s a glorious opportunity. My second pair are PINK.
‡‡
And that curious circular object you see vanishing off the left-hand margin is an empty hellhound bowl. It’s been a good day: hellhounds ate dinner.‡‡‡
* * *
* You Know Who You Are
** On second thought, don’t answer that. I don’t want to know.
*** Do parrots do curling-up-and-going-to-sleep-on-your-lap equivalents? I know they can be very affectionate, but will they roost on you? (Do parrots snore?) I still have fantasies of a parrot^ and I know a lot of the bigger parrots take no guff from other members of the household, including the predator-shaped ones. And I already have hellhounds, so it’s not an issue, but I admit that if I were limited to one species I would not want one that didn’t want to lie with you in heaps occasionally.^^
^ I’ve told you about my poor budgie who only lived a year. That was sufficiently traumatic I keep thinking ‘not this year’ when I think about trying again. And it’s coming up Easter, so it’s Is It Going to Be This Year? time of year for a young budgie again. Sigh. I do not need any more complications in my life right now. +
+ A budgie isn’t complicated! ~
~ Shut up.#
# And you could teach it to talk! =
= Sure I could teach it to talk. Now let’s discuss the language it would actually learn in this household [having just spilled peppermint tea all over the Aga and indulged in a suitable linguistic meltdown|]
| Evil cow! it would say. (Among other things.) Evil, evil, stupid, clumsy cow! –Note that I make peppermint tea with loose peppermint leaves.
^^ Although the hellhounds take exception to the occasional. They wish to renegotiate terms of occasional.
† Which needs a wash. All substances, objects and human limbs that come in contact with hellhounds need washing sooner rather than later. I’ve been putting off washing the blankets in the dog crate because my sitting-room has been full of jungle which is where my Magic Heated Laundry Airer gets put up, whereby I am not mauled by wet hairy blankets for a week while the wretched things dry. I did finally have to do a set of my sheets, since I’d run out, and was mauled by wet sheets for two days. But it was only two and they aren’t hairy. Well, they aren’t very hairy. Meanwhile I’m missing my opportunity, while the jungle is outside (mostly). It’s going to get seriously cold again. But washing dog blankets is so . . . epic.
†† Did anyone else feel old, bereft and tragic at the news that Lux Interior died?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2009/feb/05/lux-interior-the-cramps-dies
††† . . . or three
‡ . . . or three
‡‡ And today’s All-Stars. 
‡‡‡ This almost makes up for having rung like death and taxes at bell practise tonight. Sigh. Some of the problem, I suspect, is that my piano lesson was rather too interesting^ and I was/am tireder tonight than is desirable. I did however have the extremely pleasant experience of offering Leo Tips for Ringing Stedman. Leo’s the one has kids, a family, a life and only comes to one bell practise a week,^^ so while he’s been ringing longer than I have and is higher in the tower hierarchy^^^, he’s only just learning Stedman. My advantage as a tip-offerer is that learning Stedman is still horribly fresh in my mind. I know from bitter experience that a lot of good ringers’ tips about things are based on a greater understanding of bells and ringing than you have in the first place or you wouldn’t need the frelling tips.
^ If I can get my head around it, I may blog about it tomorrow.
^^ Speaking of things that are hard to get my head around. And I may be going to have a Brand New Tower Experience on Monday. Our handbell third is encouraging Niall and me to come to his tower practise. I’ll see how well I’m walking on Monday. The upright thing is still pretty challenging.
^^^ He has his own set of keys to the church. When I am occasionally pressed into letting-people-in-and-out duty Vicky has to lend me hers. The front door has your actual bar on it, like a besieged castle, but the back door has one of those old-fashioned monster keys that needs its own scabbard. It is not a key you carry idly, on the off chance you might have a sudden passion to play the church organ.
On the threshold of the palace
Person editing. Hellhounds assisting. Holly, of the previous generation, made a rather good desk, once you got accustomed to the gentle rising and falling motion. I used to read some of my homeopathy homework on her.
(Peter is not doing anything I say, of course. Authors are like that. I should know. )
IN THE PALACE OF THE KHANS
CHAPTER 1
Day 1. Hi there. This is from Dara Dahn, capital of Dirzhan. That’s way out east. Next but one and you’re in China.
DD is a twin city, like Budapest (been there) and that place in the US (haven’t). Looking out of my window, this side of the river’s Dahn and the other side’s Dara. That thing bang in the middle, right on the river (see photo), is the Palace of the Khans. Now, that is one cool building. That’s where the president lives . . .
“But the man’s a monster!” said Nigel’s mother, not looking up from her book.
“What kind of a monster?” said Nigel.
“You don’t want to know,” said his father.
“How do you know what I want to know?” said Nigel. “We’re all supposed to be keeping a blog for Mr.Udall. He doesn’t want to plough through a lot of stuff about the height of mountains and the length of rivers. ‘The president of the People’s Thingummy of Dirzhan is a monster’ would be a cool start.”
“Ah,” said his father.
”If you don’t tell me I’ll put it in anyway and post a copy to the Daily Mirror,” said Nigel. “‘Ambassador’s Son Calls President Monster.’”
“And if I do you won’t?”
“I’ll e-mail it to you before I post it so there’s time to change anything you don’t want me to say.”
“You should be negotiating over this dam, not the crew we’ve got. All right. The deal includes not talking to anyone about what I tell you outside this room. We detected three listening devices inside the embassy when we first moved in, quite sophisticated ones.”
“Wow!” said Nigel. “They wanted to know stuff about the dam, I suppose.”
The dam was a big deal for Nigel’s father. He’d been Trade Secretary in Lima until a year ago, and it didn’t look as if he was ever going to get a move up. Dirzhan hadn’t had an embassy at all then, only an office where the Ambassador to Kyrgyzstan next door showed up once a month or so. Then the project for a British consortium to build an immense new dam in the Vamar Gorge had come up, and the British had decided that they’d better have a real ambassador on the spot. Nigel’s father had dealt with one of the companies in the consortium before, so he got the job.
Dirzhan was in the back of beyond of Central Asia, but there was one big plus side. The president of Dirzhan had been so keen on having a real British ambassador in his crazy little country that he’d simply turfed out the owners of an old family hotel, large enough to hold an apartment for the ambassador as well as the actual embassy, and as a result here Nigel was having breakfast in a gorgeous room looking out over the roofs of Dara Dahn.
”You still haven’t said what kind of a monster,” he said.
“A monster of efficiency, I suppose. Sometimes he appears to have no decent human feelings at all. Apart, perhaps, from his affection for his daughter. If someone threatens his prestige or stands in his way he has them removed, which may well mean that they end up dead. Usually it’s done by members of his bodyguard, but if he wants to make a special point of it he does it himself.
“In the early days of the dam project – before my time here – there was a disagreement in his cabinet about who should be the main contractors. Two of the ministers had taken bribes from an Italian bunch. They misjudged the situation and argued their case a bit too forcefully. The President gave them plenty of rope, until without warning he took a gun from a drawer and shot them both dead.”
Nigel felt the blood drain from his face. There was something about people getting violently killed. It was the stuff of the old nightmares he still sometimes had. He’d never seen it happen in real life, of course, and in video games and films he’d learnt how to armour himself against the shock. But here, safe, relaxed, having a luxurious breakfast alone with his parents, his mother reading while she ate, his father holding forth about something while he spread his butter in an exactly even layer . . .
Neither of them seemed to have noticed. He pulled himself together.
“He’s a Varak, from the north,” his father was saying. ”They’re the smallest group, but they tend to hold positions of power because neither the East nor the West Dirzh, in the south, trust each other an inch. If they were to co-operate they’d run the country, but they can’t, so they let the Varaki do it.”
“Do they think he’s a monster?”
“Hard to say. He’s got complete control of the media, and ordinary people wouldn’t tell an outsider what they think.. My guess is that if there were ever such a thing as a free and fair election in Dirzhan he’d get about eighty per cent of the vote, simply because he makes the country function.
“He was a lecturer at Moscow University when the USSR fell apart twenty years ago, and his half-brother, who was the local chief of police in Dirzhan, seized power in the chaos and declared independence. He brought our chap back from Moscow and made him president to give a respectable façade to his regime. He then set about milking the economy for all it was worth.
“Our chap, the president, was not so happy. He was just as much of a thug as his brother, only a lot more intelligent. He wanted power, and he saw that he’d have much more power as the head of a prosperous, functioning state than a ramshackle, broke, falling apart one. He wasn’t interested in stashing millions of dollars away in Switzerland.
“There was only one way the disagreement could end, and he got his blow in first. It is widely believed that he arranged to have his brother strangled and watched it happen on CCTV. He then rushed in and shot the men he’d hired to do it and announced that he, personally, had foiled a coup attempt against the regime but had arrived too late to save his brother.
“The media trumpeted the story to the world, but I doubt if many Dirzhaki believed it. It’s a weird little country – one foot in the age of the internet and the other one still in the Middle Ages.”
“Can I put that in my blog?”
“Um. I suppose so, provided you don’t say I told you. Anyway, the Dirzhaki had been here before. Khan after Khan in the old days had most the men in his family killed off as soon as he moved into the palace.”
Nigel was ready for it this time.
“But the Varaki didn’t like it,” he said in a no-big-deal kind of way.
“Oh, they’d have taken it in their stride – like I said, it was what they were used to. At least the men he’d shot had only been Dirzh.”
“I suppose that’s pretty monstrous, but . . .”
“He’s still a monster. Tell him about the snow ibex,” said Nigel’s mother, still not looking up from her book. It didn’t mean she hadn’t been listening. She read like breathing. She could do other things at the same time.
”I was coming to that. At first glance it seems to be true crazy-monster behaviour, but in fact it fits into the same pattern. I sent you a postcard of a snow ibex, didn’t I, Nigs? It’s a species of goat found in these northern mountains, nothing to do with the true ibex though it’s a very handsome creature. In the old days it was a royal beast. Only the Khans were allowed to hunt it. The villagers were well rewarded after a successful hunt, but if no animals were found the head man of the village was staked out to die, on the grounds that he’d been allowing poachers to operate. The communists put a stop to that, and the ibexes were hunted almost to extinction for the sake of the rams’ horns, which are highly prized in Chinese medicine. When the president staged his coup the numbers were down to down to the last eighty-odd animals. It’s still an endangered species, but the numbers are now up in the hundreds, thanks entirely to him.”
“What’s so monstrous about that? It sounds like good-guy stuff.”
“He does quite a bit of good-guy stuff if it suits him. He doesn’t waste billions buying high-tech fighters and tanks. He’s much more likely to spend it on schools and hospitals. He has total control over what gets taught in the schools, mind you. If a teacher steps out of line he doesn’t just get fired. He disappears. Same with newspapers and journalists, even more so.
“The business about the snow ibexes came up when he declared that Dirzhan would henceforth be known as the People’s Khanate. As president he obviously had inherited the rights and privileges of the khans, and henceforth only he would hunt the snow ibex.
“Those last animals were confined to one remote valley, where the villagers were not in the habit of paying much attention to edicts from Dara Dahn. So the hunting continued, though by that time it might take a skilled hunter two or three weeks to track and kill a ram. They were utterly unprepared when the President showed up and told them that he had come to hunt the snow ibex. Unsurprisingly, with only eighty animals left, none was found for him to hunt. The headman of the local village was staked out and died in the night – Dirzhan winters are harsh as they come. The village was searched, all the hunting rifles were burned, any householder with an ibex skull was was hanged in his own doorway.”
Again Nigel was ready.
“Wow! That’s monster stuff all right. This was up in the mountains, so they were Varaks too?”
“Varaki. My guess is that he wanted to show the Dirzh that nobody gets any favours unless it suits him.”
“What happened next year? Did he shoot one?”
“I must go now. I’ll get Roger to show you the video. And think about this business with his daughter, Nigs. I can get you out of it if you don’t feel like it. No problem.”
It wasn’t true and they both knew it. He needed to keep the monster sweet.
”Oh, I’ll go all right . . .”
Ferdinand
Atlas had Wolfgang yesterday and . . . wow.
Poor Wolfgang leads a hard life with me. I’m always expecting him to go bouncing over farm tracks and to climb up banks, so I can park him far enough off the road (or equivalent) for Land Rovers, tractors, and bewareable chestnut mares having bad days to get past him while hellhounds and I go questing for adventure.* We frequently come back from these excursions with frondage** dangling from our undercarriage.*** And then there is the variety of mazes we need to penetrate/extricate ourselves from daily: the parking space at the cottage alone is at least graduate level in tactics, area of specialisation: wigglibility. There is not merely the little cul de sac itself which is just about wide enough for your outside mirrors so long as you don’t go in for ranks of great horny mirrors, there is the fact that it’s a steepish hill and that the turn into my car-length driveway is steepisher, there is usually a great houseboat on wheels thing in the single space next to me and the tiny brick retaining wall on the other side of my space which I measured for carefully when I asked Atlas to build it, because there’s a perfectly good strip of garden there if there were some way to keep the dirt in, turns out to be Fractionally Too Tall . . . and my Grand Neighbour at the top of the hill, on the other side of the fence that my not-quite-little-enough wall retains to, has the reprehensible habit of leaving his curly wrought iron gates open the near side of which blocks my driveway.
So I’m afraid Wolfgang tends to leave bits of paint behind kind of a lot. Also he lives out and I never have time to take him to the car wash . . . If this were Maine, he would be a rust bucket by now: and if we’re about to start having spells of Real Winter I need to get my act together better. I’ve been meaning to ask Atlas–who is a mechanic and General Vehicle Person along with his creative carpentry skills–to patch poor Wolfgang up†, and I keep putting it off due to Dealing with Jungles etc. Yesterday was finally the day. Atlas came round and picked up the car key, and I didn’t see him–Wolfgang, I mean, not Atlas–again till I drove down to the mews for supper, by which time it was dark. I did have a faint tingly sense that Wolfgang was redder than usual but it wasn’t till this morning . . . wow. If you didn’t look at the number plate†† you might say, hey, new car. Atlas is amazing.
In Maine I had a Subaru station wagon for commuting from New York City with fifteen or so dozen H&H bagels in the back.††† No, really. I’d survived my first winter back in Maine–after a few years in that soft option‡ Manhattan–with my first MGB‡‡ but I decided the eccentric artist thing could be taken too far and I wanted something that didn’t leak, whose heater produced heat, and whose electrics were not infested by mad misogynist‡‡‡ gremlins.
I’d also just won the Newbery, which meant I could afford to buy a new car. But you find out that you’ve won the Newbery in January, which is a little late in the season for buying new cars. I’d done my homework and Subaru was the answer, but the only one my local Subaru sales had left was a station wagon. I’d been frugally asking about hatchbacks or thereabouts, but aside from bagels, I was worrying about how many books, black leather, studs, rhinestones,§ and typewriters I could fit in a hatchback, since my life was still in New York City, but Maine had more trees and a better coastline.
And then the only thing they had left was a station wagon. Furthermore a brown station wagon. This was in the days of my consummate aversion to brown. My heart sank. But I agreed to go out in the teeth of the gale, since of course it was galing–gales make you want a new car with a heater, etc, worse–and have a look at the revolting object.
As the salesperson and I were battling across the lot I heard a little voice in my head: Of course I’m brown. My name is Ferdinand.
When we got there the salesperson opened his mouth to start the rundown of the finer points of the last of the ’83 Subaru station wagons. I’ll take him, I mean it, I said, or possibly shouted, as the banshees wailed Noooooooo! Don’t leeeeeeeet her! She’ll be haaaaaaaappy! Ferdinand was a treasure. I got used to the colour.
* * *
* No, no! Not adventure! Please! No adventures!
** This is a word. I just checked the OED. I was going to invent it if it wasn’t.
*** We have less underbumper than we should because it keeps getting sheared off. Yes, we go where no VW Golf should be expected to go, but those whatever-they’re-called are incredibly cheap plastic crap for what they cost to replace. So we’ve stopped replacing them.
† And several assortments of neighbours would be glad if I stopped lowering the level every time I park there.
†† Number–license–plates over here tell you how old the car is, if you can read ‘em. I can’t. I was just beginning to learn the old system when they frelling changed it. But Wolfgang is on the old system, and he’s a P registration, which means he’s a ’96. There are probably readers of this blog younger than my car.^ Which is why I try to stick to ‘frelling’.
^ There are a lot of readers of this blog younger than my MGB.
††† http://www.hhbagels.net/(S(zj40sxn5a1eoyw45j5ywknag))/HHMaster.aspx
In those days they didn’t have a web site of course. Nor, I think, did they ship worldwide. And no, I don’t–sigh–in the first place I can’t face the postage and in the second place I can no longer afford the calories. SIGH. Menopause: when there aren’t enough hours in the day that, if you spent them all swimming the English Channel in cold weather, you could burn off enough calories to eat bagels. I mean, one bagel. Treading water from your shark cage.
‡ JOKE. Give me six foot of snow to that gritty February wind whistling down the canyons any year. And furthermore you can never be sure that you won’t suddenly get six foot of snow in Manhattan.
‡‡ No, really. But–trust me–she was a great improvement on the motorcycle I’d had the last time I’d lived through a Maine winter. There had been a pick-up truck named Wilbur about the place then but I wasn’t legal to drive him.
‡‡‡ Possibly misanthropist. But it’s hard not to take personally.
§ These did me no good whatsoever. People from small towns in the Midwest still stopped me in the street–including in places like the East Village which in those days people from small towns in the Midwest+ had no business being–and asked directions to the Empire State Building or a good local chili house. I tried so hard to look dangerous. Sigh.
+ I am not being geographist. Some of my best friends are from the Midwest.