Surviving
I can’t remember when the ME has been quite this savage quite this long. It’s been more sucky than not since November and it won’t go away. And having begun to hope, about ten days ago, that it was finally getting bored with me and thinking of finding a fresh, more entertaining victim, possibly on the other side of the planet where they’re headed into winter instead of out of it . . . the last week has been one of those besieged-castle numbers, where the enemy is at the gate and the supplies are dwindling. Gah. The hellhounds had to hold me up on our hurtle this morning, and offer a few basic directions (no, no, this way, not that way, that way is to Glasgow). And there’s the present carlessness adding a surreal gloss to the situation*: you mean I have to carry a fresh bag of dog kibble down to the mews? Gah.
It was a beautiful day today, and I should have been out in it, planting more roses.** But since I couldn’t get out of my chair*** I did the next best thing . . . I ordered more plants. No, no, not roses–other plants, so that I can point to them and say with wounded dignity, it’s not all roses, look, there’s a delphinium. And it’s supposed to be another beautiful day tomorrow, which I should also be out in, planting more roses, the other things not having come yet†, but I am going to the opera. I am. I’ve talked to my dog minder and put my spare keys through her door and the ticket in my wallet so I can’t discover I’ve forgotten it on the ENO’s front step tomorrow evening in London, and I’m going. Wheelbarrow with attached porter for door to door transport optional. Peter is paying for the taxi to and from the train station so I don’t have to decipher the bus schedule in my blurry condition. I suppose this is not a good moment for me to go all feminine and decide to wear high heels however. Oooowah. Makes me dizzy just thinking about it. Sigh. However, I Will Survive.††
* * *
* Never so surreal as Saturday night walking home at midnight however. One of Peter’s daughters was here for the weekend, she who is my excuse to watch a film.^ I could be reading page proofs of FIRE ELEMENTALS. No, no, let’s be hospitable. I’m only thinking of the pleasure of our guest. Of course. Of course.
She suggested THE KITE RUNNER which we duly watched. I can’t believe they cleared it for 12 year olds. None of the horrors is graphically displayed in grisliest Texas Chainsaw manner^^ but it’s very graphically horrible for all that. I took my glasses off a few times. Artistically and coherently I had some trouble with it–there seems to have been rather a lot that got left on the cutting-room floor–but it still took me a while to fit myself back into my comfortable, as-safe-as-life-ever-is, middle class existence in a small comfortable country town in Hampshire, England. And walking back to the cottage in the dark. . . .
The old driveway to the big house, which the mews’ courtyard opens off, is completely dark after eleven, when they turn the house spots off, and the dim little lamp on a dim little post that stands in the Y-fork where the mews splits from the main house drive. And it’s a long driveway. Even when you get to the main road it’s still dark because in the big house’s day this was still a part of its grandeur, so you have an eight foot flint wall on one side of you and an avenue of huge trees on the other, through which the streetlights gleam only fitfully. Hellhounds, of course, were delighted. Oooh! Superfluous hurtle! Oooooh! My lot was not improved by trying to figure out where they were during any given millisecond by the whipping in and out and back and forth of their extending leads. I could occasionally see a fawn flank flash, as it were, chaotically, across a streetlight beam: My steel-blue Darkness, forget it.
And then once we got back to shops, pubs and pavement there were Saturday night people to have to negotiate. Nobody–barring the occasional dog walker, or perhaps someone who keeps late hours and whose car is five miles away in a garage awaiting an overdue MOT test–loose on the street late on a Saturday night is a safe bet. I was rather glad to be accompanied by eighty-odd pounds of dog, even if the dog in question is a brace of mad hellhounds. It doesn’t matter that you’re in green, relatively law-abiding England where most people have enough to eat and many have enough disposable income to go out and get drunk on Saturday night, and you’ve been frightened and appalled by a film–a film based on a novel–about Afghanistan: if you’re freaked out by what humanity can get up to, then you’re freaked by humanity. One of the reasons domestic animals are so good for us is that they’re so clueless.
Walking back last night was quieter. Nobody on the street at all but us chickens/hellhounds.
^ Watching WAITRESS a few weeks ago without her around felt like playing hooky. Oh, this is also the daughter who plays the violin–she plays hers in public, with other people and sometimes in front of audiences. She said a while back–when it was still safe to say things like this to me–that she’d be happy to play with me if I found something I liked for violin and piano. That was then. This is now. Mwa ha ha ha ha ha ha. And I am going to get onto the third page of Sonata by Ratbag this week: even in my present la-la-la state I’m getting through page two relatively stoutly.
^^ Or so I assume, since I’ve never seen it. Are you kidding? I start nervously backing toward the ‘off’ button for certificate 15. I stopped watching ANGEL because it was too icky.
** When I’ve got everything out of plastic bags, buckets, cardboard boxes, and waxed paper mailing envelopes^ I’m going to go out there with a notebook and count exactly how many roses I’ve got in this cottage’s handkerchief garden.
^ Whenever I have a car again I have to go back to the Garden Centre with All the Pots and buy more pots. Specifically I need a matched pair of the Heaviest Pots in the Universe for the two weeping standard roses that are . . . ahem . . . still sitting around in a plastic bag full of wet dirt, their cardboard mailing box to support their long stems, and a green garden refuse bag to protect their roots from untoward sunlight. This is all taking place in the space, where there never is any space, between the greenhouse and the hellhounds’ courtyard at the cottage. All the other (ahem) heeled-in roses in pots are in that non-space too. A few of these things do go up to Third House eventually . . . when I have a car again and also when . . . if ever . . . I can get in the driveway at Third House again. At least Mr Chief Builder is back from Saskatchewan or the Galilean moons or wherever as of this morning+. I hope those he left in charge had some good bowling trophies to exhibit.
They need to be the Heaviest Pots in the Universe, of course, so they won’t blow over. I’m feeling a little twitchy about things blowing over since a few days ago when my abutilon leaped off the kitchen window shelf and rolled around the hellhounds’ courtyard like a horse having a good back scratch . . . I still don’t know why the pot didn’t break, but the abutilon is obviously feeling a trifle shaken.
+ Hours before I got out of bed. Mr Chief Builder is obviously mildly fascinated by these little demonstrations of the Artistic Life. No, no! This has nothing to do with being artistic! It’s about having no sense of time and always running over it! Time, I mean! –Plus the frelling ME. I slept ten hours last night.
*** Radio Three’s Composer of the Week–one of my favourite programmes–is Gaetano Donizetti. Who, as Wiki says, ‘ . . . is one of the most prolific . . . He composed about 75 operas, 16 symphonies, 19 string quartets, 193 songs, 45 duets, 3 oratorios, 28 cantatas, instrumental concertos, sonatas, and other chamber pieces.’ Seventy five operas. And, okay, some of them probably walk like a dog and bark like a dog but they also include L’Elisir d’Amore and Lucia di Lammermore and La Fille du Regiment and Don Pasquale and the three Tudor queens and a few more I wouldn’t throw off my CD shelf.. I don’t want to hear about Donizetti during a week I can’t get out of my chair.
† Actually I have two delphiniums in pots waiting to be done something with. Like put in larger pots.
†† Okay, you all know this one:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eim5jLlEPYI
But do you know this one?
http://uk.video.yahoo.com/watch/814544/3400917
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