Misery
I wanted to title this something like ‘Bad Dog News’ but I was afraid regular readers might leap to the wrong conclusions. The hellhounds are fine.*
But . . . remember Mike? Adorable cocker spaniel puppy given via deepest conspiracy to my friend Daisy? A conspiracy initiated a few months after her last critter died (she had two old dogs and an old cat all go within a few weeks of each other) when she said to me with tears in her eyes that she didn’t know how she could go on without an animal? One of my better blog entries, I still feel, the Arrival of Mike.
But eight months later and he’s turned into the most appalling, mannerless, disobedient little tyrant. I had of course noticed this was happening—and heard about it—but I hadn’t realised just how bad it was. I’m not really used to remedial dogs. I haven’t had that many dogs in my life but I just sort of Don’t Put Up with certain kinds of behaviour so we never get to the remedial phase.** And Mike is still very friendly—and on the very infrequent occasions I’ve needed him to listen to me, he has done—he’s a working dog, for pity’s sake, from a working family: his basic problem is that he hasn’t been given any work to do. But all those genes are still hanging out there waiting for orders, and, in the absence of orders, have found their own diabolical occupations. And he reserves his worst behaviour for his own ‘pack.’ As I say, I didn’t realise just how bad the situation had become. Daisy and Roy have had dogs before! They’ve had working cocker spaniels before! What happened! It’s also the waste of a dog—and Mike has the potential to be a very good dog, instead of a thirty-pound nightmare.
I’ve been talking to southdowner, Days in the Life’s very own professional dog behaviourist and mod extraordinaire, about him, and she, who is far too nice for her own good, had offered a free consult. Which between her schedule, mine, and Daisy’s, has been a monster to make happen. But Daisy and Roy went off on their usual fortnight summer holiday a few weeks ago—leaving Mike behind—and Mike has been really bad since they came back. So when southdowner said she was going to be passing by today I simply nailed her . . . despite the fact that Daisy and Roy weren’t going to be here. Southdowner could meet Mike and cast a steely professional eye over him. Daisy gave me the spare key and her blessing.
Maybe I can get southdowner to do a GUEST POST on basic remedial dog training philosophy. It wasn’t that Mike tried to eat us or crapped on the floor or anything. But as southdowner pointed out, he has no attention span and no boundaries: everything is on his terms, and he has no concept that he might have to behave according to someone else’s specifications. We spent an hour standing in Daisy’s kitchen with Mike on lead . . . while he leaned on his collar as hard as he could and refused to respond to southdowner because she wasn’t responding to him. She was, of course, just not in the way he had in mind. But she’d asked me to put his collar and lead on him while she watched . . . and I knew at that point that the news was bad, because he writhed and struggled and chewed on my hands . . . at the time I was so nonplussed I wasn’t really taking it in beyond ‘WTF?’. . . . And simply preventing him from biting me. But I can’t even imagine having a dog that won’t let you put his collar on. You have all the cards here! Not just the aces! All the cards! Dog wants to go for walk! Only way dog can go for walk is if dog sits quietly to have collar put on!*** It only takes a few minutes—maybe a few extra minutes during puppy adolescence—but along with creating a dog that goes for its walks politely you’re also creating a dog who is accustomed to obeying.†
Southdowner says that she’ll do one more freebie if I can get Daisy, Roy, and their daughter Zara who was my chief co-conspirator in the Great Puppy Search, together. She’ll sit them down and read them her best professional riot act. And then she and I will pray.
Today I can really use the cheering-up of b twin’s pupdate. . . .
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*To the extent that hellhounds can ever be described as ‘fine’. Although I might be tempted to describe them as ‘fine’, on hellhound terms, if we could get one or two little food issues a trifle more straightened out. I have told myself so often that after their first two years of being disastrously allergic to their food, plus all those hellhound genes telling them that eating is beneath them, the miracle is that they eat at all . . . that these words have etched their own little permanent channels in my brain. I don’t have to bother to think them any more. They’re like a ritual object: your lucky pebble or the bracelet you always wear for meetings with your boss. And as you stagger out of the latest disaster zone you think, gods, how bad would it be if I didn’t have my mantra/pebble/bracelet? Reeeeeeeeeeeelly bad. The purpose of the mantra in this case is to give me hope that the Food Issues might yet improve. In our present hot weather remarkably little eating is going on at hellhound food bowl level and I’m having some difficulty maintaining my natural posture of serenity and equipoise. Eat your lunch you damned little ratbag, I at least want your pelt in good condition when I turn you into a hearthrug.
** I’ve also never had a Bad to the Bone dog, which do exist, although they’re rare. It’s rarely the dog: it’s always the human. And I did know a seriously dangerous Jekyll and Hyde dog, who I think must have had a chemical/physiological screw loose somewhere.
*** The other standard ‘you have all the cards’ situation is usually about food. You can reinforce all kinds of things just by mealtimes, let alone clicker training and treats . . . with most dogs. Not with hellhounds. But I do still have the drop on them about hurtling.
† Allow me to reiterate that the hellhounds got their nicknames honestly. But they sit to have their leads put on, they sit before they go out the door, they lie down in the car and they go lie down in their bed when they’re sent there for pestilentialness. There is a bottom line about companion animals. That’s mine.
Pupdate – 5 weeks on
from B-Twin
Pups are doing what is to be expected – GROW! LOL
(Of course getting them to stand still to take pictures is near impossible!)
And some more video for your amusement…..
Pups running and being generally puppy-like: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w1jpGFuRgxM
More feeding frenzy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJu6w7P5Uao
The Bar being upheld.
Attentive.....
"Hey! Water on the ground!"
A Sheepdog Army
"Hey! It moves!"
"Bill" & "Ben" ....
"Ben"
Some Thoughts on ‘The Nine Tailors’
Since I am a literary bell ringer, Dorothy Sayers’ bell-ringing murder mystery, The Nine Tailors, has come up a few times on this blog. So when I read the following in the ‘letters’ section of The Ringing World last week I thought, ah ha! Blog entry! . . . RW is slowly beginning to develop a web site rather than just an opening page that says ‘hi, we’re the change-ringing weekly paper, you look way too normal, go away’ but they aren’t hanging their letters yet. First I looked up D G Rowlands’ home tower’s web site* and the only bell ringer contact info they offered was the church office phone number. So then I emailed RW and asked if they could put me in touch with D G Rowlands and they immediately sent me his home phone number. Which tells you something about how small and friendly the ringing world is. We’re all fruit loops but we tend to be sociable and hospitable fruit loops.
So then I spent 1,000,000,000,000 hours trying to ring D G Rowlands and getting a busy signal. I suspect an on-line cruising teenager and no broadband. When I finally did get through I abruptly discovered that saying ‘Hi, I would like to run your letter on my blog’ sounds really strange. But he said oh, fine, go right ahead, without even asking me to repeat what I had just said . . . slowly. Or to spell my name and then checking this blog first. Small and friendly and trusting, as I say.
There is I acknowledge safety in obscurity. I’m at the mews and my copy of Nine Tailors is at the cottage, so I have just been googling it in the hopes of finding listed somewhere what the method of the famous peal was—and for that matter why it was supposed to last nine hours. An average peal is three and a quarter hours or so. Nine hours isn’t a peal, it’s a . . . well, it’s a curious sort of masochism is what it is.** But in my fruitless search I kept running into these book reviews saying that the book is boring and/or hard to follow because of all the bell ringing.*** Er. I read Nine Tailors repeatedly in my Sayers-mad youth; it was one of my favourites. I loved the arcanery of bell ringing—who needs to understand it? Not to mention the Fens landscape, which I didn’t understand either but could still get all swoony over.†
However, people who can’t read Nine Tailors because of all the bell ringing probably won’t find a lot of the following letter interesting either. But then people who find disquisitions on bell ringing boring and impenetrable probably don’t read this blog regularly anyway.
Oh yes, and SPOILER ALERT. If by some mysterious chance you haven’t read Nine Tailors and still think you might like to some day, you don’t want to read the following.
Sir,— The technical aspects of Miss Sayers’s bellringing in The Nine Tailors have been argued over and debated many times, not least in this journal, but there are a number of other questions that arise also. They are all fairly obvious and I don’t claim any originality in setting them down here, though I haven’t seen them posed in print before.
In particular, the circumstances leading up to the death of Jeff Deacon suggest several problems to the literal mind. According to Will Thoday’s account (“The Dodging”), he put Deacon up in the bell chamber and tied him to a beam there, leaving him overnight. Would Deacon, a murderer, have submitted to being tied up there in the cold? The bell chamber would be open to the weather unless the louvers were blocked with snow and freezing cold. We will skip the problem of his bodily functions, as does Miss Sayers and just about every other fiction writer of the period†† (Walter de la Mare excepted) ††† and note that in the morning before daybreak, when Will took Deacon food and drink he found him “all right only very bad-tempered and perished wi’ cold . . .” I’m not surprised! Just that ordeal might well have killed him—freezing cold with very little freedom of movement. Then, how did he get Deacon to submit to the tying up again? Because Will collapses with ‘flu’, Deacon is then left the whole of the day and evening in the bell chamber, still tied up in the freezing cold. When did he die?
With a 9-hour peal intended, it is impossible that the conscientious steeple-keeper Jack Godfrey would not have gone up to check the ropes and adjust them. He might well have fitted new or repaired ropes a few weeks before and gone to adjust them before the New Year’s Eve ringing. He could hardly have missed seeing Jeff Deacon tied to a beam of the bell-chamber even if after dark and with only a lantern.‡ Then again, after the handbell practise‡‡ for Wimsey’s benefit—and before dinner that evening—the ringers go to the tower and ring up the bells for the service. It would only need one bell to go up “wrong” (easily done on heavy old bells on plain bearings)‡‡‡ and Jack or someone would have had to go up and put it “right.” They would also have seen Deacon.
As has often been said, it is debatable whether the noise of the bells even in such close proximity could kill anyone, but if we accept it for the sake of argument, did Deacon survive the ringing up and later the ringing (on 6 bells only) before the Watch-night Service? If so he then had the 9 hours of peal ringing during which time Wimsey/Miss Sayers implies that he died.
I reckon that he died a lot earlier and from cold (despite Will Thoday’s coat), not the bells. It was purely his bad luck that Jack Godfrey or another didn’t discover him tied up there and raise the alarm.
The one technical (ie “ringing”) point that I’ve not seen mentioned is that unless Hezekiah left “Tailor Paul” up at backstroke after the service ringing (back six?) or the raising, then ringing The Nine Tailors for the Old Year (9 + 12 strokes) would have left him at the wrong stroke for starting the peal.§ But being a downy old bird, no doubt that’s what he did!
D. G. Rowlands
Ivor, Buckinghamshire
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* I am still not really accustomed to the fact that everyone and his/her axolotl has a web site these days, but I’m learning that looking for everyone’s axolotl’s web site is the first thing to try. And I get really cranky when there’s a web site and nothing on it. Content! I want fascinating content from the comfort of my kitchen table! To read in my copious free time! When I should be writing my blog entry! So I can get back to PEGASUS before my single firing brain cell closes down for the night!
** And Lord Peter just would be a bell ringer. Of course. Gah.
*** Note that whoever wrote the Wiki entry on Nine Tailors is glaringly not a bell ringer.
† I have long been capable of becoming swoony over British landscape.
†† Something that bothered me a lot when I was a kid. Was I the only human being in the galaxy who had bodily functions?
††† I don’t remember this at all. But then, my memory makes a sieve look like a bank vault. Maybe it’s my excuse for a long leisurely de la Mare wallow.
‡ And one might assume Deacon would be trying to catch the attention of any unexpected visitor
‡‡ Handbell practise? Okay. Must read this book again.
‡‡‡ ‘Wrong’ means the clapper is lying on the wrong side of the bell as it stands mouth-up waiting to be pulled off for change-ringing. Yes, it matters. You don’t really want to know, do you? I could explain this and plain bearings if you really wanted me to, but I’d have to think about it earlier in the day when I’m awake first.
§ Usually you ring a few rounds before you start your method. He could have just not rung the first handstroke, and picked up on the second (back) stroke. Or maybe I’m missing something.
Treasure Trove
Guest post by Peter
This is a by-blow of Kiftsgate+, one of those roses that lack the gene that tells them when to stop growing. I first saw Kiftsgate in the eponymous garden forty-odd years ago, where it was covering three full-grown cedar trees. We went straight on from there to Treasure’s nursery, and spotting Treasure Trove on offer I bought it on the strength of the label. I planted it down by the pond at the bottom of the garden of our old house, hoping it would eventually scramble up into some large old yew trees. It took a few years to get going, but on a tip from a TV programme about Paul’s Himalayan Musk++ – another of those roses that lack the gene – I started giving it a barrow-load of manure each winter spread in a wide circle around its base. By the time Robin showed up it was well up into the yews, and also into the three full grown birch trees standing close beside the (small) pond that composed the Two Acres.*
We used to open the garden for charity+++ three or four times a year, timing the first opening to coincide with Treasure Trove in full flush, when if all went well she** would be lowering her long trailing stems of several hundred small roses each, opening pale apricot and fading to white, towards the water. Three weeks of that and she was over for the year, but during that time the garden would have been worth visiting for that brief burst of glory alone.
My garden here isn’t as elfin as Robin’s, but I think you could fit about sixty of it into our old garden. One yew tree would have taken up a good third of it. So it was pretty dotty of me to pick up Treasure Trove at the first rose nursery we visited after the move. But ha! Just over the wall behind my shed, in a corner of the rough paddock where a neighbour keeps a few horses, was a small stand of some of those coarse nondescript trees one can never bother to learn the name of. They could do with something to brighten them up, if only for three weeks of the year. There was a scruffy little bed my side of the wall with nothing but bluebells*** in it and a variegated ivy in the corner.
I widened it a bit, dug it out as deep as I could, chucking out any bluebell bulbs I found, filled it up with good rich earth, and popped Treasure Trove in, not expecting her to do much that year. “Grow, you bastard,” I said, a charm I learnt from my saintly mother. It worked, and by the end of the growing season she’d reached the top of the wall, all set to stride up into the trees come spring.
Winter came, with storms. I was woken one night by a frenzied banging coming from immediately above my head. My house was once part of the stables of a Georgian mansion, and I sleep in what used be a section of the hayloft, with the ceiling sloping down on two sides to within four feet of the floor. The bit immediately above my head sloped like that, with the roof-slates close above it, and the banging was caused by the branches of a tree just behind my house threshing around in the gales and thwacking the slates. Not good for either slates or slumber.
I called my neighbour next morning and asked her to have the tree pruned, and was relieved a couple of days later to hear the sound of a chain saw. Too late I discovered that she’d solved the problem by having the whole grove felled, with the result that Treasure Trove had no fresh world to conquer and was forced to colonise the top of the wall, the shed, and the façade of the house. Not much daylight seeps through into the kitchen just now.
All is not lost. The trees are of a type that responds well to coppicing, and the new shoots already rise six foot above the wall. This winter I shall endeavour to persuade Treasure Trove to turn her attentions to them, and negotiate with my neighbour to leave a few trees standing next time.
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+ http://www.kiftsgate.co.uk/kiftsgaterose.shtml I find this an immensely frustrating site. Home is here: http://www.kiftsgate.co.uk/index.shtml But you’d never know that this is one of the most fabulous gardens in England. For pity’s sake give us some decent photos. Make us yearn to go there, aside from wanting to gape at the original Kiftsgate the way zoo visitors hang around the big cat pens.
++ I put in both Kiftsgate and Paul’s Himalayan Musk later on. Ahem.
* “All gardens, no matter how small, should have at least two acres of woodland.” Lionel de Rothschild. ^
^ Dear Lionel was known for having the common touch. How big a pot do I need for two acres?
** I think the feminine is house style for roses on this blog
*** A miracle in the woods, a pestilentially invasive thug in gardens.^
^ The problem is they’re endangered. Every time you hoick out another bucketful from your garden—I do this too—you should take them out to the woods somewhere salubrious, and plant the suckers. But I guarantee that would be the day that the Plant Police were patrolling in that area and you’d get arrested for stealing them. No, really: it’s illegal to do anything to a wildflower in England but admire it. And things can get pretty hot about something like bluebells, for which there’s a thriving black market. Hey, if I saw someone in the woods on his/her knees with a trowel and a bucket of bluebells I might hit ’em with a hellhound first and ask questions later.
This finishing-a-novel thing
I went bell ringing tonight because I am an irresponsible halfwit. Well, I rang an unexpectedly reputable touch of Grandsire doubles at service ring yesterday morning* and one of the yardsticks both of how bad a mood the ME is in and how thoroughly some learning process has been gouged into my flesh is whether body memory will take over when my brains are running out my ears: yes my thumbs hit the long-extending-hellhound-lead brakes on first sight of frelling cat or frelling pheasant, before any higher faculty has translated what my optic nerve is reporting; yes I can still make long thirds in Grandsire when the frelling conductor says ‘single’ and I’m in the wrong place at the wrong time. And yes there’s an upper limit to the amount of your own company you can stand when you’re trying to finish a novel.** Creating havoc*** in a local tower is sometimes the best option.
This finishing-a-novel thing is a ratbag. This isn’t news—even to me—but I tend to forget between times. † And CHALICE was at least short. Finishing DRAGONHAVEN, however, was a major ratbag. I remember it all too well.††
PEGASUS has been around one way or another for a while. I told you it began life as an AIR ELEMENTALS story, yes? ††† The basic ‘because she was a princess she had a pegasus’ premise is pretty old. One of the reasons I haven’t got on with it any sooner is because I know even less about the ending than usual . . . or maybe I should say that there is a Big Climax on or near the end‡ which could go radically one of two ways . . . and I don’t know which way. Not knowing something this important makes me nervous. But PEGASUS has come up in the story queue and I can like it and shut up. Or not like it and shut up. Keep writing and shut up.
I finished page thirty of the second draft today. I write in single space—to get more on a computer screen—so this would be page sixty of a standard double-space print-out. I’m on page forty of the third draft. Eeeeeep. This rate of exponential explosion had better slow the frell down or I’m looking at a trilogy.
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* Even more unexpected and more reputable than merely getting through the beggar, which is enough on Sunday mornings. But depending on which bell you’re on and on how the touch is called, you may have a fairly easy time—when you’re first learning a method the conductor will make a point of giving you a quote easy cough cough unquote time—or you may have to do something unspeakable every call. I was on the unspeakable bell for that touch. And I still did it. Yaay me. Sunday morning and everything. Of course that was it for the day. I walked out into the sunlight^ afterward, took a deep breath and thought, or ‘thought’, this would be a good day to . . . sit down.
. . . . In front of a computer screen, and get on with PEGASUS. Sigh.
^ Yes. Sunlight. Summer in England and sunlight. Far too frelling much sunlight, in fact: I am TIRED of watering. I want some RAIN.
** Husband and hellhounds don’t count, unfortunately. The presence of husband and hellhounds, while much to be preferred to the absence of husband and hellhounds, still does not prevent the wearying shrieks of fury and despair, both creative and technological, which are the author’s daily lot.^
^Generally speaking I win hands down in the shrieking category, but Peter has been known to expatiate on the crimes of computers in quite an energetic manner. He coulda been a contender.
*** And I didn’t. They were glad to see me.
† Like childbirth, I believe. I’ve been told by several mothers that the old cliché that if women really remembered what childbirth was like no one would ever have a second child^ is true even in this era of pharma-cornucopia and prescheduled Caesareans. Which doesn’t even address the life sentence following. Baby books often get their progenitors out of bed in the small hours^^ with long wailing cries of The second chapter suuuuuuuucks! And what are you going to do about the confrontation between the oracular axolotl and the evil magician? You need it for the plot but it doesn’t woooooooooork! However, once they’ve grown up and left home books rarely ring you up from unknown villages in East Timor or Gash-Barka saying that they’ve just run out of money and could you wire some right now because they’re hungry and it’s getting dark? Or steal all your original Kingston Trio LPs when they go off to college because you don’t appreciate them and didn’t you know that they’re so painfully retro they’re cool?^^^
^ Maybe something could be done about twins and triplets before the race died out?
^^ Sometimes said progenitors haven’t been in bed yet
^^^ No.
††And I will never forget that bats^ fell out in the 1,000,000th rewrite and their absence was not queried by any of the regiment of copyeditors and proofreaders^^ nor noted by the oatmeal-brained author who had managed to cut them in the first place with the result that they do not appear in the hardback edition of DRAGONHAVEN and I might have had to kill myself only I still have 5,978 books to write on the contract I signed to get enough advance money to buy Third House. I may still have to kill myself after I finish the 5,978th book. But by then I’ll probably want to kill myself. I’ll probably have run up several more literary atrocities on the kill-yourself tab by then anyway.
^ ie other critters besides dragons that fly
^^ Clearly more blog readers should be hired to read proofs
††† Sigh
‡ I’m a little careful about saying ‘the end’ after my experience writing three more chapters after the ‘end’ of HERO, which I told you about a little while ago.