July 2, 2009

The saga continues

 

It’s still hot.  And it’s doing that catching-up-with-you thing, when it doesn’t cool down enough at night so you’re already starting from half-warm the next morning.  I have turned the Aga off.  I’ve lived at the cottage for five years and this is the first time I’ve turned the Aga off.  Usually even in gruesome weather we get enough of a through breeze on our hill that it gets sucked down through the cottage with all its windows open:  and the Aga is on one side of the kitchen island, and the hellhound crate is on the other.  But this is that dense, mostly motionless heat . . . and I was seriously freaked out by Darkness being so sick day before yesterday. 

            I was going to take tonight off.  It’s hot.  And there’s a pupdate.  And there is also PEGASUS*, as there is always now PEGASUS** . . . and I have not one but two canons to try and thwack into a take-to-Oisin shape by tomorrow afternoon.  I’ve decided I like canons.  And one of them is specifically for posting on the blog.  So it’s in your interests that I should take a little of tonight off.  Really.***

            But I didn’t want you to think that life has got all peaceful and everything and I haven’t got anything to write about.

            Last night it was . . . ahem . . . late, even by my standards, when I finally went upstairs to run a bath and start winding down toward sleep.  The adrenaline from the opera would keep thrumming.  But it was going to be dawn soon and I needed to get back out of bed again to squeeze our slow dawdle in before we were at risk from sunstroke.

            And I discovered I had no hot water.  I have no idea why I had no hot water.†  And I don’t know about you, but I don’t want a cold bath even when it’s ninety degrees out there in the atmosphere.  It took me another forty-five minutes to boil enough water to create four inches of tepid bath:  remember I said I had turned the Aga off?  This means I have one rather weedy little plug-in electric burner†† which takes forever to heat anything up, let alone a large pan of water to boiling, and an electric kettle, which boils about a pint.  Sigh.  It was dawn by the time I went to bed—dawn comes very early this time of year she adds hastily—having thoughtfully unplugged the phone first.

            But the phone machine will pick up calls even when the phone doesn’t ring.  And when I got out of bed at 9:30 there was still a striking lack of messages from the Bang & Olufsen engineer.  So I rang B&O again. 

            I had been planning to begin this entry with Bang & Olufsen is a big weenie.  Unfortunately I have had to stand down from my most emphatic condemnation.  But I had not had a lot of sleep and I live by my B&O and had been without it for 24 hours at that point.  And the frelling little git who picked up the phone told me that the engineer would get back to me ‘in due course’ and that ‘he was a working man, you know’!  (*&^#@]+%$£”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!  I composed several letters to the president of B&O during the morning’s slow dawdle.  And I had a funeral to ring this afternoon so I’d got down to the mews for lunch in a timelier manner than I might otherwise have done . . . whereupon the phone rang, and—calloo callay—it was the engineer.  Saying that he could do it now, or he wasn’t sure when he could fit me in. . . .

            (*&^#@]+%$£”!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

            I want my B&O.  I raced back to the cottage to let him in. 

            And my B&O is now working again.  So that’s okay.  And I’m not sure if the engineer rang up the office and said, a word in your ear, Jack—because I had perhaps made reference to my future letters to the president of B&O—but I received a good-customer-relations phone call from either the previous frelling little git or some frelling new git, which was basically five minutes of pressing the ‘apology’ button.  But . . . the engineer is just a guy, like my builder:  he’s impossible to get hold of, sure, and he rings you up and wants a decision now, which is annoying.  But he’s only one guy, and the guys he hires are only more one-guys.  B&O is a major frelling international company with a reputation as top end tech and customer relations so slick they leave a slime trail—and allow me to repeat, as I did to the apologising git—that this is the second time in five years my B&O has broken down, which suggests to me that perhaps it is not made of platinum and rubies after all—and I think possibly B&O might consider spending less money on glossy fliers and champagne parties [sic] and hire a second engineer and a secretary to keep track of them, at a particular local franchise.

            I can hardly wait to get back to the cottage tonight and find out what happens when I run a bath.           

* * *

 * I think I’m probably getting to the stage where I mutter characters’ names in my sleep.  I’m certainly at the stage that when I wake up I’m often—briefly—in a world where there are pegasi.  This beats waking up to a world where there are—briefly—vampires, but the pegasi land has a lot of unfriendly things with teeth too, it’s just that—so far as I know—none of them are undead. 

** I am trying to avoid scaring myself unduly about the fact that PEGASUS is going to go . . . on.  Gods help me if I just stay in the ‘er—what world am I in?  What do I need to be hiding under the bed from here?’ phase through a whole second book.  

*** Slightly depending on how you feel about canons, of course.  Although neither is exactly a canon as your average counterpoint tutor would recognise it.  Fortunately Oisin is not average. 

† Although I kept reverting—remember it was very late by this point—to a Very Much Earlier Era where I lived in an ancient flat dominated by a vast oil-and-gas monster which was not only the cooker/stove and the central heating, but also the hot water.  But the Aga does not heat my water.  I think.  Or if it does, why do I pay both an Aga man and a boiler man for annual services?  And what does the boiler do? 

†† Mind you, I’m grateful for that.  I turned the Aga off first . . . and then couldn’t find my two-burner countertop cooker, which I had foresightfully bought when I moved into a cottage with an Aga.^  I have no idea where I might have put it:  the cottage is not exactly rife with substantial hideyholes.  Little pieces of paper go missing constantly . . . but something the size of a two-burner thingummy in its cardboard box . . . no.  I rang the ironmongers’, and of course they didn’t have any plug-in burners.  And then, miraculously, they did:  someone emerged from the back room blowing the dust off, and I went round and bought the sucker.  I don’t actually like raw courgettes all that well, and I’m sure the hellhounds would be outraged by cold food, although it’s always cold again by the time they deign to eat it.  I wasn’t even thinking about hot water. 

^ I know the usual system is to have a second cooker/oven/whatever.  There isn’t room.

July 2, 2009 | Filed Under perversity of life, real world, ugh 

comments

Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people. -- Thomas Mann