Frelling OBE
Vicky, our tower secretary, is one of the organising forces of the known universe. There’s the Electromagnetic force, the Strong nuclear force, the Weak nuclear force, the Gravitational force, and Vicky. She organises bands for weddings, funerals, special services, quarter peals and striking competitions, she looks after visiting bands . . . she’s been known to pressgang visiting ringers in the street when we’re short handed, even if said ringers were trying to have a bell-free holiday: and leave it to Vicky to know them and know they’re ringers . . . she chivvies our band to go to ‘education days’ and is usually one of the steady ringers who supports the learners. She writes the tower news and announcements that go in the parish magazine, and she’s usually the one who sends in successful quarter peal reports for publication in THE RINGING WORLD.
And with reference to the facts that she organizes our quarters and knows everyone who rings, has ever rung, has ever thought for two minutes on a Sunday morning when an uncharacteristically well struck touch of something or other is wafting out over their heads that they would like to learn to ring, she is also always looking for reasons for quarter peals. The birth of ringers’ children and grandchildren*, important birthdays and wedding anniversaries, successful circumnavigations of the globe in cowhide coracles, etc, anything worth celebrating happening in any ringer’s extended family, Vicky will ferret it out and we will ring a quarter for it.**
I imagine she does this out of a combination of a naturally socially-involved attitude*** and to keep herself from going mad. She says herself that organizing ringers is another of these cat-herding occupations and both from listening in on Vicky tackling people at practise nights and Sunday mornings to sign up for one or another of the occasions up on the board needing ringers, and my very minor brushes with ringer-gathering†, usually when Vicky is in Kenya or Suriname ††, I will support this view fervently. Feeling that there’s a reason for all this effort††† makes it easier to keep picking up that telephone.
My tower rings quarters every other Sunday, more or less. A few of these are ‘practise’ quarters, for those of us who have learnt something well enough we ought to be able to ring a quarter of it, but nobody’s party is spoilt if we fire out. But most of them are for some occasion or other. If there aren’t enough obvious events in Vicky’s ken, she goes looking.
A few weeks ago she decided that we should ring a quarter peal for Peter’s OBE. And of course his wife should ring in it.
Aaaaaaaaaugh.
I haven’t rung a quarter in over a year, I think, barring the accidental handbell one this spring. Because of the ME. As I keep saying, I have mild ME as it goes. And I can fake most things. I can ring at practises and ordinary services because you rarely ring more than a few minutes at a time—a ten-minute touch is about as long as it gets—twenty minutes if it’s a good band and we’re feeling frisky‡. Even on Sunday mornings when there are only four or five or six of us so we all have to ring all the time we still come to the end of a touch, stand our bells, and stop for a minute or two. If I have to slow down on hellhound hurtles, there’s no one to see but the hellhounds, and they’re used to it. My rose bushes don’t care if I sit down for a while. Writing and composing always have long periods of staring into space doing nothing‡‡ and my piano-playing always sounds like I have fourteen and a half arthritic fingers and a bad attitude.
But I can’t fake a quarter.‡‡‡ A quarter peal is forty-five minutes standing up pulling on a bell rope and concentrating. The ME means I have no stamina, mental or physical. Sure, on good days I could do it§ but I don’t know when I’m going to have a good day, or a bad day, or when a good day might suddenly, between one paragraph of PEGASUS and the next, turn into a bad one, because sometimes it really is that sudden. And organising ringers is already like herding cats: I’m not going to put myself or Vicky in the position of phoning her up half an hour before a quarter and saying I can’t do it.
Vicky said, of course you want to ring in Peter’s quarter.
Um.
Vicky said, I’ll find an eighth person who is willing to stand in at the last minute if you decide you can’t do it.
And she did. What’s more, all the ringers are people I know and like and ring with§§—it was conducted by the ringing master at my old tower who first started teaching me to ring a decade ago—and, knowing Vicky, she’ll have done that deliberately.
Well, I wouldn’t be writing about this at such length if we hadn’t got the quarter.
We got the quarter. Yaaaay.
I admit my anxiety level has been rising somewhat sharply over the last day or two§§§—and high anxiety levels are very bad for ME. I get up every morning sort of testing myself for squashy places—today I got up expecting my head to fall off and roll under the bed.¤ But it didn’t. I got through morning service ring. I got through hellhound hurtle. I got through pretending to work on PEGASUS.
I got through the quarter.
. . . The curious thing is . . . it was kind of fun. The fact that it was all an extremely good band except for me helped a lot, an extremely good band ringing a method they could do in their sleep.¤¤ And also . . . I’ve gone on in here before about how time on a rope is time on a rope is time on a rope and even when you’re not getting anywhere, if you’re a mediocre ringer who only learns by grind, you are getting somewhere: you’re racking up more hours. I still had to be hauled out of the wrong gaps a few times today but there were great stretches of it when I could just ring. When eight bells wasn’t too many ¤¤¤ and I could see exactly where I should be every stroke. I was thinking—wistfully—that at this rate, if just ringing gets familiar enough, I might even risk ringing . . . another quarter . . . some time. . . .
Peter was primed to be in the churchyard when we should be finishing, and to come up the tower ladder as soon as he heard us stand our bells. And present Vicky with the posy I had fought into shape and strapped together with a ribbon this afternoon for the purpose—although it was his idea. I had wailed, we’re ringing a quarter for your frelling OBE! And it was Vicky’s idea! And he said, that’s really sweet. Shall I bring her some flowers?
Peter is a nice man. I’m glad we rang him a quarter. I’m glad Vicky made me ring in it.
* * *
* Anybody under the age of 50 who lives within reasonable commuting distance of a change-ringing bell tower is hereby ORDERED to go learn to ring.^ Our average age is getting older and older and the usual elder-generation thing of worrying about what one’s own little piece of the world is coming to has some validity for bell ringers.
^ And you have to like it. And start bringing your friends.
** If we’re very lucky someone will commission us. The problem there is that you feel a fool if you lose the quarter. I have never rung in commissioned quarters for the obvious reasons of nervousness and mediocrity.
*** which I can’t imagine
† Ringers like Niall and Colin are worth their weight in gold.^ They just say ‘yes’ or ‘no’—usually ‘yes’. Way too many ringers say I think so and don’t get back to you. Or you ring them up and they continue to say I think so. Or they say, I’ll check my diary. And then they don’t get back to you. About the third time you’ve phoned one of these doofuses they start getting testy.
^ No, Niall is a scrawny little beggar, he’s worth more than his weight in gold.
†† She has some very well-located relatives
††† Howard Ogs’ retirement from fifty happy years of Bolster Evaluation at the Serendipity Soft Furnishings Factory, say.
‡ No, if the conductor is feeling frisky. A glint in Edward’s eye on a Sunday morning puts fear into the rest of us.
‡‡ But trying to look like you’re hard at work mentally pursuing the ultimate secret of life and art, in case the muse is watching.
‡‡‡ As I can’t fake riding. I’m only interested in riding if I can develop a relationship with an individual horse, and horses are live, and need regular work and consistent handling. I can’t do regular and consistent anything, and to the extent I can, it’s spent on hellhounds.
I’ve decided that the real purpose of the blog isn’t to keep my publisher happy, but to make me feel, on bad ME days, that I’ve got something done.
§ As on good days I could ride, which is kind of a killer.
§§ I only told Peter yesterday that I was ringing a quarter. And why.
§§§ Including Niall and Colin
¤ Not under the bed. It’s full of boxes of books.
¤¤ Plain bob triples. And I was only on the treble, which is the easy bell.
¤¤¤ In triples you only have to keep track of six. The eighth is the tenor-behind, who is always last, and you’re the seventh.
Guest post by Diane in MN
Dog Show Weekend
On Memorial Day weekend (late May, for anyone outside the US), we took Teddy to his first show ON GRASS. He hadn’t exactly been in a lot of indoor shows—his career started the first week of January, when he turned six months old, but even if there were shows in the Upper Midwest in winter, you wouldn’t risk going into the ditch to take a puppy to them—but even youngsters who know the routine at an indoor show can get a little crazed in an outdoor ring, and decide that the grass under their feet means that they’re there to have a good time. Or they can get overwhelmed by the whole atmosphere and forget they have a brain. Training inside or even in the back yard can’t replicate the real thing.
Good stand in the back yard--what about at a show?
We had a good taste of that on the Saturday. It had rained on the way to the fairgrounds where the show was being held, and looked like starting up again at any time after we arrived. Teddy and I were waiting under the tent* for the breed in front of us to finish, because we’d be first in the ring** when Danes were judged. Because of the possible rain, it was more crowded than usual under the tent, but he was fine with the traffic and the other dogs until someone knocked over a grooming table behind him. The table went down with a reverberant crash, and Teddy, who is sensitive to noise, decided that escape was his best option and tried to take a flying leap away from it. He didn’t go far because I was holding him close to his collar, but a dog the size of a year-old Great Dane, even a smallish one, doesn’t need to go to the end of a leash to cover some ground. Teddy ended up hitting a ring gate*** hard enough to knock it over and complete the job of freaking himself out. He hadn’t managed to pull me down on top of him, so I could get him extricated from the ring gate, set it back up, and begin trying to calm him down. And he did stop shaking: this was good. And then someone let their dog knock the table over again. “%$#*&@#! TABLE,” I muttered (or at least didn’t shout), and hauled my now pretty paranoid puppy over to the other side of the entrance to our ring.
At that point I wasn’t expecting too much from him. I was mainly hoping that he wouldn’t fixate on the idea that tents are scary and sensible puppies should stay out of them, and/or that ring gates are scary and sensible puppies should go nowhere near them. Going in for his class, he would have to line up along the ring gate under the tent, and come back under the tent to be examined after circling the ring. I would have a hard time getting him to do that if he was convinced that monsters might be lurking there. So I was encouraged that he walked into the ring and got in line (although not beautifully), and was willing to come back under the tent and stand for examination (although he leaned hard against my leg the whole time). He even stopped tucking his tail when he did his down and back^. He was recovering, and considering everything, he did very well.
While we were chatting with friends after Teddy had shown, I had a bright idea and asked Nina if she’d like to handle him on Sunday. Nina is a junior member of our working dog club and at twelve years old is a better handler than I am. She is used to big dogs—she put a championship on her Mastiff herself—and likes Teddy, and she agreed to take him in. Sunday was still cool but sunny, and we had a corner ring so the entrance wasn’t too far under the tent, a plus if Teddy remembered the dangers posed by grooming tables and resisted going in. We arrived early enough^^ for Nina to work with Teddy for a little while, and he was relaxed and comfortable with her. He likes kids, which helped. (It also helped that she was relaxed too. I am a nervous handler and probably never send calm, confident feelings down the lead to my dog.) He walked under the tent with no hesitation—and that was quite a relief—and Nina did a great job with him and won the class.
And the issue of showing on grass? Well, I guess Teddy had enough other things to think about, because leaping about and trying to gallop never entered his mind.
Of course I forgot my camera on Sunday, so I can’t show you pictures of this weekend. Instead, here’s Teddy a couple of weeks later with Nina at another outdoor show:
Stacked and ready for examination.
Completing the gaiting pattern.
*************************
* Outdoor shows generally have rings set up on either side of a big tent, with the ring entrance under the tent and sufficient tent overlap to provide a space for the dogs to stand and be examined out of rain or strong sun. The space underneath the tent is usually available for crating and grooming and is where exhibitors wait to go in the ring, so it can get pretty crowded.
** At conformation shows in the US, class dogs (non-champions) are judged separately by sex, starting with puppies and moving up to the mature dogs. Males are judged first, then females. So the first dogs in the ring for a given breed are the puppy boys.
*** Ring gates look like expandable wooden baby gates and are the fencing used to mark off the rings. They aren’t designed to withstand 120 pounds of dog crashing into them.
^ The down and back is one of the movement patterns that judges use to assess a dog’s structure and gait. When a dog moves around the ring in a circle, the judge is watching his side movement; on a down and back, the judge is looking at front and rear movement.
^^ This generally means TOO EARLY. Short-coated dogs that don’t need much grooming are frequently scheduled first, and most shows start at 8:00 a.m. This is a miserable hour of the morning to start anything, and it’s that much worse if you have to get there a half hour before you show.
Another Friday
Fridays are always a monster because it’s both Music Lesson and Sacred Home Tower Bell Practise. Today was further confounded, compounded, confused and flummoxed by Weather.
I heard it tipping it down in buckets last night. I know it’s all cosy and everything to lie snugly in bed and listen to Weather happening on the other side of the window,* but I tend to peer at the clock, calculate how many hours before I will be wanting to hurtle hellhounds again, and wonder how long the sleet, hail and thunderbolts are going to go on for. And Friday mornings tend to be my second-earliest** falling out of bed days because I want to get down to the mews as early as possible in the hope of having several delicious, semi-illicit hours at the piano, the computer, and frelling Finale. There have certainly been weeks when everything has gone to hell with a bang and a clatter and I’m frantically trying to scratch something together on Friday morning to make it worth Oisin’s time to have me infesting his space***. But it is likelier that I’m hustling down to the mews as fast as I can because Fridays are such a good excuse to spend extra time on music. Oh, but I wanted to finish the seventh symphony and the first act of the opera, the song cycle and the concerto for bagpipe, sho, and singing bowls for today!
But first I have to get hellhounds dashed and blasted. That first half an hour out of bed in the morning† is not a happy time. They could be re-enacting the battle of Thermopylae in the street under my window†† and I would only be thinking, blurrily, I know my over-the-road neighbour has a houseful of teenagers, but this is extreme. So the weather doesn’t really penetrate††† at first. The shadows cast by rapidly moving fat black clouds only make me worry about my eyesight and the bellowing of King Leonidas is only someone arguing with his girlfriend.
The first time hellhounds and I ventured out in what looked like a gap in the weather I hadn’t even got the door locked before the rain started up (or down) again like someone putting a firehose over the rooftree and aiming at our heads. Hellhounds hate the rain, and take it personally: there’s not a lot of point in trying to dash and blast them through heavy rain unless you enjoy shouting and yanking. So we grappled our way through the Spartans to Wolfgang and went down to the mews immediately.
This was not to the hellhounds’ taste either. We want a walk, they said. We want a hurtle. Will you please turn the water off and take us out? I have never really learned to believe in the hellhounds’ astonishing sphincter control so I told Finale to save, and took them out for necessary eliminatory purposes—they having refused to avail themselves of the cottage garden because of the weather—we lasted about a quarter of an hour and I gave up and brought them in again. It’s raining, guys, I said. I control the cooking of chicken‡, the filling of water bowls, and the closing and opening of doors: I do not, contrary to these clear indications, control the universe. Hellhounds semi-subsided, grumbling.
This week I have spent insane amounts of time trying to put frelling dynamics into the Silly Canon. Gaah.‡‡ There are two reasons why the amount of time is insane: first is that I (as usual) don’t know what I’m doing.‡‡‡ The second is that Finale, in its infinite lack of wisdom, blops everything that goes above or below the staff in a single undifferentiated heap: second thing on top of first thing and third thing on top of second. So if, for example, you have lyrics and then you want to add dynamic markings . . . you will then have to go back and move all your crescendos and diminuendos, all your fs and ps, off the lyrics and each other. And as you’re highlighting and dragging, about half the time you grab the wrong thing, because you can’t see what you’re doing because everything is in a heap. Not to mention having to do the lining-up by eye: Finale does give you ruled lines that flash into existence when you start to drag something . . . but they move too. Arrrrrgh.
Maybe it’s just as well, the harmonising arrrrrghs from the dog bed. All right all right. So we went out again. It didn’t rain for a little while. And then it did. And then it didn’t. And then it did. And then . . . And then I declared us hurtled and we went back to the mews. And the piano. And Finale.§
And . . . this is all your fault, you forum musicians. Especially the singers, but you’re all implicated, all you people who keep posting about music. I haven’t got time to join a choir.§§ But I need something to get me going with singing: Gypsy Rover and Suzanne may be frightening the badgers when I’m out with hellhounds, but it’s not teaching me anything about how to sing and I don’t want to damage anything because at my age badly treated bits start dropping off and rolling under the furniture and never being seen again. I have a very nice book on Finding Your Voice but I’m not going to find it without help, despite all the diagrams. And I want to be able to sing what I’m writing. Well, some of it. I want to be able to sing the poems of Peter’s that I’ve set, for example. I also kind of want to know just how bad the news is and if I want to write something I can sing I have four notes to do it in.§§§
So I asked Oisin. I said, gods help me, I need a voice teacher. I need a short sharp shock of voice lessons. I want someone to tell me what to do to get me started. Do you know anyone who’d be willing to take someone with no voice to speak/sing of, who only wants to be able to sing her own strange crabbed compositions?
Oisin is great. He didn’t laugh. He sat there staring into space (or possibly at Silly Canon, which was stretched on the piano rack in front of him) and finally said: you know, you want someone really good, someone who will understand what you want, and able to hear what you’re capable of and tell you how to get there—and what you’re not capable of and need to give up on. He then fixed me with a hard eye and said, you know you’ll have to go back occasionally to check on progress.
Yes, sir, I said meekly.
Let me think about it, he said. I’m sure I can find someone. You’ll have to nag me.
I’ve added it to the list: Nag Oisin about Voice Teacher with Sense of the Absurd.
* * *
* Or very likely on the floor, since I tend to sleep with the windows open.
** Sunday mornings being the most gruesome. I try to remember to be grateful that we don’t ring the early service which starts at eight.^ I’m not usually awake enough at 8:45 to be grateful.
^ I would like to think that the neighbours might object to bells at 7:15 on a Sunday morning, but most of the people who live slap next door to the churchyard seem to be the bright-eyed chirpy little old ladies and gentlemen I see coming out of the 8 o’clock service when I’m tottering up the path and thinking, bell ringing, for pity’s sake, why didn’t I take up knitting?+
+You can also knit indoors in bad weather. And I could be wrong, but I assume your knitting bag doesn’t leap and cavort and get under your feet and howl if you neglect it. Or step on it, because it’s getting under your feet.
*** And for me to be paying for it. But let me also observe that I have, more than once, on bad ME days, rung him up Friday morning and said, I feel like death on toast^ but I would like to come anyway, can he bear it/think of something to do with me? These are the days he plays Bach and points out how subversive Bach is, or tells me about the brilliance of Benjamin Britten or fabulous pipe organs he has known . . . or rails about the economy and the prime minister and the criminal lack of music education in schools. He also tells really, really bad jokes. I come for the floor show.
^ Why toast? Death on kippers? Death on a bed of watercress, radicchio and fennel, with garlic croutons and mayonnaise?
† Yes, yes, very funny, it is still morning when I get up
†† Ephialtes will be leading the Persians round through my posh neighbour’s garden. Hee hee hee hee.
††† Except for the wet spot on the carpet. Frell.
‡ Actually Peter does this. But I’m the one puts the food bowls down. Aaaaaugh. Not food again.
‡ I try to make a point, after I’ve been shrieking and throwing wadded-up manuscript paper across the room in a frenzy, of telling poor Peter, who bought it for me about this time last year, that while Finale makes me frelling nuts, I’d be lost, astray and accursed without it.
‡‡ Although this dynamics thing could definitely catch on. I think it appeals to my control freakery. No, I said loud! That’s a crescendo, you oaf!
§ I may do an Ode to the Aroma of Wet Dog. I feel that the lyrics ought to be out there already, by Ogden Nash or someone. But I can hear the first few chords, and the cranky melody.
§§ Another night out a week and Peter will divorce me, etc.
§§§ It works for Leonard Cohen.
Frelling ratbag
It has been an absolute frelling ratbag sod of a day. A lot of the most emotionally oppressive garbage is inherently unbloggable.* But I’ll tell you I’ve had a second friend in I think two months diagnosed with cancer; they got the news for sure yesterday, it’s just a question of how bad it is and what they do next. Friend number one has come through surgery with flying colours but . . . who needs to have cancer, you know? There are so many better things to be doing with your time.
And Daisy and Roy are giving up on Mike: long phonecalls from both of them today. And I’ve said I’ll find a new home for him. Yes, I am nuts. And your point would be—? I look at my hellhounds—four little shiny eyes immediately staring back at me, hoping I will make an Interesting Gesture: a toy? Another piece of chicken?** A move toward the sofa, a picking-up of the TV remote? A step toward the door?***–If you’re a critter person, how can you live without your critters?† But I want to say something utterly naive and puerile here about how can you love a critter and not put in the basic time to train it, if it’s the kind that needs training?†† It doesn’t have to be top in its agility class or able to do canter pirouettes, but it has to know its place and what’s expected of it. And basic companion-animal training just isn’t that hard. You just have to do it. And there’s nothing wrong with Mike but its lack.
Moan moan moan moan moan. But I’m pretty depressed. Oh yes, and Pegasus the Cow has just taken another dive into the ravine†††, although that may be a result of all the other stuff that’s going on. MOAN.
Comfort food. I need comfort food.
This is my variation on a recipe from one of my favourite cookbooks, whose name and notoriety have been seen on these virtual pages before: All-Butter Fresh Cream Sugar-Packed No Holds Barred Baking Book by Judy Rosenberg. The title says it all.
Lemon Raisin Pie
1 pie crust bottom: there is no top crust to this pie.‡ Having said that, I recommend you make it in a deep pan and build the edge up a bit, so you may need more than a half-recipe of a two-crust pie. Half-bake it: about 10 minutes at 400°F, just till it’s beginning to show faint colour. Cool.
1 ½ c golden raisins, or mixture of any kind of raisins you happen to have on hand. All golden is very pretty, and probably looks most like you thought ahead and got your ingredients organised, but I rather like the speckled effect of golden with ordinary black, and maybe a few currants thrown in for make weight. I’ve also made this with part cranberries, but I’m a big cranberry fan.‡‡ The clever boys and girls of the food industry have figured out a way to dry cranberries so they’re sweeter than fresh ones, but you may still need to adjust your sugar.
1 T grated lemon zest (I don’t have to remind you not to grate the white, do I?)
½ c lemon juice
¾ c chopped almonds or hazelnuts or a mixture. I suggest you toast them first too.
1 stick lightly salted butter at room temp
½ c granulated sugar
¼ c dark brown sugar
1 tsp cinnamon
3 large eggs at room temp
Preheat oven to 350°F
Soak raisins and lemon zest in the lemon juice for at least 15 minutes. If you’re going to make the pie this afternoon, you could put them in in the morning. Add the nuts at the last minute, just as you’re putting the rest of the pie together.
Cream butter and sugar till light and fluffy. It’s easier if you use an electric mixer. Throw the cinnamon in at some point. Add the eggs one at a time—remember to scrape the sides of the bowl a lot—mixing thoroughly but no more than that. Mixture will look curdled.
Stir in the raisin mixture and pour into the crust.‡‡‡
Bake 40-45 minutes. The centre should be just set, but it’ll be paler than the edges. It’ll still be soft though. It’ll set better as it cools. Let cool THOROUGHLY before you try to cut it.
Warning: this is seriously rich.
* * *
* Insert standard rant here about the gob-smackingly indiscreet things people have been known to put in their blogs and then they get all upset when the people they’ve been writing about get upset. Can you say ‘clueless clodpole’? You can choose some other phrase of opprobrium as suits you, but I like the euphony, even if no one has said ‘clodpole’ since Mark Twain.
** I have fallen into the reprehensible habit of giving them a bit of neat chicken each after supper, supposing they eat supper. This is in theory to inspire them to eat more supper . . . I doubt it does anything of the kind, but they’re bright enough to have figured out that they don’t get the chicken if they haven’t (nearly) finished their proper food, with all that lumpy brown kibble stuff. I think what it does is give me, for about five seconds about three nights out of four, the illusion of having real dogs, you know, the kind that think food is terrific, the kind you can clicker-train because they respond to treats. It does my little heart good to see them surge out of the dog bed and slap their butts to the floor to get their scraps of chicken. And no, since chicken is the only thing that makes them eat at all, I am not going to push it by trying to use it as a training treat.
Sigh.
*** It’s the middle of the night. It’s dark out there. We are not going for another hurtle.^
^ We might run into something. Trees. Telephone poles. Vampires.
† Dogs, cats, horses, giraffes, poison dart frogs, whatever
†† I think poison dart frogs generally just hang out in their terrariums.
††† Speaking of basic training for your critters. Novels are feral.
‡ Can’t remember if I’ve posted my pie crust recipe. One of these days I’ll go check.
‡‡ I’m from Maine. I didn’t need any frelling British cooking maven to tell me about cranberries.
‡‡‡ I always start my pies off with tin foil around the crimped edge, to prevent it browning too soon and being wrecked by the time the filling is cooked through. Take it off, if you use it, about halfway through.
Just a little more about homeopathy
Skating librarian writes:
The advice about burning would seem to apply, as serious nettle encounters go way beyond itching. Of late the incessant rain seems to be good for more than swelling the berries, for I’ve discovered that if I can plunge my hand into cold water at once I have much less of a reaction, and Lord knows there is more than enough water around.
I still use cold water for minor burns . . . even though I know I shouldn’t. I’m a homeopath, and like cures like. Another one of the tutors at my first college told an extraordinary story about burning, stinging and nettles. He’d been picking and eating wild blackberries—as one does: you see more people out in the countryside, all of them elbow-deep in the hedgerows, during blackberry season around here than you do the whole rest of the year together—and managed to bite down on a bee. It stung him. He was standing there feeling his mouth and throat swell up and burn like he’d swallowed acid . . . of course he didn’t have his first aid kit on him; us homeopaths are dumb thoughtless twits just like the rest of the population. But there were nettles growing up through the blackberry canes—and like cures like. He grabbed a handful of nettles and stuffed them in his mouth.
For about twenty seconds he knew he was dying. And then . . . the burning began ebbing away. And when it was gone, after a few minutes, the swelling was gone too. He didn’t even know where the bee sting site was any more.
Don’t try this at home, kids. It’s a great story but I wouldn’t want to rely on it: adrenaline and panic will also have played a part here. Like cures like—but use the little white pills, it’s what they’re for* and which have been, as it’s called, potentised, which is a lecture for another day.
On the subject of burning however I do want to put in a word for Cantharis—Spanish fly. Yes it is used for sexual and genito-urinal difficulties in its homeopathic incarnation—but it’s also used for burns. Every few years I manage to pick up a hot oven dish without remembering to pick up a potholder first—I don’t mean touch and let go of, I mean pick up. The last time I did this I had grabbed the iron handle of an iron skillet that had been in the hot oven of the Aga—fatal, I find, hot handles: handles exist to be seized hold of—and I’d actually managed to take the weight of the thing before I realised what I’d done. I heard my flesh sizzle: I daresay most of you cooks out there have done this. I knew this was a bad one. It was going to take weeks to heal, it was going to be horrible and messy and I wasn’t going to be able to pull on a bell rope. I flew for my remedies, as if trying to stay ahead of the pain**, and took a Cantharis 200.*** And the pain stopped. It was like watching the tide hit a sea wall: that water coming in looks irresistible . . . and then it rides up the wall and falls back again. It was like that. I took a pill every 15 minutes for an hour† at the end of which . . . I had a little pink patch over the web between my thumb and first finger. It produced a single tiny half-hearted blister. I didn’t miss so much as a day of bell ringing.
Skaters use a lot of Arnica … and I should keep it with my gardening tote too, as the sorts of things which fall under the gardening rubric include building fences, laying bricks, and digging out nasty rooty things (nice rooty things too) which seem to lead to bruises.
It’s also good for sore backs, although there are other things for sore backs—rhus tox, for example, for a sore back or any other muscular ache that is better for motion and nails you savagely when you first move after having been still for a while.
Diane in MN writes:
It seems to me that this really underlines the necessity to find a good homeopathic practitioner, especially if you-the-patient are unfamiliar with homeopathy. Obviously you’d want a good MD (or dentist or whatever), too, but if successful homeopathic treatment is tailored to the individual rather than being primarily diagnosis-dependent, it would be particularly important to find someone who is good at asking the questions that clarify the individual’s needs.
YES. This is absolutely the case. The individualisation of homeopathy is why it’s so jaw-droppingly, miraculously brilliant when it works—and so often such a ratbag when (driving yourself nuts) looking for the right answer for a given problem. As I’m fond of saying, homeopathy does have all the answers—the stumbling block is the homeopaths, who are all distressingly mortal. This is yet another rant for another day, but along with needing a good homeopath, you need a good homeopath who suits you, who can tune into you. Not every good homeopath is good for every client.
This is also an argument, you know, for doing it yourself: there are a lot of highly competent, so-called home first-aid homeopaths I’d rather be in the hands of if I were in trouble than a lot of doctors with more degrees than sense. There’s also much to be said for your own instinctive knowledge of a person or an animal—or a plant: it works on plants too, although they’re hell to reportise—that you know well. I dragged Holly through a fatal illness when the world-famous homeopathic vet I was spending house-mortgage money on couldn’t do it. As I said yesterday, you can learn the basic principles of homeopathy and start using it in a few hours. In a few minutes, if you’re a speed reader with excellent concentration.
Mrs Redboots writes:
Skaters can’t exist without arnica – most of us have, at the very least, the cream in our skate bags, and usually tablets, too.
I know a lot of people swear by the cream . . . but the pills are better.
Also, somewhat related, Dr Bach’s Rescue Remedy, which is magic both for shock after a nasty fall and for pre-competition nerves.
Yes, I was thinking I should do a post on Bach flower remedies some time too. Rescue Remedy is also great for stopping dogs throwing up in the car. I wish I’d known about it when Holly was a puppy. Rowan outgrew it, Hazel was too stoic to permit herself to throw up . . . Holly threw up for years.
And, speaking of puppies, B twin is back from the sheep races††, and we have another PUPDATE.
* * *
* Which is to say, take your frelling first aid kit with you.
** Yes, I was yelling, but mostly with terror
*** For anyone who finds themselves getting serious about a remedy kit: 30c is the usual strength for the average kit, but 200 is good for getting it in there for more severe things. If I were waiting for an ambulance, I’d probably be using 200 strength on whoever the ambulance was for.
† Standard treatment pattern for a sudden or drastic situation
†† . . . whatever