Articulateness not guaranteed.
Starting with use of the word ‘articulateness.’
I am shattered. I think this happens even to normal people without mysterious auto-immune malfunctions: you get through the hairy scary bit and then disintegrate.* Yesterday was hairy. Today has been a haze, not of small spidery galumphing monsters**, but of fuzzy grey exhaustion. I must have hurtled the hellhounds or they’d be dancing on the table and getting in the way of the computer. And there’s an empty Green & Black’s wrapper lying at my elbow so conclude I have also had supper. I hope I enjoyed it.
And I did make it to my music lesson. Well. Of course. But also Oisin is going on holiday for three weeks***. There ought to be a law against holidays of more than a fortnight.† And he’d suggested last week that we take my latest flights, or perhaps more accurately thumps and crashes, of fantasy for the organ, over to the church today, where I can hear them demonstrated on the instrument they were theoretically designed for.†† Yes. Ah. Hmm. And I’m still such a beginner that both what I think I’m trying to do and what halfway to works just keep drifting in and out . . . and no of course they don’t drift in and out together. That would be too easy. And by the time I put the music on the stand and call them up on Finale tomorrow to choose one to work on I’ll have forgotten everything I noticed today. I made Oisin write his comments down this time ††† . . . but then there’s the little matter of the legibility of his handwriting, not to mention interpretation of what a remark like ‘needs more air’ might best mean in practise.
Then I went back to the mews and grappled with PEGASUS‡ for a while and by the time I crawled back from second hellhound hurtle ‡‡ I was so thin on the ground I was seriously considering missing sacred home tower bell practise.‡‡‡ But I went, as I have occasionally gone before, on the grounds that I would feel worse listening to the bells from even a relaxed lying down position with a glass of cold champagne in one hand than going along and making a mess of it because I have no usable brain left. But it was one of those evenings in which I got to find out some of the surreptitiously increasing length and breadth of my bell-ringing auto-pilot: hey, I got through an evil long-thirds single in Grandsire. I’d gone thinking nervously, oh, cheez, what if we have a Kent band tonight? Fortunately we didn’t. Well, there was a dangerous glint in Niall’s eye at one point but he was deflected onto Stedman§, which was quite hair-raising enough, since we didn’t have enough for tenor-behind and only two of the five of us really knew what we were doing. Shoals ahoy. We all seemed to have had a hard week one way or another: the climax of the evening for me was when we were ringing Grandsire again . . . and everyone but Richard and me went wrong. Even Niall. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Too many handbells, that’s his problem.§§
* * *
* I cannot begin to express my admiration for people like long-term carers, especially those in unstable situations. It’s one thing to keep your head during a single event, or even a series of single events: I know there are a lot of A&E/ER staff who are adrenaline junkies, and more power to them for making good use of a risky personality type. I’ve told you I was a volunteer ambulance driver for a couple of years back in Maine: and you kind of did want your beeper to go off on your duty days and feel your adrenaline go through the roof as you scampered down to the station. But to have to keep your head as day-in-day-out standard . . . well, I couldn’t do it, even if I didn’t have ME.
** Them too. But I don’t know if it’s that I now know they’re harmless so I’ve stopped noticing them—as I said yesterday I have a lot of practise ignoring multi-legged specks playing polo over the field of my vision—or if they’re settling down at the speed a normal dog, speaking of normal, slaps its butt to the floor when it sees its supper dish arriving, or that I’m just totally out of it, but today I barely know anything happened.
*** Aaaaaaugh. I’ll forget everything! What is that huge piece of furniture in the corner with the strange narrow platform stuck out in front full of long thin black and white rectangles? Good gods, they make noise if you press them. . . .
I won’t forget anything. I now have Blondel. And I am sweating learning the melodies of both Sebben and Panis. Gods. It’s only one simple line. How hard can it be? Hard enough. Sigh. I am finding it totally schizophrenic, picking the tune out with one finger on the piece of furniture with the rectangles, and wavering along behind vocally. My piano^-playing skills are pathetic at best but they suddenly look all shiny and professional compared to my singing.
^ Piano! Of course! I knew it had a name!
† . . . for music teachers. Watch out, Blondel.
†† I am uneasily reminded of a forum post by blondviolinist imprecating against clueless composers who don’t take on the individuality of the instruments they claim to be writing for. Have I mentioned that I asked Peter’s violin-playing daughter to bring the thing with her next time and not merely play—I’ve heard her play before—but demonstrate?
††† Among Oisin’s many sterling qualities is an ability to tell you something doesn’t work without your immediately wanting to kill yourself. Granted I have a slightly extreme reaction to criticism, but that makes his achievement all the more impressive.. He never gives me any sense but that he’s taking me and my crabbed scratchings seriously and that we’re worth taking seriously. He is mad, of course, but that’s necessary in a good teacher.
And speaking of crabbed-scratching progress, partly based on Oisin’s support, I came back from the second hurtle of the day^ with another little piece of melody in my head, and when I sat down at the nearest keyboard I was only a half-step out on the first note—F# instead of G—and I got the rest of it instantly. The time signature seems to be 7/4, but I’ll worry about that later.
^ There. I did get the hellhounds out.
‡ Biff! Bang! Whump! Garg! Kachoingggg!
‡‡ And had safely got my new tune-scrap down on paper
‡‡‡ I dowsed for this and was told ‘oh belt up and go’
§ In the extremely unlikely event that there is someone out there saying, hey—you only had five for Stedman, you need six for Kent—true. Vicky turned up halfway through, having locked the visiting grandchild in a closet to convince her it was bedtime^, but we got through Stedman by pulling Richard off a bell and setting him to mind our Stedman beginner. If we’d essayed Kent it would have been all twelve hands on ropes.
^ Vicky’s husband doesn’t do grandchildren. If the kid had managed to break out of the closet, Vicky would have got a call on her mobile.
§§ And last but not least, horizon-stretching musical link of the week:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1201765/Look-laurels-Bob-Geldof-come-real–Boomtown-rats.html
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