Double or nothing
Today has been better. We withdraw, cautiously, and no doubt temporarily,* from the ungleblargs. Whew.** All praise and acclaim, not to the evil ME gods which are, of course, evil, but to the Special Ops fairies who performed a daring raid on ME headquarters in the dead of night*** and broke me out. Would that I needed their gallant assistance a little less often.
And so I have of course been scampering around today because I can.† And I went to bell ringing practise tonight. This is the first time I’ve been involved with any kind of bells since service last Sunday, I who generally ring three or four practises a week.
People with memories they can’t turn off may recall that I have mentioned an excess of ringing weddings this weekend: three in fact. One wedding per weekend is an elegant sufficiency, and not every weekend either, okay? Three? Go away. So I was delighted when Vicky phoned me a few days ago and explained that due to the exigencies of having to throw her net wide to get the Saturday weddings covered, she was relieving me of my rope at Old Eden, which has only six bells, so that Amanda, who has to come a distance, would at least have £30 out of losing her afternoon instead of only £15.†† Although I would still be needed here in New Arcadia because of our eight bells.
So tonight at practise Vicky comes sidling up to me, looking at me through her eyelashes and smiling the smile of a woman who is about to take the rest of my Saturday afternoon away from me again. Arrrrgh. See, there’s another wedding at the next-bell-tower-town over on our other side, and they’re having trouble getting enough pairs of hands for their ropes. . . . . It’s supposed to be a good gardening day tomorrow. I spent a little time this afternoon reacquainting myself with my garden at the cottage†††
But I rang Kent AND Grandsire Triples tonight. I was sitting there congratulating myself on having got there at all when Edward called briskly for Grandsire Triples and said, Robin, do you want to ring inside? Urble gurp, I said, I haven’t rung it in over a month, I’d better look at the line. So I’m sitting there looking at the line and thinking, I’ve never seen this thing before in my life, and my brain, which, after all, has not been having a good time for the last several days and had already been obliged to produce several third-draft pages of PEGASUS today, was trying to slip off again toward ME headquarters . . . when Colin, who was there tonight with Anthea and who were why we had a Grandsire Triples band, said, you know, she is ringing Kent, and Edward turned and looked at me with a wild surmise‡ and said, we’ll ring Kent then.
But I’ve been looking at Grandsire! I can only keep one pattern in my head at a time! I said feebly, giving Colin a look that would have peeled paint, if he were wearing any.
Kent, said Edward.
Colin paid for his treachery by having to mind me, and, with my brain still caught in Grandsire, I did not get off to a very brilliant start, but I was doing it myself by the end—these frelling treble bob methods go on and on, you have plenty of time either to recover yourself or to go to pieces really spectacularly and if I can manage to go to Colin’s practise on Monday I will have another chance at ringing it without a minder, which I was planning on doing‡‡ last Monday.
And then of course my head was full of Kent so I made sort of a mess of Grandsire. Only sort of, though: a plain course of Grandsire triples is pretty much of a doddle after frelling Kent, and second time through I did it perfectly. Except all that’s going to do is open me to the hideous prospect of a touch of the thing.
Meanwhile, however, I need to go to bed so I can get hellhounds hurtled and have a long run at the aggrieved question of hellhound lunch, before I have to go ring too many dranglefabbed weddings. But I’ll probably read up on touches of Grandsire Triples before I turn the light out tonight. I don’t trust the gleam in Colin’s eye.
* * *
* Sigh.
** Not that life as I know it is ever exactly smooth and gracious. At the moment, for example, I have a hellhound gakking up the food he’s only just started to molest after about fifteen minutes of staring at it in the hopes it will run away.^ He hasn’t actually swallowed any of it yet, he’s just rearranging it on the floor a little so he can decide which bits he might choose to eat if he could see them a little more distinctly.
Even for a post-bell-ringing evening I’m running late. We’ve been having summer, sort of, the last few days, which is to say all the water hanging heavily in the air, rather than condensing and falling as rain, like sensible vapour, just stretches out its tiny damp wispy hands to its infinity of tiny damp wispy friends and relatives and what we have is fug. Bleaugh. So even though there’s enough water around here to keep all the golf courses in southern California^^ green, it’s all dangling murkily out of reach.^^^ I swear fug dries your garden out faster than blazing sun.
So, since I’m at the cottage tonight, I’ve got my sprinkler going. Except for when, chopping runner beans or mixing hellhound food, my attention is caught by a sudden strange roaring in the back garden and I race out there to stick the hosepipe back on the tap again, and screw it in place (again) with an uncooperative bit of plastic which clearly feels it was made for greater things than holding cheap hosepipe in an intimate embrace with a tap. If there are any neighbours having a nice breath of fuggy air this evening they have experienced language of a neither smooth nor gracious variety. This dance of mud and curses slows down dinner preparations considerably. Tomorrow when it’s daylight again I’ll have a look at the assortment of frellers involved: previously the after-dark sprinkler thing has worked fine.
And speaking of daylight, it is almost two months after the longest day and it is now dark again when I come out of bell ringing at 9. Snivel.
^ So he can chase it. Or be rid of it.
^^ Which should not have golf courses, just by the way. If you live in a desert, you should be living in a desert.
^^^ I can just about hear+ an infinity of tiny damp wispy voices saying ‘neener neener’.
+ Partly because I have turned Radio Three off. It is Harrison Birtwhistle tonight. Pollyanna forbids me to express myself on the subject of Harrison Birtwhistle. Mmmphrgrgggle.
*** True. I woke up in my own bed in my own self this morning, instead of the two-dimensional grey wasteland I’ve been inhabiting the last two or three days, with a little fairy dust masquerading as one or two semi-ex-blank journals, books on bell-ringing, music, mythology and Kipling, a few novels, and a lot of homeopathic periodicals, scattered over me and the bedclothes.
† The Special Ops fairies sigh and check their diaries.
†† In terms of being able to buy myself a nice little tiara with only one or two sixteen-carat rubies in it by the end of the year, £15 a wedding sounds great. In terms of losing Saturday afternoon after Saturday afternoon to late brides, it is not great.
††† Discovering those geraniums I never potted on and which are flowering anyway, the finger-sized cotinus which has got buried among petunias but is doing rather well and is ready to be potted on now, the marigolds that are getting eaten by slugs . . . I thought the point of marigolds was that they don’t get eaten by slugs. The dierama which aren’t dead after all . . . never throw out dead things too quickly. I think I haven’t told you (?) that I threw out one of my carnivores the beginning of the year because it had clearly been killed by the winter. Fortunately the Compost Men only come around every fortnight, and I was organising that fortnight’s green rubbish when I noticed . . . that my dead pitcher plant was hopefully putting out big fat red shoots. It had at this point been lying, dry and exposed, on a pile of genuinely dead things, for about ten days. Yeep, I said and thrust it hastily into a bowl of rainwater. It is huge this year. Maybe sarracenia like a little extreme drying-out at the beginning of the growing season?
‡ Silent, on a peak in Darien
‡‡ Planning on trying to do
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