In which the gods are not kind
I didn’t get to London.* I can pretty much only get up off the sofa if I do it slowly. With pauses to rest.
And not one but two sets of proofs** have arrived to be read in the next forty-eight and a half hours (approximately). Hey, you can lie on the sofa and read proofs. Why don’t I feel happy?
And so, since I’m not in a very good mood anyway, and because I am lying here thinking about health, and because the size, extent and totally insane details of the row about Obamacare amazes me***, I am going to give you this link: http://e-moon60.livejournal.com/195083.html in which she says everything I might have said if I were better educated, better organised, better phrased, and didn’t feel like tumble-dryer lint. America has got to have some kind of socialised—YES! SOCIALISED!—health care. Where the Nazis come into it really escapes me.†
. . . And I’ve just cut about five hundred intemperate politically extreme words that are the sort of thing I avoid on this blog. I think I’ll go to bed and hope this headache is gone by tomorrow.
* * *
* I considered having my stand-in hellhound walker walk the hellhounds anyway and decided that would depress me worse. So we tottered out as usual. This afternoon we were walking past the sports fields and discovered an escaped soccer ball.^ Well, a large thick-skinned ball full of air, anyway.^^ Much too big for a hellhound to get his mouth around, and Chaos was carrying one of his plastic bottles anyway.^^^ Both hellhounds were very interested in it, however, and Chaos play-bowed at it just to check if it might respond. # Darkness, who has spasms of believing that he really is a grown-up, then trotted off. Chaos, however—still holding his plastic bottle—pranced at it, ran away, ran back, growled. . . . So I kicked it.
Canine joy.
We were in the stretch of ex-parkland that belonged to the Big Pink Blob, I mean House, that Peter’s mews used also to belong to, between the old boundary wall and the road. There’s lots of room to tear around but there is no way I’m going to let hellhounds off lead with the main road through town right there. ## Chaos danced, dashed, curvetted, courbetted, and generally went mad. It fascinated me that—and he was still carrying his bottle—he’d tag the ball with his nose and then arrow off again. You know those old paintings of dogs and horses running—and deer and rabbits and various other four-legged things, where the hind feet are stretched out behind but firmly planted on the ground, but the forelegs, stretched out forward, are at about chin level? No animal ever ran like that. Surely, I would guess, no animal fleeing for its life would run like that, but that’s exactly what a frisking hellhound in passionate raptures over a brand-new toy of unknown potential runs like. Or bounds and capers like.
It was too good. I kicked the ball again—not too hard: the extending lead only extends 26 feet. ### I kicked the ball in twenty-foot bursts down the entire length of the old parkland, watching my hellhound having the time of his life, and telling my guilty conscience that we were still opposite the playing fields even if we weren’t still opposite the soccer-playing end of them. And the ball is blue and yellow [sic]: it’s pretty visible.
And I was also thinking: if I’d gone to London I’d’ve missed this. Weeeeeeell . . . okay. Many things in life are a trade off. I’ve had worse.
^ I think it was a soccer ball. It is a deep spiritual quest for me to know as little as humanly possible about any sports concerning balls. Cricket makes this easy. The others you mostly have to work at a little.
^^ And that was, just by the way, one hell of a kick. There is a twice-human-high fence, a road, and two lines of trees between the soccer field and us. In three years of walking hellhounds on the far side of the road beside the playing fields, this is the first time I’ve seen a soccer ball. (If it’s a soccer ball.)
^^^ I can’t teach the blasted animal reliably to pick up his front feet to put his harness on—just when I think he’s got it for good he loses it again for a week or something—but he pretty nearly taught himself to drop plastic bottles into my hand if he’s carrying one and we stop beside a litter bin. They know ‘drop’ and Darkness, The Trainable One, drops things and leaves them dropped. Chaos drops on command pretty well, but he, like Holly of the last generation, has a negative attention span, and you can see him suddenly think, wait, what happened to my plastic bottle/stick/disgusting unidentifiable piece of discarded clothing??? I had it just a moment ago—and shoot back for it. But he mysteriously seems to get it when he watches me put it in the litter bin. This seems to me freakishly high-level comprehension, especially in a hellhound who can’t remember he has two front feet. But he never goes back for something that has gone into the bin. ??????? Critters exist to ensure that us humans never fall into the booby trap of thinking we’re getting stuff figured out.
# The ever-hopeful. He play-bows at most things: cats. Sheep. Bicycles. Rosebushes. When any of the former run away he hopes that means they’re saying yes, and it is up to me to disabuse him. It astonishes me that he continues to like me, I’m such a spoilsport.
## People do. They should have their dogs taken away from them.
### And in fact it doesn’t even do that. This year’s leads are a good eighteen inches shorter than last year’s. I hope next year’s will be the old model.
** The paperback CHALICE and the new standard McKinley trade paper edition of SPINDLE’S END—the next in the series that all have the same ‘look’, including the cover illustrations all being statuary. And before we get into another argybargy about it, I like this series. I can’t remember now if it was Merrilee or my Berkley editor who said that a standard edition with a ‘look’ is a good thing and we wanted a McKinley brand.^ It’s also harder than you might think to come up with a ‘look’ sufficiently lookish and sufficiently flexible to incorporate a lot of books that aren’t very like each other—and allowing for an author who is hard to please anyway and has furthermore a total ban on graphic depiction of any of her books’ characters.^^ I think Berkley have done an amazingly good job.
^ Especially, I think, since I keep refusing to write that favourite of marketing departments and bookshop buyers, the series.
^^ I cannot sufficiently express my loathing for the repackaging of Eva Ibbotson’s backlist
etc. I hate them so much it’s hard to buy them, and I love these books and want to give them to any squashy romantics I meet who don’t know them yet.
*** I’m also old enough to remember Clintoncare, and to have watched in disbelief as they buried Hillary and the horse she rode in on. So I guess I shouldn’t be amazed, but I still am.
† http://guerillawomentn.blogspot.com/2009/08/barney-frank-insults-dining-room-tables.html
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