Pale green Monday
I’ve spent most of the day having a stomachache. It’s not even an interesting stomachache. Just your plain dull garden variety unnnh* stomachache. Now tonight was going to be my first official goofing-off, I mean text-alternative, Monday, so I can more perfectly** focus on PEGASUS one more day in the week.*** And Blogmom and I were going to produce something magnificent and compelling . . . and then Blogmom was hijacked to more urgent matters†, trailing promises to have magnificence and compellingness ready for tomorrow; and since Wednesday is guest post anyway, if I blow you off with, say, The Story of a Sunflower today, or Hellhounds Disappearing Over the Horizon Before My Finger Has Finished Pressing the Button on the Camera, or even And Furthermore, It Is All for Naught, and we have Blogmom’s tomorrow, I think you might all start getting a bit restive. And my publisher can’t have that.
So here I am.
Unnnh.††
Well, speaking of hellhounds . . . an unnerving encounter today. This morning, walking up a familiar hill . . . toward an unfamiliar assemblage of several children of various smallness, including one on a pony (the pony appeared to be falling asleep with boredom). Only one grown up, and she wasn’t very . . . and two dogs. One of the dogs peeled off at once and came purposefully toward us. Please call your dog, I said (wearily). While she was trying (not very successfully) to grab it, while it made its mind up about how much macho posturing it was going to do while hellhounds gambolled, as much as it is possible to gambol when your humourless owner has you by the harness, the second dog came trotting up. At about this point the not-very-grown-up got hold of Dog Number One and was strapping it into one of those headcollar things . . . which was not reassuring. However she now had it on the end of a lead and we weren’t dead or even bleeding, so hey.
. . . And my hellhounds from dancing and frolicking with ears flat and tails lashing, were suddenly as tall as I am—whoops—and barking and snarling. Dog Number Two thought better of his plans and hived off again. Dog Number Two happens to be the Cocker spaniel who burst out of containment—oh, several months ago this would be, maybe more—and was extremely hostile and aggressive and wouldn’t let us pass—and the bloody woman who resentfully came out of the house in response to my yells tried to blame the situation on us. We’ve seen it a few times since then but the one time it came anywhere near us Darkness strode out in front and barked and it said oh, fine, if you can’t take a joke, and sloped off.
The thing is: I’ve never seen them mean it like they did today—and I’ve never seen Chaos snarl at anyone. I’ve told you he still whimpers yearningly when I haul him past the border collie who frelling bit him several months ago—they’ve put chicken wire up since, so she can’t get her muzzle through the fence any more either—and usually what happens during confrontations is what happened with Dog Number One today: some big ugly thug comes prancing up leading with his chest, and then stands down at least a bit when hellhounds go all puppyish at him. What happened with Dog Number Two is how dog fights start— not every aggressive canine idiot is a coward—and my guys, because they’re on leads, are going to lose. This is not good, and it’s not a situation I’m used to handling.
The good news, however, is that the champagne is working.
* * *
* Stress! Stress! Stress! Must finish novel! Must lie on sofa! Must drink champagne! Very settling to the aroused stomach, champagne. Besides, it’s a 26th.^
^ For recent Day in the Life readers, or people who have better things to do with their memory than remember this kind of thing+, Peter and I count our lives together as beginning the 26th July eighteen years ago, when I picked him up at the Bangor, Maine airport, because I knew him slightly and had said if he ever had a fancy to visit Maine, etc . . . saw him walk through the airport door and went ‘oops’. We were married the following 3rd January. Peter was then 64, and said with cool British practicality that we needed to get on with the celebrations thing and that once a year wasn’t often enough. So any 3rd or 26th of any month is considered fair game.++
+ Remember, your mind is like an attic, and it fills up. Sherlock Holmes said so.
A man should keep his little brain attic stocked with all the furniture that he is likely to use, and the rest he can put away in the lumber room of his library, where he can get it if he wants it. http://www.geocities.com/EnchantedForest/Dell/8362/holmes.html
Sherlock would have loved the internet. So, are there any good cyberpunk novels starring Sherlock Holmes? I said good.#
# Yes I’ve read http://io9.com/5178945/22-cases-of-sherlock-holmes-in-science-fiction
++ News flash: I have just spoken to Peter. Finally.# And he confirms that I should take a glass of medicinal champagne at once.
# Rant alert: I want to see those generic phone-machine messages banned. How the hell do you know whether you’re leaving your embarrassing message on the right phone machine or not when the message doesn’t say whose phone machine you’ve reached? Of the four phones I use regularly (two at the mews and two at the cottage) one of them displays the number you’ve punched in~, as opposed to the one you meant to punch in, and even this is not much use if there’s a typo in the contact number, which, in the case of Peter leaving me the schedule for his trip to Scotland, is very possible. Two hours after he was supposed to ring me I left a small polite message on . . . somefrellingbody’s phone machine. It may have been Dr Thingummy Thingummy, with whom Peter is staying overnight, or it may have been anyfrellingbody. It may have been the Chinese take out at the corner. It may have been the Prince of Wales. Although you would think both the Chinese and the Prince would have their own messages.
~ And in one case, dialled. Yes, I bought one of those retro refits a year or two ago, that you have to put your finger in a little hole in a wheel and turn the freller.
** More perfectly is of course an interesting concept. Interesting like stomachaches are interesting.
*** I’ve decided my due date is 16 November, which is a Monday. I want my birthday off. Speaking of champagne.
† What could be more urgent than Days in the Life? Uh . . .
- Peanut butter sandwich
- Cup of tea
- Taking baying hound(s) for walk
- Another cup of tea
- Checking refrigerator for snacks
- Hanging laundry^
- Sharpening pencils^^
- Creating a virus that eats plastic and dog crap on contact and then reverts to inert viral dust till fresh contact. These viruses, of which there will be kind of a lot very shortly, will be filtered out of their environment and then, when put through the Squisher (patent pending), will emerge as The Perfect Clean Fuel. I haven’t worked out how it’s going both to burn in your fireplace and in your car, but I know there’s a way.
^ in the absence of an electric dryer. If you prefer substitute ‘folding laundry’ here.
^^ One of the many drawbacks to computers is that they have almost eliminated that perfect desk-work-eluding excuse, the sharpening of pencils. I still use pencils, but nowhere near as often. I try to bear down firmly, however, whenever I’m using one, so as to produce the need for sharpening as rapidly as possible.+
+ Speak, Nabokov: With the help of the janitor he screwed on to the side of the desk a pencil sharpener–that highly satisfying, highly philosophical instrument that goes ticonderoga-ticonderoga, feeding on the yellow finish and sweet wood, and ends up in a kind of soundlessly spinning ethereal void as we all must.
†† If I’d realised, I would not have worn a pale green shirt and pullover/jumper today.
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