Not quite upright
I am immoderately tired.* Typical. I don’t do moderation. Generally speaking I have NO IDEA why I should be so tired.** What do I have to be tired about? Everyone knows that writers just hang around in their dressing-gowns all day drinking tea/coffee and whingeing. But it might have something to do with the weather. We didn’t get hit with the really big stuff in this part of Hampshire—only a few miles away they got three and six inches of snow overnight—but according to my garden(s) we got an inch and a bit of the frozen white and according to my FEET we got the vicious, ice-goblin collection. Geezum. The cottage’s little cul de sac is a vertical skating rink; the long swirling driveway to the mews is no better, it’s just flat. But I’m not at all sure we’re going to make it back up the cul de sac tonight when we attempt to glissade home. I could leave Wolfgang here and hoof it . . . but there’s a hill down between the mews and main street that I’m not at all sure I can navigate on foot: at least in a car you don’t fall over, and in a car at the hour I’m usually going back to the cottage there’s nobody else around to get in the way if you find yourself doing a little slithering. I’ve twice today done some fairly severe unscheduled four-wheeled sideslipping and while the old Maine instincts still seem to be in place I did not enjoy the experience. And as several people have remarked recently the worst of driving on snow and ice is the other drivers. You would think it would be obvious that if you put your foot down on the ‘go’ pedal and your (vehicular) back or front end promptly leaps gazelle-like to one side that you want to take your foot off again, not put it down harder. You would think. Hellhounds and I on one or two occasions today retreated quite a distance onto people’s private gardens. They don’t do the running-you-off-with-a-shotgun thing much here*** and I’d prefer being yelled at by an outraged property owner to being squashed by a fugitive Sport Utility Vehicle. And yes, we did our hurtling today in town.
The hellhounds find icy weather exciting. They, however, are equipped with four legs and a low centre of gravity.† I am trying not to think about the weather report promising several more days of the same††. None of us had a good time this morning: they kept rocket-launching and I kept clinging to fence posts and tree branches, and screaming.††† This afternoon was worse. And by tomorrow morning some of the still lightly crunchy and yielding grass and bare ground are going to have set solid too. I can hardly wait. Tenerife. Cape Verde. Maldives. No. None of them has bell towers.
All right, I could probably get another hour of PEGASUS in . . . or I could go to bed with a good book. Which involves getting home. . . . Maybe I could just curl up with the hellhounds. Their bed at the mews is big enough for three.
* * *
* I’m only still sitting up because we’re having roast duck for dinner which is worth a little pain.^ Also because I have a blog entry to write.
^ Which is to say I am eating lovely gooey greasy crunchy golden skin and will weigh eighty-seven pounds more tomorrow morning. So be it.
** Ninety six hours till PEGASUS goes in. Maybe. I seemed to think it was eighty-eight hours this morning on Twitter. I said there that I don’t count very well. Maybe I mislaid a day or something.^ Maybe I can just go on plucking random numbers of hours out of the air till I do finish and am ready to send it in.
^ I said I was immoderately tired. I lose anything to do with numbers first.
*** Yes, that is on the list of reasons to live in England.
† Sylvi, the human heroine in PEGASUS, after she’s spent a long time hanging out with pegasi, finds herself disturbed and uncomfortable with the weird narrow up and downness of human anatomy. And I haven’t even made her walk on any ice.^
^ No, I’m not invalidating what I’ve said (repeatedly) about the fact that the story exists and my job is to shut up and write it down. You still have lots of slack with which to hang yourself about choosing which details to write down in the melancholy hope of presenting the story to readers in such a way that it feels like itself when it’s only words on a page. This kind of slack includes you the author being able to slip in a private joke occasionally. If Sylvi has to walk on any ice in PEG II she will certainly think about the fact that four-legged (not to mention winged) pegasi are better built for it.
†† I also have a kitchen full of plants that need not only above-freezing temperatures but sunlight. They’re going to be very, very unhappy if they haven’t had any of the latter till I turn PEGASUS in Tuesday night and can apply myself to things like greenhouses and growlights. Hells. And I still need a timer and a greenhouse heater. FRELL.
††† We also managed to find ourselves out alone and unprotected on the streets when the schools let out at noon today for the start of holiday. Gak. I attract a certain amount of attention from all ages and stations because of the hellhounds but today, as I was staring at the landscape and deciding to turn around and go in some other direction less resembling the Matterhorn on a bad day, a small but highly articulate young boy—ten or so maybe? He was awfully small for how fluent he was—hailed me as if we were old friends with a remark about the perverse manifestations of global warming. I responded in some kind of kind, appropriate to a cranky old hag who nonetheless believes that kids who talk to grown ups as if they were all human beings together should be encouraged, and he fell into step beside me and we pitoned and ice-axed our way up the alternate slope. He was full of chat about holidays and homework—and his old school. We toiled together for a good five minutes and I’ve been thinking about him off and on all day. The new kid with no friends? I told Oisin about him, who suggested that he might be getting bullied. I hope not. He doesn’t have the markers of a victim, but I can easily imagine him getting on the wrong side of the local fists-for-brains cadre with his verbal facility. I hope he has a good Christmas. And a nice adventure involving zombies, double agents, and saving the world.
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