Reformation (sort of. Maybe)
I am sitting here surrounded by huge tottering piles of old newspapers and magazines. And it’s all Fiona’s fault. This catalyst thing can go too far.
Those of you with disgracefully tenacious memories* may remember that I went to the Steeleye Span concert** back in November with a friend named Fiona. Fiona runs a folk-music club*** and sings for a little local band who might well be wealthy and famous if they weren’t all cripplingly shy and polite.† Which is to say that Fiona is another of these starving artist people.††
So I had a brainstorm a couple of months ago one evening at the cottage, fighting my way through the accumulation on the stairs, on the ladder to the attic, in the hall space behind the ladder to the attic, on both sides of my desk, between, on and behind the two small tables behind my desk, stacked up against the wall in my bedroom†††, on and under the kitchen table downstairs, and let’s not discuss the attic at all‡. I thought, I wonder if Fiona is silly enough to let me hire her for an occasional day of accumulation-bashing?
She was.
Today was her first day.‡‡
She got started on alphabetising my rose photos from the old house.‡‡‡ She has gone some considerable way toward alphabetising the fiction/lit at the mews. She may have taught me how to load music § onto my little non-iPod§§. I’ll know tomorrow.§§§
And she packed up and took 1,000,000,000,000 parcels to the Post Office.# I have a Post Office phobia. It’s very sad. Maybe the next time she’s here we’ll catch up as far as last year’s Christmas presents.
And speaking of Christmas presents . . . in an excess of hectic enthusiasm I’ve already tweeted this but it bears repeating . . . I TOOK ALL THE ORNAMENTS OFF THE CHRISTMAS TREE TODAY AND PACKED THEM UP!! And it’s not even the end of January yet!!!## See, Fiona was a GOOD idea! Not only does she not have a Post Office phobia, she is such a good INFLUENCE! You can’t have someone alphabetising your books while you sit slumped over your computer trying to make PEGASUS II magically emerge from the screen-mist. Or maybe I should say, if PEGASUS II is not going to emerge magically from the screen-mist you might as well be doing something useful like taking down the Christmas tree, rather than clicking on all the links that all the people you follow on Twitter are posting.### Which is why, unfortunately, I’m now surrounded by large tottering piles of ancient magazines. You also can’t have your books halfway to being beautifully alphabetised and let those cobwebby heaps of newsprint remain unchallenged. After she left I shot back to the mews and started pulling out three-year-old Guardian REVIEW sections. Stop! Stop!
Although that was a little later than you might think because Thursday is handbells and I made her stay to be tortured . . . I mean to have her first exciting experience of the glory that is method ringing on handbells with Niall and Colin. Hey, she was ringing plain hunt on eight before the end of the evening, never having seen a handbell in her life before. Niall and Colin and I, who are used to ringing on six, were having trouble counting that high, but she tried her best to keep us in order.
And she still agreed to come back. She really is 35,000 feet over the North Sea on a no-return ticket, isn’t she?
* * *
* You also remember^ I hate you, right?
^ What? What are we talking about?
** http://robinmckinleysblog.com/2009/11/20/fangirl/
*** I think she should write a guest blog about this, don’t you?
† Think Nell Gwynn! Think Benjamin Disraeli! Think Freya Stark! Think David Tennant! You don’t have to be cripplingly polite even if you are British!^
^ Think Beau Brummell (1778-1840), who, when cut by the Prince of Wales, turned to his companion and said, Who’s your fat friend?
†† Literally, I sometimes think. She would certainly far rather buy a front-row ticket for a Steeleye Span concert than eat.
††† There’s no room under the bed, you know, because of the boxes of books. Oh, and shopping bags of vitamin pills. You want to know how I maintain my ridiculous level of activity with ME? Vitamin pills and homeopathy. But homeopathic pills take up a lot less space.^
^ The frelling shelves of homeopathy books take up a lot more.
‡ And no I don’t want merely to haul it all down the road and stuff it wholesale into Third House’s attic. No. Noooo.
‡‡ And before she left she agreed to come again. Although I don’t know that her email just now saying she’d got home okay^ was necessarily sent from home. She may have been sending from 35,000 feet over the North Sea. Wireless is getting pretty amazing these days.
^ Having had a rather unnecessarily Amusing Time getting here this morning
‡‡‡ Sic. Next time she’s going to scan some in so perhaps on some particularly gruesome February day with the banshees howling through the gutters and the hammering rain crushing hellhounds and hellgoddess to the sodden earth, I can post some rose photos to cheer myself up.
I’ve actually got plenty of rose photos from the last few years in town, it’s just I have this really bad habit of not marking the ones I’ve already used here . . . yes, this is the same mindset^ that has produced brilliant ideas like buying third houses and converting their attics to contain eighty (heavy) boxes of backlist.
^ All right, let’s take a moment and consider the words ‘mind’ and ‘set’.
§ Starting with Steeleye Span. Naturally.
§§ Okay, what is the non-BlackBerry RaspBerry version of a non-iPod? The oMoya?
§§§ Mmm. Not necessarily. She didn’t tell me how to make it play back.
# Including one that’s been lying (mostly) on the attic stairs^ since July. Yes. That one. You Know Who You Are.
^ I moved it around occasionally so it didn’t get too bored
## Peter takes the tree itself down. It’s a rather plausible fake one, but the problem with it is that most of the branches are supposed to come out so you have to detach them all carefully and wrap them up in tiers so you can figure them out again next year, but he would have done it weeks ago if he weren’t waiting for me. . . .
### GAAAAAAAAH. I’ve never been so current evented in my life. GAAAAAAAAAAH. I’m not even sure I want to know that Obama’s approval rating is .007% and dropping fast.
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