Must Read Proofs
MUST. READ. PROOFS.*
So let’s have a few hellhound photos and maybe a dog joke** and then I am going to READ MORE PROOFS and then I am going to go to bed.***
Some day I am going to get a photo of Darkness doing his sudden downshift sprint and nailing Chaos but I haven’t done it yet. Anybody who doesn’t have running dogs themselves has no idea how impossible these guys are to photograph. They’re a mile away before you’ve pressed the button and that’s even if you’ve got the camera out of your pocket and are holding it between your teeth while you take the leads off.
* So, I had this wedding to ring. When Vicky asked me the beginning of the year, I had no thought of proofs^ and while Friday weddings are not on my list of favourite things^^ wedding rings are a nuisance anyway and weekdays are worse because a lot of your stalwart bell crazies like Niall are inconveniently off earning a living. So I only ground my teeth very briefly and agreed. Come to find out, of course, that this is the week I have proofs to read. But Vicky has been in Constantinople^^^ the last fortnight and while she instantly shook off her time lag# and phoned round all of us saying that if there were any problems, etc, I couldn’t bring myself to say, well, um, since you ask . . . so that was an hour and a half I might have been reading proofs.##
Then Oisin was late back from wherever he was which was delightful in that I had no option but to sit at his piano and start fooling out a new something. Ooh, creativity, said Oisin when he finally showed up, that’s what I like to see. What is it? —I haven’t the faintest idea, I said. I’ll let you know. So that was another hour and a half. And no, Oisin can’t find any secret repository where the saved file from yesterday might have been renamed and tucked away on my computer, but we’ve now got a query in to tech support at Finale, and maybe I’ll just use manuscript paper for a while. Meanwhile I can’t bear to look at Frost and Fire and Ice, which is discouraging. But I have a few bars of a nice new twiddle . . . for after I finish reading proofs.###
Then of course I went to bell practise. Where we discovered ourselves to be locked out. That was entertaining. When we finally managed to get the door open, thanks to a small packet of gelignite one of us just happened to have secreted about our person~, we discovered ourselves to be short handed (again) and overcharged with beginners. Whereupon I relaxed. And somehow didn’t do a recount after Colin and Anthea showed up . . . so when Niall turned to me with that fixed Ringing Master gleam, I was bracing myself for having to call my feeble little touch of bob doubles. He said, this will probably come as a shock but we have a Cambridge band. EEEEEEEEP. We did. We rang it too, but only because we had Colin roaring at me. . . .
^ Obviously I should have had thoughts of proofs. But in the first place proofs tend to come when they come and in this case everything is so late every stage is a kind of AAAAAAAAUGH INCOMING WHAM.
^^ I made the mistake of tweeting that I do not love Friday weddings+ this morning, following up, in a proper tweety way, after the fact, with the news that the rain had started falling in large heavy blocks at the point when the bride was trying to leave. Whereupon several other tweeters with more sense of humour than is good for them retweeted my original comment with the pursuant remark about the weather and the annotation that it is wise not to piss me off. I’m a hellgoddess, you lot, not a weather goddess.
+ I believe the phrase I may have used was ‘a pox upon Friday weddings’
^^^ No, Constantinople. Time machine.
# Which is much more catastrophic than mere three-dimensional jet lag
## Yes, I should have brought them with me, since it is a law of the universe that weddings run late. But speaking of things I couldn’t quite bring myself to do.
###And . . . sigh . . . I have another novel to write. . . .
~ I am endlessly amazed at the things I find at the bottom of my knapsack, although I’m always wondering why it’s so heavy.
My hellhounds have a far more varied and interesting vocabulary. I might almost suspect that Mr Malki, while a noble fellow in many ways, is not a dog person.
*** And yes, thank you very much, I do have a guest post for tomorrow.
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