Dental Anaesthesia, Deathlike States and Really Good Reads
I knew it was coming, of course. I heard the thwack, thwack of big horny feet and felt the hot breath of the panting pursuant predator. Occasionally I am not laid out afterward by dental anaesthesia. But not very often. And after the fortnight leading up to last Friday it’s not exactly surprising that this was not one of those times.
It usually takes about twenty-four hours for the full pumped up roaring force of the thing to arrive. Which means that I at least got through ringing handbells with Titus. Finally. I’ve told you about Titus: he had a stroke fifteen or something years ago and while he can just about get around with a cane, he has only one usable hand. He’s also a lifelong demon tower ringer. At my old tower—which is where I met him—he used to take the four or the five, which were closest to the wall, so he could brace himself against it, loop the rope over his good wrist, and ring. Terrifying.*
I don’t know when he started handbell ringing again; I only know that a few months ago Niall started trying to hook me into being one of the Titus ringers. But I lead a complicated life** and I keep having these frelling collapses.*** They also tend to meet Saturday morning and the idea of compelling my brain to think about method ringing on handbells in the morning is fairly dire.† I’ve agreed to it before and cancelled at the last minute—yes, I’m a cow. But even cows eventually get embarrassed, and yesterday there were only going to be three of us, so if I cancelled again Niall†† and Titus wouldn’t get to ring at all.
I cannot begin to tell you how CONFUSING it is ringing change methods on handbells with someone who holds both his bells in ONE hand. CANNOT. BEGIN.†††
Niall had warned me. He had warned me in the light, shifty way he has when he doesn’t want to scare you off. But I know Niall. I know what that light, shifty way means. I was glad to see Titus again, and I’m not sorry, even if the experience did tap out the last glinting driblets of mental energy left on the bare floor of my skull, because the predatory beast was going to take me down anyway but . . .
. . . Since yesterday morning I’ve been in Getting Hellhounds Semi-Hurtled: the Ultimate Challenge mode, subheading: Oh No, What Can I Get a Blog Post Out of?
Sunday mornings at noon there’s a programme on Radio Three called Private Passions.‡ Michael Berkeley (pronounced BARKly) interviews famous people about the music they listen to.‡‡ I listen to it when I’m near a radio. By noon today I knew I was facing another trashed desert of a day, so when the interviewee turned out to be Joanne Harris‡‡‡, I thought, Joanne Harris! Runemarks!
Runemarks in hindsight is probably the reason I stopped doing book reports on the blog. Remember I said that the problem with blogging about books is that books matter? If I frell up my own life on line, hey, it’s my life. If I’m going to talk about a book I totally adored, I want to get it right. Getting it right . . . is too hard for a daily blog. Well, for this daily blog.
I adored Runemarks. Runemarks is very, very, very, very, very, very good. There’s never been any doubt Harris can use the language—I had no idea she was this good. Individual sentences are both sharp and funny, the plot is both irresistible and eye-crossingly intricate, and the characters–! Maddy is a magnificent heroine, confused and clever and brave. All the gods and murky supernatural beings out of the old Norse tales that you half remember (well, that I half remembered) are both strange and familiar, human and superhuman. And—just by the way—I have always hated Loki. I have read a lot of Lokis by a lot of writers who obviously have a soft spot for the eternal bad-boy troublemaker, and I have found all of them loathsome and incomprehensible–why does he get away with being such a bastard? I liked Runemarks’ Loki. He’s just as treacherous and self-absorbed as ever but . . . somehow Harris makes him work as a character and not merely a deadly pain in the ass to keep things stirred up.
Runemarks is what happened a long time after Ragnarok. § And to give you a flavour of its style, this is how it begins:
“Seven o’clock on a Monday morning, five hundred years after the End of the World, and goblins had been at the cellar again. Mrs Scattergood—the landlady at the Seven Sleepers Inn—swore it was rats, but Maddy Smith knew better. Only goblins could have burrowed into the brick-lined floor; and besides, so far as she knew, rats didn’t drink ale.”
Maddy is fourteen years old, and, as in the best quest tales, an outsider in the strait-laced and fearful village she lives in, because of the runemark—called a ruinmark—on her hand. The villagers all know it means she’s a witch, although few of them will say it to her face. Fortunately she has one good friend who encourages her talent for magic—a disreputable old vagrant who goes by the name One-Eye. . . .
In my present state of mental health I’m not even going to try to summarize the plot for you.§§ Besides, you don’t need a plot summary. It’s a wonderful, wonderful—and underrated§§§—book. Go read it and spread the word. Here’s one last prompt from me: this is from about two-thirds of the way through, when Loki and Maddy are on their way to Hel. If this doesn’t intrigue you to the point that you have to get your hands on it, well, you’re not the reader of brilliant fantasy that I thought you were.
“Many roads lead to Hel. In fact it could be argued that all roads lead eventually to Hel, the frictionless pivot between Order and Chaos, where neither holds sway, and nothing—and no one—ever changes.
“True Chaos, like Perfect Order, is mostly uninhabited. The many creatures that exist within its influence—demons, monsters and the like—are simply satellites, basking in Chaos as the earth basks in the warmth of the sun, knowing full well the dangers of over-familiarity. Even Dream—which has its laws, though they are not necessarily the laws of elsewhere—is far too near Chaos for comfort, which is why so few dare stay there long. And as for Netherworld—you’d have to be mad to even think about it.
“Loki had been pondering this with increasing unease as he and Maddy followed the long, well-travelled road to Hel. Not a difficult road, for obvious reasons, though less worn than you might have expected. The dead leave fewer tracks than the living. . . .”
. . . Which is reassuring, because at present I’m leaving more tracks than the living: the deep, dragging, shambling tracks of someone being hurtled against her will . . .
* * *
*I think I’ve also told you about the block and tackle the boys created to haul him up and down the ladder into the ringing chamber. More terrifying. But it’s also an intimation of how loyal bell ringers are to their own.
** !!!!!!!
*** I have not yet failed to get the glass to my lips, even at my collapsiest. You really cannot drink champagne through a straw.
† I have enough trouble Sunday morning service on tower bells. Today, for example, was profoundly not one of my better service rings.
†† LIKE NIALL NEEDS TO RING MORE HANDBELLS
††† The fact that (most of) you know (almost) nothing about change ringing is not the defining feature. If you were here in the mews kitchen with me I’d start waving my hands around and attempting to demonstrate with wine glasses. Because visual cues are important . . . and six-note rows^ that (occasionally) have seven or eight notes in them ARE VERY DISTURBING.
^ One for each bell, right? In change ringing every bell must ring once before any bell rings the next time.
‡ http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006tnv3
‡‡ Yes, it’s usually overwhelmingly classical. You do get a few surprises, but I have yet to hear either Steeleye Span or Led Zeppelin.
‡‡‡ Who has a new book out. http://www.express.co.uk/entertainment/view/168063/Review-Blueeyedboy
Brrrrrrr. I think I’ll stick to rereading Dickens and Diana Wynne Jones. I scare too easily. But I admire Harris, aside from a passionate liking for Runemarks: she’s a best-selling author who risks doing different things. Indeed she bridled when Berkeley said that blueeyedboy was a ‘departure’, replied, oh, you’ve used the d-word, and that she liked to think in terms of career ‘trajectory’. Yes. I get that. And may she go on doing different things. The only other big best seller I can think of who keeps doing different things is Neil Gaiman.
It also perhaps behoves me, speaking of reasons why she’s on my radar, to mention that she gave SUNSHINE a really good quote when it came out over here.
§ You remember Ragnarok. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ragnar%C3%B6k
§§ But if you want to read a couple of proper reviewers: http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/children/article2307684.ece
http://www.powells.com/review/2008_02_23.html
§§§ I don’t understand why it wasn’t the Next Big Thing. Why isn’t it Harry Potter, His Dark Materials, and Runemarks?
Guest post by Maren
A crash course in banned books
More than anything else in the library field world, censorship and other intellectual freedom issues have the power to instantly send me off into a blind rage. Unfortunately, as an academic librarian I don’t get many opportunities to channel this energy into my actual work because it’s largely a public and school library issue. I do however keep track of the email lists and Twitter feeds of various organizations that publicize and fight censorship*, so that…I can send myself into a rage all over again, almost daily? I don’t know. No, actually, I think that anyone who’s ever loved a book–not just librarians–should be aware of the constant attacks on those or other books by people who are nominally adults but seem to have missed the First Amendment** part of Civics 101. I’ve also seen a lot of misconceptions online from well-meaning people on my side of this issue, so I humbly present a roundup of censorship concepts. I had planned to also include some particularly interesting or notorious recent book challenges, but the post is long and dense enough already so I may continue it as a series.*
What does “banned book” mean, exactly?
In the U.S., it simply means that some library or school district somewhere has removed the book from their collection or curriculum because it offended someone. It does not mean that the book has been removed from all libraries throughout the nation***. You may also have seen or heard the term “challenged book”–this means that someone lodged a formal complaint against it, but it’s either in the process of being reviewed before a decision is made on what to do with it, or it was already judged appropriate and returned to the collection. These challenges are what the American Library Association compiles in its annual list, often mislabeled “the banned books list.” This is inaccurate because not all of those books were ultimately removed from all of the libraries or schools where they were challenged. In fact, if the institution has a good policy in place to deal with challenges–and if they actually follow that policy in good faith, which sadly doesn’t always happen–the book will usually remain in circulation, albeit sometimes with restrictions.
Who decides what to do with challenged books?
That varies widely by institution. Ideally, the book is read and the challenge assessed by a committee composed of a wide range of stakeholders, possibly including librarians, parents, students, community members, teachers, administrators, and/or school or library board members. You might think that the one constant would be librarians, as we are probably the most familiar with First Amendment issues in libraries and with what our entire user base can handle, but unfortunately this is not always the case. In too many institutions, book challenges go to the school or library board only, or to a single administrator, or in smaller communities even to the city council. When a book does get banned, it’s often because the person(s) who assessed the challenge made their decision based only on their own personal reaction, with little to no knowledge of the many Supreme Court precedents that have affirmed free speech protections for library books and their readers. For instance, Island Trees School District v. Pico is one of many cases where the Court acknowledged that the freedom to read is implied by freedom of speech, since speech is pointless if no one can “hear” it. Another case, Tinker v. Des Moines Independent School District†, had already established that public school students “are ‘persons’ under our Constitution” (something that overbearing adults seem to forget all too often), and that they do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Taken together, these two cases guarantee that schools cannot legitimately remove books from their libraries simply because they don’t like the ideas or a few of the words in them. Emphasis on “legitimately” because as I said it still happens when committees, boards, or administrators are not sufficiently acquainted with these precedents, and if no parents or students feel like suing the school over it the decision will probably stand.
Obviously, free speech protections in public libraries are even broader. While Pico specified that books could be removed from schools on the basis that they were “pervasively vulgar,” adult fiction and non-fiction in public libraries enjoy a constitutional protection that goes waaaay beyond what many people seem to believe. They usually discover this when they are shocked, shocked upon coming across a sex manual on their local library’s shelves (bonus shock points if it’s a gay sex manual, of course) and complain to the authorities thinking that once they realize it’s there††, where children could find it, they will certainly remove it forthwith. The challenge is usually stopped short when the library or the ACLU points out that the ultimate responsibility for policing what minors read falls to their parents or guardians, not librarians or the community.
As I write this at the tail end of National Library Week (April 11-17), ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has just released the list of the most frequently challenged books of 2009. I encourage you all to pick one and read it, or if there’s an old favorite on there, re-read it! And please, please speak up when books are challenged in your communities. Here’s the list:†††
1. “TTYL”; “TTFN”; “L8R, G8R” (series) by Lauren Myracle
2. “And Tango Makes Three” by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
3. “The Perks of Being A Wallflower” by Stephen Chbosky
4. “To Kill A Mockingbird” by Harper Lee
5. “Twilight” (series) by Stephenie Meyer
6. “Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger
7. “My Sister’s Keeper” by Jodi Picoult
8. “The Earth, My Butt, and Other Big, Round Things” by Carolyn Mackler
9. “The Color Purple” Alice Walker
10. “The Chocolate War” by Robert Cormier
* * *
*Such as: Intellectual Freedom Action News listserv from ALA’s Office for Intellectual Freedom; Twitter feeds for OIF and the Freedom to Read Foundation; and Facebook fan pages for the National Coalition Against Censorship and Banned Books Week.
**I do apologize to non-U.S. readers for the U.S.-centric nature of this post.
***Yes, this would be one of the misconceptions that hurts my head. I’m not sure how people even think that would work, because barring a secret library cabal^, the directive would pretty much have to come from the federal government and–NO. That doesn’t happen here, or I daresay anywhere the readers of this blog live. That’s like North Korea-level repressive, man.
†You may have heard of this one; it’s the case where some students successfully defended their right to wear black armbands to school in protest of the Vietnam War. It was the basis for Justice Stevens’ dissent in the more recent “Bong hits 4 Jesus” case.
††Like books just appear on library shelves by magic. Certainly no one read reviews and considered their worth to the whole community before purchasing them, oh no.
†††The reasons frequently given for the challenges are listed here.
^Of course we have one, but we sure don’t use it to ban books.
* YAAAAY! SERIES! YESSSSSSSS! –ed.
Attack of the Real World, Update
One of the great things about dogs—hellhounds anyway—is that they can always catch up on their sleep. They’re not bothered. So when I turned them out at 8:45 this morning—eighty forty five in the freaking morning*—they said, Oh! Hurtle! A hurtle! How lovely! Oh, hellgoddess, we’re so happy! Yeah. We’re all so ungleblarging happy. Happy happy happy. And I’ve got a little home experiment in antibiotic-resistant micro-organisms going on in my head right now. I rang the dentist just before we frolicked outdoors—and, furthermore, they answered. Gods. These morning people.* And furthermore dentist from R’yleh was already in surgery. I explained that the forces of dental evil were gaining, and I needed fresh troops—silently hoping that they could ring the new prescription through to a local chemist, and I did not have to schlep into Mauncester today. We’ll get back to you, said Cerberus.
We went for our abbreviated hurtle.† I had to get up to Third House to give the Pond Man a house key. I’ve told you Third House has a pond, haven’t I? It has a pond like the cottage has an Aga—unimaginative persons tend to accuse me of having bought two houses for these accessories. Pffft.†† Anyway. Third House has a neglected pond. It was already neglected three years ago when it became my responsibility. It has one of those great flat cypressy things growing out horizontally over it, which I have hacked back each year to give the water lily a chance, and beyond that the pond has just sat there, holding water††† and getting shaggier and shaggier. Hence: Pond Man.
But I hadn’t been expecting him to say ‘Friday, or maybe June’. Yeep. So I said Friday. I bunged hellhounds back at the cottage to get on with their mischronological beauty sleep, checked on Pond Man to give him the house key and be informed that the coupling on the hosepipe had disappeared‡ and bolted to the doctor’s surgery for our hospital follow-up appointment with Peter’s GP.
Which was a bit of an anticlimax. Or a lot of an anticlimax. I meant to go in with my list of questions researched and prepared, and be cool‡‡ and organized‡‡‡ and articulate§ but the way this week has gone . . . well. But the GP was in a mellow and expansive mood.§§ With the result that we came away very little wiser about anything, but fairly sure that’s merely because there wasn’t anything to know. They don’t know why what happened happened; the tests the hospital was so hung up on showed no very significant results, said the GP§§§. Best guess is pretty much what we knew already: Peter went down with some kind of acute, and it probably knocked him down harder because he’s old. That’s it? But then I remember that 80 million people died of the Spanish flu in 1918. Humans are fragile little creatures really.
And I’m feeling pretty fragile right now. Any of you who follow me on Twitter know the rest of the story. I got back to the cottage to a phone message from Cerberus saying that they’d had a cancellation and that I could come in not merely for Godzilla antibiotics but for the treatment. I love the don’t-scare-the-patient-speak. I talked both to Cerberus and Scylla and they never once said ‘tooth pulling’ or ‘extraction’ or ‘chainsaws’. It was always the treatment.
So I went in. Whimpering a little.
And I had the treatment.#
And I’m not sure I’m going to be having a really great night tonight.
And I’m supposed to be ringing handbells at 10 am tomorrow morning.##
And I would kill for an apple. I usually eat one or two a day, and I haven’t had one in a week. I had soup for supper. I will be having soup for supper tomorrow too. And for lunch. And for breakfast, if I ate breakfast.
Sigh.
* * *
* As I petulantly climbed in to bed last night^ I was thinking, as a way of getting yourself categorically on frelling summer time, the last fortnight has worked, but I don’t recommend it as a method.
^ Carefully arranging myself on my good side, where there would be no promiscuous contact of pillow with the wrong cheek.
** I realise you all find this difficult to believe, but I used to be a morning person. My problem is that it’s afternoons I like least. But going to bed at noon and getting up at 6 p.m. makes it extremely difficult to cope with the real world. Which is a hostile entity, as we know, and prone to sudden, unmerited assaults.
† We did not meet anything too alarming. Well, there was the Lost Regiment of Daleks, but we climbed over a stile and ran away when we heard them shouting EX-TER-MIN-ATE!
†† And the pond has a pink water lily.
††† And, this time of year, tadpoles, which Pond Man sieved out a lot of before he drained the pond. I said, the pond’s too small for fish, isn’t it? He said, no, you could have fish—but they’d eat all your tadpoles. Oh no! I said. I want the tadpoles!
‡ ARRRRGH
‡‡ HA HA HA HA HA
‡‡‡ HA HA HA HA HA
§ You’re thinking I can do articulate, right? Well, it depends. One of the reasons I hate the standard medical model of the Expert and the Idiot so much is because I was very thoroughly indoctrinated at a very young age and it intimidates the zgggrmbbb out of me still. I can be absolutely furious with a doctor brushing me off, ignoring me or patronising me, but I still find it extraordinarily difficult to say ‘Pardon me, but you’re not listening.’ Or: ‘You are a titanium-plated, knuckleheaded jerk, and I hope you get your cojones sued off by a patient with more time to waste than I have and that your husband/wife/dog /Bugatti Veyron runs away with the circus.’
§§ He was wearing socks with pink polka dots. I longed to ask him if his six-year-old daughter had given them to him for his birthday.^
^ No, I have no idea if he has a six year old daughter.
§§§ Flexing his ankles
# Because the dentist from R’yleh likes to have as much fun as possible, we wasted a little time with him saying, well, you don’t have to have The Treatment today if you don’t want to. I can still give you more antibiotics and we can go through this whole ghastly ceremonial dance again next Tuesday. LOOK, MY COURAGE, SUCH AS IT IS, IS SCREWED TO THE STICKING PLACE^ HERE, OKAY? CAN WE PLEASE JUST GET ON WITH IT?
^ Given my attitude toward Shakespeare, if anything could delight me about having a tooth pulled, having it pulled on Shakespeare’s birthday would.
## I missed Friday tower practise again. And I’m in frelling charge next week, unless they’ve given me the white feather for deserting the regiment in time of need.
Attack of the Real World*
So Computer Man came** and it will be nice if I have a working printer again, I haven’t had time to find out.*** I AM ALSO CHANGING EMAIL SERVERS so maybe it will stop taking several minutes to download anything larger than three lines of plain text, and hanging and crashing every time a new email comes in, and eating my contacts. I proceeded therefrom to being dazed and confused by the options on offer by Orange, which is the company I pay money to to have a mobile phone.† The first thing that happened is that I went on line—see, I was trying to be modern and sensible—and you are supposed to look up available choices by the sort of phone you have. The RaspBerry is an HP and it’s not even listed. I’m screwed and I haven’t even done anything yet. So I rang them up and was dazed and confused over the phone instead. Blurg. So I have a new SIM card coming in the post that is going to let me do EVERYTHING and maybe I’ll learn to text.†† But it means I can have the phone on all the time so Peter can ring me at any moment day or night.††† And moving on from that vivid accomplishment I rang Lifeline, which is the panic-button company the hospital recommends‡, who is going to send a representative round for a Free No Obligation Demonstration next week. There was lunch‡‡ around here somewhere, and the second half of the hellhounds’ morning hurtle, and a failed attempt to pick up Peter’s prescription at the surgery, and loading up on olives from the Olive Man‡‡‡ at the Thursday farmers’ street market . . . and I even managed to scramble back up to the cottage for an hour and half’s somewhat frenzied gardening because we went to a garden centre yesterday because . . . er . . . Peter needed a new kitchen bin? Unfortunately there is a garden centre attached to the homewares.
And then limped back down to the mews for my first handbells in a fortnight. At the time I thought, golly, my stamina is waay down, but presently contemplating the day that had just passed I could just have been, you know, tired.
But it’s worse than that.
Niall is gone next Friday. He’s going on Colin’s ringing tour, the ratbag(s).
Niall, New Arcadia’s Ringing Master, will not be here for tower practise Friday week. And you may remember who the Assistant Ringing Master is???
* * *
* Attack of the Frelling Terrier. I haven’t been keeping you up to date on local canine transgressions but it’s not because there haven’t been any. I had a particularly trying one about a week ago. The footpath past Third House takes a sharp blind turn at the bottom of my garden. A Large Black Off Lead Dog came swaggering around the corner, you know, the way thugs and teenage boys walk, swaying their shoulders from side to side to take up as much space as possible. He stopped. His head and his tail came up, and so did all of his hair. We stopped. Jeezum. Didn’t we just stop. This was one of those occasions when even the hellhounds were subdued. He started growling. And advancing, one slow footstep at a time. Oh frelling swell. He hadn’t lowered his head yet or I’d be really panicking. Eventually this big stupid humanoid jerk came, also swaggering, around the corner. After a few seconds he deigned to call his dranglefabbing dog—who was now plenty close enough for us to see the whites of his eyes, and the hellhounds were showing a tendency to stand just the tiniest bit behind me—the dog ignored him, of course. Dog bullies always ignore their humanoids. So the jerk started talking to me. And the thing that made me want to kill him is that he was using that put-upon, faux-reasonable tone that passive-aggressive men are especially fond of using on women and it TOTALLY PRESSES MY BUTTONS. If you’d just walk by him, he said, as if this was all my problem. He’d be fine if you’d just walk by him. HE IS NOT FINE! I said, in a low, controlled voice, keeping an indirect (don’t look an aggressive dog in the face) eye on the buffalo-sized thing marching toward us. HE CAME AROUND THAT CORNER, PUT ALL HIS HAIR UP AND STARTED GROWLING! THIS IS NOT FINE! At least the jerk speeded up a little and the dog let him grab his collar. He’s fine, you know, said Mr Faux-Frelling-If-I-Had-A-Gun-I-Would-Shoot-You-Thank-the-Frelling-British-Government-for-Gun-Control-Reasonable. HE IS NOT FINE, I spat over my shoulder as hellhounds and I crowded past, since it is a NARROW footpath. The dog went berserk as we actually went by them, and I could see Mr Faux-Frelling having to work at keeping hold of the brute. And this thing was OFF LEAD.
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.
Today we had to hurtle early, because the Attack of the Real World was beginning early with the arrival of Computer Men. Once again we were walking in town. As we came around the corner to the very, very, very long stretch of straight path by the river, waaaaaaay down at the far end I could see a woman and her terrier wandering toward us. It became apparent as it got closer that it was off lead. I looked at it thoughtfully, since off lead terriers are among my least favourite denizens of the animal kingdom, and cranked the hellhounds in. It had clearly seen us some time before—and the bloody woman could hardly have avoided seeing us, unless she had a bag over her head, which she did not—and it eventually reached its Acceptable Distance, lowered its head, and started stalking us. GIVE ME A FRELLING BREAK. The woman calls, Wait! —But what did I just say about dog bullies and their humanoids? She wasn’t even hurrying. We backed up. The terrier kept coming. Wait! Wait! shouted the woman. Eventually she began to hurry a little. We were whites-of-its-eyes range again too, but this thing is at least only about mid-calf high—Mr Faux-Frelling’s big broad-jawed oik could have done some damage—and it suddenly launched itself toward us, barking and snarling, and started biting everything in reach, ie Darkness and Chaos. I started yelling and—I had that infuriating run-in with a terrier who did the stalking and running who turned out to be FRIENDLY and I think it’s ruined my instincts. The one time I’ve ever managed to kick one of these bloody attack dogs was before that occasion and the damn thing had simply chomped onto Chaos’ neck and was hanging on and therefore an easy target since Chaos was too nonplussed to do much, which is just as well really. Anyway I kicked this one twice but pulled back for godssake both times I connected because my INSTINCTS are I don’t want to HURT IT. VERY BAD LANGUAGE HERE. The stupid woman finally shambled up and caught the sodding little bugger. I swore at her—and I did not use ‘frelling’—and said WHY THE HELL DIDN’T YOU GRAB THAT THING??? And she said, attempting, not very successfully, for wounded dignity, I was trying. YOU WEREN’T TRYING VERY HARD, I said. YOU COULD SEE US COMING FROM A LONG WAY AWAY.
As we stormed off—well, I stormed: hellhounds are always sad and amazed when other dogs don’t love them, which is part of why I get so furious—I heard her saying in a headmistressy voice to her vicious little piece of four-legged crap, Well, that wasn’t very friendly.
ARRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.
** Man! Not Men! Whoa! I thought you were attached at the hip! —It’s okay, he said. We’ve been separated. The doctors say the operation was a success.
*** We have an early draft of JOHN’S^ NEW BOOK to read. If we could print it off.
^ You know, Dickinson. Peter’s son.
† Orange because it’s the only one that even sometimes gets a signal around here. New Arcadia, Hampshire, the Bermuda Triangle of the United Kingdom. I’ve had it—well, I’ve been through three phones—seven or eight years, I think, and have put in an extra £20 top up like twice. Not one of your heavy users. But back in the days when I used to go places occasionally it was good for the ‘No, I caught the 4:56 out of Smurgeon Gakworthy, I’ll be there in half an hour’ and the ‘the train has been sitting a hundred feet outside Waterloo for the last forty minutes, I’m going to be late for lunch’ calls. And I’ve told you that the RaspBerry exists both to indulge my penchant for techie note-taking and to comfort Peter that if I break a leg five miles from the car after tripping over a hellhound I can ring for help. Assuming the Bermuda Triangle is in a good mood that day.
†† And then again, maybe I won’t.
††† Since he has an absolute gift for
***WARNING: TOO MUCH INFORMATION FOLLOWS***
ringing when I’m sitting on the loo reading Calvin and Hobbes it will actually be very nice to have the phone in my pocket.
‡ Which is a good idea anyway, since they have a 24/7 central switchboard, but also see: Bermuda Triangle, and breaking a leg five miles from the car.
‡‡ Mushy. I miss my huge salads with raw chewy lettuce and crunchy sprouted seeds and things. The really bad news is that the bloody infection, having subsided somewhat, is now gaining against the damned antibiotics. Tomorrow morning I can ring the dentist again. Like I don’t already have to meet the Pond Man up at Third House and go with Peter to see his GP for the discussion about what went so appallingly wrong a week ago and why it’s not going to go wrong like that again.
‡‡‡ Olives used to be things that happened to other people till I met the Olive Man. The Olive Man’s olives are now absolutely necessary to my existence, and if we run out I grow sweaty and feverish. They are additionally attractive right now in that they are something I can still eat.
Guest post by Black Bear
Tulips
Writing a guest blog entry for Robin is always a daunting prospect. She sets the bar high, you know. Not only does she have a great deal to say, she says it very well and interestingly, to the point that I have found myself awake at 1 am on a weeknight doing further research on roses, which I don’t grow, sighthounds, which I don’t own, and bell ringing, which I don’t remotely understand. That’s a pretty darn good blog, to my way of thinking. Or so I keep telling her.
Not that getting me interested in sighthounds was a stretch, mind. I’m an animal lover and always have been, from childhood forward; I tore through all James Herriot’s books at about the age of 12, I think. (This was probably a bit sooner than I should have, I do remember clearly that All Creatures Great and Small was the first book I ever read that had the word #%@^ in it. I was shocked to the core– #%@^, right there in print! I knew I had arrived in the world of adult literature. Sure, Tolkien was a grown-up author, but he never said #%@^.) Anyway, so I now read with great entertainment the trials and tribulations of Life With Hellhounds. I don’t have dogs myself, at the moment—I favor largeish dogs, and I have a smallish house. But my house is in a wooded area, near a river, so my furry animal needs are met by Cat Within, and Wildlife Without. Visitors in and near my yard of late have included foxes, snakes, weasels, beavers, muskrats, mink, deer, and squirrels. Great quantities of squirrels.
I have a real love-hate relationship with squirrels. I think they’re fantastic little animals, amazingly smart and strikingly beautiful. We have two kinds around here; first the red squirrels, which are gorgeous beasts with a bright chestnut color, a shrill call, and a fierce territorial demeanor. There was a colony of these living in my neighbor’s attic a year or so ago; I could see them busily running in and out of a hole in his soffit, and it made me happy because I had the joy of watching them without hearing their deep philosophical discussions under my own eaves at 5 am. My personal curse is the larger local species—the Fox Squirrel. Fox squirrels are big and fluffy and fat; they have salt-and-pepper fur on their backs, but a bright orange underbelly and tail, much like a grey fox. Thus, fox squirrel. Fox squirrels, unlike red squirrels, are NOT territorial; therefore, you can have approximately 80 billion of them all in one small yard and they’re all perfectly agreeable. I, however, am not.
I have a birdfeeder—and I accept, of course, that “bird feeder” means “squirrel feeder with some left for the birds if they’re lucky.” I don’t believe in all those elaborate do-dads for keeping squirrels away. They have to eat too, after all, and there’s usually enough for everyone. Besides, I have another birdfeeder that’s one of those tube thingys with perches ranged around it, hanging off the corner of my porch, completely out of squirrel reach. Completely. Squirrels are happy, birds are happy, I’m happy…
Then a few weeks ago I noticed that my fox squirrel population seemed to have reached some sort of saturation point. Perhaps my regular feedings ensured that no natural selection occurred over the winter. Perhaps fox squirrels from other areas had heard of the bounty of my bottomless not-a-birdfeeder and were coming in, by rail or bus, to set up housekeeping in the large silver maples down by the back road. Either way, it was getting ridiculous. Every time I pulled into the driveway, 6 or 7 of them would scatter from the feeding area in all directions, all of them fat as butter. Unsatisfied with a half-liter of oil sunflower each day, they chewed through the wooden lid of the feeder in search of some sort of hidden cache of food—as if perhaps the feeder was holding out on them. I came out on the front porch one morning and surprised two of them—one on the windowsill, one hanging precariously off the top of the aforementioned tube feeder, with his head crammed into one of the seed openings (he’d broken off the perch to allow easy head access.) “That’s IT!” I told them firmly, as they dropped swiftly into the forsythia like covert ops agents. “No more.” And I stopped feeding them, figuring a few days without the gravy train might toughen them up a bit, encourage them to seek new food sources, and maybe try a few other yards in the neighborhood.
It did toughen them up, in the same way that a childhood spent on the mean streets toughens young hooligans into organized criminal gangs. It started with a warning—I came out one morning and a squirrel was hanging on the screen door of my back porch, nearly at eye level. She fixed me with a steely gaze for a moment, then dropped off and ran up a tree. I keep the sunflower seed on the back porch, so at the time I figured that was just a longing gaze at the former source of bounty. But then, two days later, I glanced out a window and noticed a squirrel sitting on my front walk, eating something bright red. Red? Squirrels don’t eat red things… I came over to get a closer look, and saw that the object in question was a tulip flower. He had coldly beheaded one of my only blooming tulips, and was eating it right in front of me in an extremely calculated manner. When I said “HEY! You little JERK!” he dropped it rather pointedly on the walk and hopped away. The meaning was clear—it was as if the squirrel mafia had stopped by to say “Accidents happen. It’d be a real shame if some of your other tulips had… accidents…”
Still, I wasn’t too worried. They’re only squirrels, right? But the other day I saw one of them up on his hind legs, directly under the engine block of my car. Rigging a car bomb? Or was he just hotwiring it so they could drive to the hardware store themselves and buy a new bag of sunflower seeds? Then yesterday morning I noticed tiny, muddy footprints all over the hood of the car. Tiny, squirrelly prints. And all my tulips are gone.
As James Herriot might say– #%@^.