Eve of the Big Day
One wonders (perhaps a trifle plaintively) if publisher schedulers notice little things like national elections??? Couldn’t they have made PEGASUS’ publication day today? Or even Wednesday? Whimper.
But don’t I get a wish or something? Night before publication day? Yes. I say I get a wish. And I wish that we all get up tomorrow morning and discover that the Tea Party was all a really, really bad dream. . . .
Okay. Stopping now. Not a political blog. Mrgfllgle.*
Meanwhile . . . I tweeted about Peter coming downstairs at the mews this morning to find water pouring through the sitting-room ceiling. . . . The sort of adventure every home owner dreams of not having (speaking of bad dreams). Angelic plumber has been—twice—and installed the new gewurtztraminer—no, wait, that’s what you knock back medicinally after it’s all over. Gaah. Well, we have hot water again, even it’s a trifle inclined to brawl out of the tap at you in barfs and geysers of ill intent. And the furniture appears to be recovering, although the hellhounds were a trifle miffed that the melodramatic sitting-room rearrangement didn’t seem to have any particular affiliation with Pleasing Hellhounds. And there is an unnervingly strong smell of wet plaster in the hall. I suppose we could just turn the central heating on high for a couple of days.
And since Colin and Anthea are in Tasmania for some ridiculous number of weeks while Colin turns sixty where none of us can get at him, Niall and I set off for Stanhope this evening, where poor Wild Robert** was suffering a very heavy cold—the kind that makes you sound like Paul Robeson. Our Kent this time was not a thing of beauty, but I did get to ring the six to bob minor, which is a first, and I get to preen about it a little. The six bells at Stanhope are smallish, so the tenor is not a monster—remember in a minor method the last bell joins in the fun, it doesn’t just stay bonging at the back, so you have to be able to move it around, go down to the front, dodge, all that strenuous stuff. So I asked the woman who’d been tenor-behinding for a previous touch of bob doubles if it was suitable for me ringing minor on it, or should I leave it to Wild Robert or Niall? She looked dubious and said she wouldn’t want to ring it. So I asked Wild Robert, and he looked at me a minute and said, hey, it’s practise night, give it a try. So I did. And . . . bell ringing is so infinitely full of tiger pits. It’s not just the sheer weight of your bell that’s your problem: it’s also its relative weight among its colleagues. The biggest bell always has the biggest dramas because it has the biggest wheel, even if in absolute terms it’s not more than middling, and might be an easy little thing in another tower with bigger bells behind it. Gah. Anyway, I rang it, and I had some sense of my pace-setting authority as biggest bell which in practise means racing down to the front and toiling up to the back. Meep. Maybe I can do it again next week.
And Black Bear has another update for us (keep scrolling). I am, let me say, thrilled that PEGASUS and cake is a going concern. ::BEAMS:: Thank you! Thank you thank you thank you thank you! THANK YOU!
Pub day tomorrow!
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*http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/nov/01/midterms-christine-odonnell-tea-party:
‘ . . . Christine O’Donnell could go down in history as the woman who cost the Republicans the Senate.’ Oh, I hope so.^
^ And pardon me for losing all credibility by remarking that I don’t care what her politics are, I would refuse on principle to vote for any grown-up woman who wears an Alice band.
The thing that bites me is that two years ago when we elected Obama I was exhilarated. I thought, YAAAAAY. Then I thought, Finally! I can stop creeping around and talking without opening my mouth so the locals here won’t twig I’m American. For a few weeks—even a few months—I was proud to be an American again. We’d done something pretty amazing—returned a candidate who not only had brains and principles, something notably lacking in our last president, but who was mixed race. Yowzah. Jackpot.
Well, no. No one could have walked into the mess two years ago and fixed it. We all knew that. We also knew that the ways in which Obama was not the standard candidate, and was now not the standard president, including the colour of his skin, was going to cause some restlessness in certain circles. But I admit, sad, naïve, fantasy-fiction-warped twit that I am, I never imagined anything as grotesque as the Tea Party coming to national prominence. National! Dear gods in all the heavens. I went back to talking without opening my mouth around the time that O’Donnell’s college tea-and-sympathy+ group’s manifesto declaring that masturbation was adultery—which the GUARDIAN article above helpfully provides a link to—got splashed all over the developed, western, snickering first world.
And this just makes me cry: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2010/oct/31/tea-party-sarah-palin-andrew-neil
+ Anybody read the original play?
** I tweeted about driving around for fifty minutes last Wednesday in the dark, looking for Brocéliande, where Wild Robert had taken a whim to have his monthly upper-level bell practise. Of these first three monthly Wednesdays . . . I’m missing all of them. I have or had prior commitments on the two that were being held at towers I could actually locate. When I found out October’s was at Brocéliande I knew it was no use, but you do have to go look for the black knight at the ford so when you go back and kneel to your monarch you can say you tried. Meanwhile I’ve told you I’ve been bounced from the Stedman Triples education day . . . and I’m not going to be able to go to the lots and lots of bells day at Tinhorn Abbey and ring plain hunt on forty-two either. Sob. Clearly I have managed to offend the bell gods somehow. I wonder if my ill fate has anything to do with my cottage having the largest pipestrelle nursery in Hampshire, when there are plenty of belfries around? Like Arachne putting Athena’s nose out of joint? I’m not bragging! I’m not! They just moved in! So what is a placatory offering to bell gods (or goddesses)? I could do brownies and champagne.
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