Rain and drama
I was lying WIDE AWAKE in bed last night.* The alarm was going to go off in about four and a half hours and I was not in a good mood. And I was listening to the wind and the rain lashing the cottage** and thinking about little green things in pots balanced on walls and shelves outdoors: a perfectly good system in calm weather but not so good when Eurus is playing silly buggers. Or maybe Boreas. Anyway I was lying there thinking about turning the light back on*** and worrying about my little green things. Eventually I did turn the light back on . . . and went downstairs (grumbling), put my raincoat on† and went out to rescue the pots that sit on the little walls between the greenhouse and the stairs at the side of my house. For some reason that tiny area is a total wind tunnel. You’d think the greenhouse would break it up, but the house walls on either side are two—or three, counting slanty-roofed attics—high, and if anything the single-storey greenhouse seems to focus any wandering wind, or maybe just irritate it, so it curls up over the greenhouse and then comes down with an extra-heavy slam on the far side.
I was right to worry; one of the pots had already gone over the edge—and of course the torch in my pocket didn’t feel like working†† at 4 o’clock in the morning so I was on my (bare) knees, patting around for the frelling thing—found it. Out of its pot and gasping. I carefully got the other ones down off the walls and safely (well, relatively safely) on the ground, and then took my invalid indoors and dripped across the kitchen††† to put it in the sink, which I’m afraid is what I usually do with injured or orphan plants: there isn’t anywhere to put a scullery at the cottage even if I could afford more frelling builders. I then went back to bed in the warm (if rather damp) glow of paranoia justified‡ and lay awake some more, listening to the wind yowl and the rain drum against the windows with tiny fists. Eventually the alarm went off. . . .
With the result that I am not at my best and brightest today. My little green invalid is chirpy as frell, and I put it outdoors again, in the back garden this time, where it can tell the recently potted-on and impressionable young fuchsias about its adventures. After all the noise we did not, after all, have much rain; enough, I thought, staring owlishly at my rain gauge, to let me get away with not watering my pots today. Peter and I went to a National-Garden-Scheme open garden‡‡ this afternoon: very large, very grand, very beautiful . . . and it chiefly made me want to come home and rootle around in my own tiny messy crowded space. Which is just as well because with this frelling drying wind I had to water my pots after all. Sigh.
* * *
* The joys of menopausal insomnia.^ Not. Also I was still high on Il Trovatore. Today, however, I am cranky.^^ And one infinitesimal supplementary indignation is that while only a few people have posted to last night’s forum thread—which in itself is fine: some things get forum members stirred up and some don’t—but I’ve had more than the usual number of emails about it. Anyone who wants to say something genuinely private, yes, I’d rather you emailed me^^^ but for the rest of you . . . opera isn’t highbrow, okay? You do not need a PhD in musicology to have an opinion. You don’t even need to be a professional musician. You can just like it for the noise. And you can say so on the forum.
^ I will be fifty nine in six months. When do I get to be OVER menopause? When does that fabulous free less-crazed-by-tidal-hormones post-menstrual era begin? Hey? And meanwhile, are there any other Old People out there getting on with their lives, thank you very much, who find the amortal thing ANNOYING? http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2065156,00.html
http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2011/may/01/live-long-join-the-immortals
So much of it is frelling luck. Who doesn’t keep on keeping on if they can? And sure, you can—probably—improve your odds if you eat your vegetables and get your sleep+ and find stuff that keeps you interested and people you want to go on talking to—and if you’re very, very wealthy you can have not only your own personal trainer but your own plastic surgeon, and your own private spring water flown in daily from Peru where any ovenbird or cock of the rock caught defecating in your spring is prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. But I’m old enough by now to know a lot of people who’ve been felled by nothing more than bad luck: everyone makes mistakes, and sometimes you make a mistake that your particular manifestation of your particular gene pool is vulnerable to, and it nails you. Or maybe you’re just in the wrong place at the wrong time. And sometimes there’s no discernable reason. You just go down. And these people who brag about being exactly the same as they were when they were teenagers? They’re bragging about this? This is pathetic. And the whole ‘sixty is the new forty’ or what-have-you? What utter feckless crap. Years mark you, so if you have any brains at all you will seek some use and/or satisfaction out of the inevitable scars and accumulation of experience—which will then make it easier to put the frell up with the sheer unadulterated, mitigation-less crap about getting older—including grief for the friends you’ve lost to that old bastard Death. Who is probably laughing his ugly ass off at this quaint new fashion concept of amortality.
+ supposing you can do that
^^ When am I never not cranky?
^^^ Hey McKinley remember snogging through the last three acts of that interminable brain-suck Les Troyens thirty years ago? Erm. Can I say ‘no’?+
+ Besides, I think it was Prokofiev’s War and Peace.
**This is one of my standard silly stories of minor tribulations, but I’ve been reading the news reports about the tornadoes in the southern United States. I know we’ve got at least a few forum members and I don’t know how many blog readers from that area. I tweeted a day or two ago that I was lighting candles for you. I hope, pointlessly, that anyone reading this blog is warm, safe and happy, and that those dear to them are too. A ridiculous wish, given the state of the world—and human nature—but it’s the direction I’d like to see this planet spinning in, about tornadoes in Alabama and war zones in Syria and everything else that’s sad and wrong.
*** I’m rereading E Nesbit’s THE PHOENIX AND THE CARPET. What a total charmer.
† Faint—very faint—rustling from the hellhound crate. This was hellhounds burrowing farther under their bedding and hoping I didn’t have any weird plans for them.
†† Very like the torch in my knapsack last night at the opera when just before the lights went down I dropped a knitting needle. Anguish unrestrained. This was one of my precious rosewood needles, which are my favourite.^ So I was down on my hands and (denim) knees patting blindly around the floor under my seat and moaning, and after about two minutes the woman behind me said brightly, Have you lost something? —I did find it. And a good thing too since this was the beginning, and I still had an entire intermission to get through. But I may have to revert to circular needles. Shudder. The idea of losing . . .
^ Not only because of their name.
††† Paralytic silence from hellhound crate
‡ Or it may just have been another godsblasted menopausal flush
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