Why I love Hampshire
Highlights from this morning’s hurtle:
Oooh.
Aaah.
Mmmm.
Oooh. Aaah.
Mmmhmmm.
It’s been pretty much a repeat, with more roses, of yesterday.* The mud, the blood, the screaming. I’ve bashed and slashed through enough of the back jungle at the cottage that I’m entertaining delusions of plunging into the central jungle, the jungle from which three minotaurs, six Midgard Serpents, and a special-delivery driver who pissed me off once too often, have disappeared, never to return,*** and finding the Fountain of Youth. I know I left it around here somewhere.† Gardens: the original Tardis(es). After six years here it amazes me what you can cram into a space not much bigger than a pudding-basin if you’re ruthless enough. Meanwhile there are advantages to claustrophobia: The entire—tiny, walled—Tardis smells of Agnes; it’s extraordinary;** you open the kitchen door and it’s all about your early yellow rose. Lots and lots of your early yellow rose. But elsewhere Mme Alfred Carriere—the three-storey one working on swallowing my neighbour—is coming out, and the first Fantin Latour is open, with 1,000,000 to come; ditto the first Sombreuil; and the Fru is dazzlingly full out: a large silvery-pink hummock with delivery-driver-noshing thorns.
And I think I mentioned yesterday that Souvenir de la Malmaison, my palest-pink bête noir, is cracking? Souvenir, for whom the merest hint of precipitation causes total wild-abandon-type breakdown, manifested by brown, rotten, balled flowers? And have I mentioned that we haven’t had any rain to speak of in about two months? It’s supposed to rain this weekend.
Souvenir in consultation with the weather gods
* * *
* Including the emergency summit with Niall. Sigh. Turned laptop on. Opened Abel, the Grand Old Personage of bell ringing software^, to look up a frelling method that Niall had been talking about^^ and the exact same cock-up as yesterday occurred—the cock-up that had also refused to reoccur yesterday when Niall had come round to help. ARRRGH. I happened to know that Niall was working from home today^^^ so I phoned him and he tried not to laugh and said, bring it over. Now? I said. Yes, said Niall: I’ll put the kettle on.^^^^ So I unplugged it and put it carefully, still open to Abel and the Cock Up, on the passenger seat of Wolfgang, and drove over to Niall’s. Where we, which is to say Niall, got the cock-up sorted almost immediately~ but I was still there almost an hour and a half because the only reason I have not been outed as a total drooling bell geek~~ is because I can hide in Niall’s shadow, who is a worse one. Also Niall knows that my Not Very Secret Goal is to ring Yorkshire on handbells~~~ and so he was taking the opportunity to sketch out a study schedule. . . .
^ I think. It’s certainly the only one that anyone around here had ever heard of a decade-plus ago when I was trying to learn to ring the first time. Hey, I remember Abel on DOS. Although Abel is now much shinier. And more complicated. And easier to get wrong, although reassuringly harder to do anything irrevocably awful. You were always within a hair’s-breadth of the final apocalypse, on DOS.+
+ Speaking of Apocalypse, aka Pooka, aka my iPhone, I’ve just been having a conversation with Blogmom about bloody formatting, and what it does to you whether you want it to or not, especially lately with WordPress’ latest update and Word’s manifest disinclination to cooperate ARRRRRRRRRGH, and that on the subject of two spaces after a period/full stop I might as well go quietly, because a single space is now standard usage. I DON’T WANT TO. I LEARNT TWO SPACES AND I WANT TWO SPACES. I even use two spaces at the end of a sentence on Twitter, if I have spaces to spare. Texting on Pooka—you can tell me if this is generically true: I’ve only learnt to text recently—if you want a full stop, you click two spaces, and it adds punctuation and auto-caps your next letter. BUT IT ONLY INSERTS ONE SPACE. Rotten tease.
^^ The sad fact that I clearly am going to learn to ring Cambridge on handbells, although it may take me a little while, is giving Niall dreadful ideas.
^^^ Because the clutch on his car, the Other Least Prepossessing Car in Hampshire, decided that it had had one handbell peal too many last night, and died messily.
^^^^ I not only drink too much tea, everyone I know knows I drink too much tea.
~ Whereupon the question becomes why did it go away yesterday? —And I’m not giving you the details not to save me humiliation but because they’re boring.
~~ Although I realise some of you suspect the truth. Which is that I am several kinds of total drooling geek.
~~~ Which requires four/eight, which is why we need Wild Robert.
** I meant to count exactly how many flowers she has out. I’ll do it tomorrow. If I remember.
*** Excellent fertilizer.
† Also, Alicia is going to be here next week. Eeeep. She gardens, you know.
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