26 July 2011
. . . is the twentieth anniversary of the famous day when I picked up that eccentric English writer Peter Dickinson, whom I slightly knew, at the Bangor, Maine airport, saw him coming through the gate, and went ‘oops’.
The rest is history. My twentieth anniversary of living in England—and specifically this little bit of Hampshire—is the end of October. And our twentieth wedding anniversary is the third of January next year.*
We will now briskly fast-forward to today. Peter had spent most of yesterday going to a funeral**, came home shattered, and is only semi-de-shattered today. I had nine hours and twenty minutes of sleep last night and I still feel like death and dog crap.*** We have Luke and his family arriving tomorrow, and I’m supposed to be making Third House differently-abled-friendly. We hadn’t really decided what we were going to do for our summer twentieth when we found out this was when Luke could come; and so in our usual never-mind-I’ll-think-about-that-tomorrow way we decided we’d have a gentle half-day outing to Wisley, which is the big RHS garden† not undoably far from here . . . but ‘not undoably’ is a relative term and in this case involves a long stretch of motorway driving. That was not going to happen today.
Peter and I stared at each other over the kitchen table.†† We could go to Zigguraton, I said tentatively. The media centre††† has a little art gallery and a nice café. There might even be two or three books on a shelf somewhere they haven’t reassigned to a computer docking station.‡
So that’s what we did. The art gallery contained an unexpectedly charming exhibit and the café is a really nice space‡‡ . . . But the thing that really caught my eye was the knitting exhibit in the case by the front door.‡‡‡ There’s a KNITTING GROUP that meets in the café every Tuesday morning. All welcome. Just bring your current project. . . .
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Honey_bee
Please forgive me if this has been answered but are the book doodles going to be book themed? Say…muffin doodles in Sunshine (or muffins with fangs) or a sighthound for Deerskin and so forth? Not that I wouldn’t appreciate any doodle but a specific book themed one would be really fantastic.
As what I say keeps evolving it is not surprising you are having trouble keeping up. People buying anything that includes a doodle will have the option of specifying what general category of doodle they would like. I’m hoping there will be an actual email submission form which will include a space for doodle requests—with a limit of, say, ten words, and with the caveat that my doodle skilz are limited and I can only do what I can do. I should start keeping a list of the things people suggest for doodles and post samples. (I can do a muffin with fangs for example but I’m not sure you’d like it.) But ‘themed-to-book doodle’ is certainly an option.
katinseattle
I know I can’t outbid for an autographed book, but I’d love a dragon doodle to go into my copy of Dragonhaven. I’d also love a doodle of the whippet. Just because. These will be autographed doodles, won’t they?
Remember that in-print hardbacks, signed and doodled, are going to be available at a flat fee of $35—it’s only the out of print stuff that is going to be some kind of auctioned. But the loose doodles will TOTALLY be autographed. The basic premise is: ‘best wishes and thanks to YOUR NAME HERE, Robin McKinley’. The $5 doodle will have a smaller doodle than the $10 is all. I wanted to have them on two different sizes of paper, but barring that I get to what looks like the nearest really good art supplies store—which is not near—they’ll both have to go on the WH Smith standard A6. Which means the $5 will have more white space as well as fewer lines.
Ajlr
And – you may snigger, at this point, if you wish – the timing of Sunday morning service where I ring is going to be brought forward in October so that we’ll need to start ringing just after 08.45 instead of 09.45! Can you give me any tips on how to survive such horror?
If you will forgive a brief excursion into semi-seriousness—and, may I add, well aware that you are pulling my poor sore ME-raddled leg, since you routinely get up at 6 or 7 o’clock in the morning§ during the working week—the way I get myself out of bed on Sunday mornings, hours before my usual, is by remembering that this is what us bell ringers are for. It doesn’t matter if you’re a Christian or not—and I’m not—the reason our bells exist is to call Christians to worship. The way we frelling pay back for the honour of ringing our bells is by ringing for service in the churches where they hang. This is something of a hobbyhorse of mine—people who can’t be arsed to ring for service infuriate me. It’s dishonourable. It’s stealing. The only literal financial cost to any bell ringer is a piddling yearly guild membership fee. The rest of our subscription is paid by ringing for service.
I don’t actually say this over to myself every Sunday morning when the alarm goes off much too early. It’s just something you do, if you’re a bell ringer, like if you have a dog, you take it for walks. There are people who have dogs who don’t take them for walks too. . . .
Don’t get me started. But Aj, I’m not worried. You’ll get up.
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And just in case anyone was worrying . . . yes, there was champagne for supper tonight.
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* Over halfway. I told Peter I’m expecting thirty-five years. More is negotiable. It’s all in the contract.
** Of a branch of the family I’ve never met, which is why I didn’t.
*** Our local pet shop, which orders the hellhounds’ monster bags of cereal-free kibble, greeted me with cries of triumph when I went in to pick up the latest delivery the end of last week. You’ll like these! they said, and flourished a packet of biodegradable dog-crap bags at me. Biodegradable dog-crap bags are remarkably elusive, or possibly illusory: the ones I used for a while turn out, on close inspection of the fine print, only to be degradable if you have a major metropolitan recycling complex available. I found this out as one might say the hard way—and after they’d changed their advertising. This new lot avoids all such tricky questions by declining to provide any justification whatsoever for the label ‘biodegradable’. They just say they are. Well, everything is ‘biodegradable’, given sufficient eons. When I have a spare minute and at least one spare brain cell I will look them up on line. Meanwhile, I’m using them . . . and they feel biodegradable, which is to say they have that slippery corn-starch feel . . . and they are so thin as to be seriously alarming to the person employing them. I will endeavour not to tell you if . . . anything of a distressing nature occurs.
† http://www.rhs.org.uk/Gardens/Wisley
†† Haggard and red-eyed optional.
††† which used to be a library. Cue extreme local controversy.
‡ Temper, temper.
‡‡ Even if it should be full of BOOKS. The thing that bugs the grangblatting, rumplehammering hells out of me is that they have room for a lot more books than they’ve bothered either to have shelves for or, having shelves, put on them. The café is gigantic, the first/second^ floor is a frelling rotunda, there’s more SPACE than there is anything else, they could frelling well have wedged in a few more shelves in the pathetic amount of square footage they have allotted to bookshelves and then put books on them. ARRRRGH.^^
Oh, and there’s a shop. Having utterly failed to find any of the books I thought—just for laughs—I’d look for, since the media this is a centre of is supposed to include books, I BOUGHT a book in the SHOP. How frelled is that.
But we did have a very nice slice of lemon cake with our tea. And Peter read his New Scientist and I knitted.^^^ Just like an old married couple. ::Hilarity::
^ British: first. American: second.
^^ Postscript: neither my, which is not surprising, nor Peter’s, which is shameful, books appear anywhere on said shelves.+ Sure. We can pretend they were all checked out.
+ And the children’s room is a grim little afterthought. ARRRRGH.
^^^ Stupid square knitting is fabulous when the ME is winning. Why did it take me so long to discover knitting??
‡‡‡ All of them, I think, out of this single splendid book: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Knitted-Cakes-Twenty-Susan-Penny/dp/1844483614
Which I just happen—er—to have. It’s near the front of the queue on my Knitting Shelf.
§ I believe you have been known to grumble briefly when you have to get up at 5
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