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More about bells (sorry . . . )
It has been way too exciting a day for a woman on no sleep. Well, not very much sleep. I went to bed at an acceptable Saturday-night-before-Sunday-morning-service-ring hour but . . . I have all these books on my bed. I get into bed and . . . and there are all these books. And they look at me. And they make little friendly murmuring noises. Last night I got involved in a quest for a remedy for an old homeopathic client* and this is research I love and that I don’t do as much of as I would like** and the . . . uh . . . hours fly by and . . . uh.***
So when the alarm went off something less than five hours after I turned the light off I was . . . not happy. Fell downstairs groaning and tipped about half a pound of strong black Indian tea into my teapot. Found clothes. Put them on.† Glug down tea strong enough to make my hair stand on end. Hellhounds, by the way, haven’t stirred. Why do you get up at this lunatic hour every seventh day? they say. Close the door after you quietly, okay?
Ran down hill and pelted along pavement in my usual Sunday-morning-and-I’m-late manner, praying that there are only five of us and one of them’s Cordelia.†† Aaugh. I’m the fifth and Leo and Cordelia haven’t arrived yet. And then it gets worse because Edward and Alex show up after Leo and Cordelia. Which means the crucial eight method ringers. Grandsire Triples! shouts Niall jubilantly.
Leo sprints for the tenor. Penelope sprints for the treble.
Which leaves me ringing inside.
Obviously I wouldn’t be setting you up like this if it had all been a big ugly smash. Anybody who has learnt—especially painfully, talent-free-ly learnt—a demanding skill which requires sinew-popping on both the physical and the mental levels, knows the way the process goes in jerks, lurches and gridlock. I’m just coming out of a gridlock period—partly caused by PEGASUS, partly caused by not having enough of the right people showing up for practise, partly caused by incurable native stupidity†††. A week ago I didn’t know I was coming out; a fortnight ago I made a mess of Grandsire doubles which I ought to be able to ring in my frelling sleep‡ and the following Wednesday practise it took most of the evening for me to start getting it back again. Anguish. Despair. Last Wednesday week tiddlywinks was looking like a really good alternative obsession.‡‡
And then this Wednesday . . . I’ve told you that I’d already decided I ought to learn to call call changes, but I’ve been sort of nursing this secretly and not getting out anywhere that anyone might make me try. And then this grisly business about Deputy Ringing Master happened and as DRM I really should be able to call something. Which has meant that I haven’t been struggling very hard when Wild Robert decided a few weeks back that he was going to teach me to call call changes.‡‡‡ This past Wednesday—when I almost didn’t go because PEGASUS was due the next day, but I decided that if I didn’t go ringing I’d probably just run away, and a useful thing about bell practise is that I have an entrenched habit of coming home afterward—Wild Robert gave me this NIGHTMARISHLY complicated pattern to call.§ And to my wholly dumfounded astonishment I did. I did it kind of slowly§§ . . . but I did it. What? I did what? Which also meant that I went home in an absurdly, a ridiculously good mood§§§ and this probably made my final few diabolical hours on PEGASUS much more efficacious and productive than they would otherwise have been.
And then Friday I rang Kent. And today . . . I rang a touch of Grandsire Triples inside. For Sunday service. I have to say that having a go with someone who’s rung exactly one rather shaky proper touch inside for Sunday service is pretty daft#, and I needed quite a lot of nodding, winking and shouting from other band members . . . but really it was not too bad. And ringing Grandsire Triples is one of my biggest, thumpingest ringing goals. Yes, I want to ring Kent because the next step is my first ‘surprise’ method and surprise is the seriously upper-level stuff and I’ve got this far frell and dranglefab it, so, yeah, I want to ring surprise, sue me. Grandsire Triples is a little different—Grandsire Triples is New Arcadia’s default method—when we’ve got the band. If I can ring Grandsire Triples inside it’s like I’m a real New Arcadia ringer. I get the secret handshake and the funny hat. I’ve been wrestling with this idea that I’m a real ringer for a while now—just being able to ring plain bob doubles, Grandsire doubles and bob minor reasonably reliably would make me popular in, I think, the majority of bell towers, and Stedman doubles is a bonus. But then six bells—which mean doubles and minor methods—are the commonest number of bells in English/British towers too. New Arcadia has eight bells—which mean triples and major methods. There are great frelling alpine ranges of eight bell methods, but I don’t care. If I can ring Grandsire Triples I say I’ve arrived.
Next week, you know, I’ll get tangled up in my rope and find myself hanging upside from the ceiling. . . .
* * *
* Who won’t go away. Go away! I say periodically. Go to a real homeopath! No, she says. Keep reading your weird books.
** There is nothing, of the things that I like doing, that I do enough of. It’s all a sliding scale of exasperation.
*** I did find a remedy however. You’re always looking for the ultimate cure and . . . well, the journals seem to be full of ‘cured cases’ but that doesn’t seem to be the sort of person-who-won’t-go-away that I attract. I attract the ones that month to month you think ARRRRRGH but then you look back several years—or they look back several years when you’re trying to make them go away—and you realise that they’re in fact a good deal better off than they were x years ago. Good. That’s what you want. But . . . Sigh.
† Okay, wait. This goes over the head. And this is a sleeve. And these are my jeans. I know they’re my jeans because of all the stuff in the pockets. Some of which will fall out as I put them on.
†† Cordelia can only ring call changes, and if there are only five of us we’ll want all of us ringing. Which means no brain-jangling methods.
††† No I’m not stupid stupid, but I am stupid about most of the basic knacks and aptitudes that make learning to ring feasible. I keep telling you I have a genius for obstinacy.
‡ Ie on Sunday mornings
‡‡ Except that tiddlywinks is also hard. Sigh.
‡‡‡ Not that struggling would do any good, so I might as well go quietly.
§ No, I’m not cruel and/or deranged enough to try and explain it to you. But I will add in a small, humble voice that it would not be nightmarishly difficult either for someone who knows how to call call changes or for someone with those basic knacks and aptitudes referred to above.
§§ A good crisp conductor snapping out commands will get you through in about two minutes. It took me . . . about ten.
§§§ There is this to be said for learning something you are constitutionally very very badly equipped to learn—when you succeed it feels like being number one on the New York Times best seller list. Not that I would know.
# That would be Niall. And I know if I say anything to him about my triumphant touch of Grandsire Triples he’ll look at me blankly for a minute, say something along the lines of ‘of course you can ring Grandsire Triples inside it’s JUST LIKE Grandsire doubles only with two more bells etc, etc’ and then he’ll say, ‘but have you memorized the first lead of Cambridge for handbells on Thursday?’
I Have the Nicest Mods in the Universe*
I overslept this morning.** Hellhounds and I got back*** to the cottage after our morning [sic] hurtle and found: 
It’s from my mods. Congratulating me on getting the frelling† corrections on PEGASUS done on time.††
THANK YOU. YOU ARE WONDERFUL HUMAN BEINGS.†††
I was hoping to save some of the wrapping paper which you will note has roses on it, but it’s so damn fragile I’m hoping it’s biodegradable to comfort me for failing. And while I love the new standard cut-flower delivery thing where they come with their stems in actual water . . . there is the little matter of removing the bulge of plastic wrapping that contains the water . . . remember I said about fragile? There was language. As well as water all over the floor.
But hey. There are flowers. Beauuuuuutiful flowers. Beam. Awwwwwww.
I may have to post another photo tomorrow after I, you know, arrange them. It’s been a ridiculously busy day. I have no idea what I’ve been doing.‡ I was going to spend all day on the sofa. Pardon me, what happened? I got about twenty minutes on the sofa. Hellhounds couldn’t believe it when I turfed them off again after less than half an hour.
And I was still almost late for bell practise tonight. Niall after a mere fortnight as Ringing Master is rapidly morphing into a major demonic fiend. Absolute power corrupts absolutely. But I don’t recall Machiavelli mentioning the horns and the spinal plates. I’m sure I can see the glitter of incipient green and purple scales on Niall’s forehead and his teeth are definitely growing. There were only six of us plus two beginners so we were ringing pretty much all the time, but because I am also Niall’s partner in handbell crime he picks on me.‡‡ You, do thus and such, he says. —Regretfully repressed rude gestures.‡‡‡
Including making me ring Kent. I haven’t rung Kent in at least a couple of months. Leo is also learning Kent, but he’s rung it more recently; last time we had a good enough band I rang Stedman. I grabbed the treble and held on, which worked the first time through, while Leo got his practise in . . . although I hadn’t actually rung the complex treble on a treble-bob method in probably two months either, so it was a little more exciting than was strictly desirable. I then slunk off to rememorize the inside line frantically in case Niall remembered me later, except I kept getting dragged out of my corner to ring rounds with beginners. Somebody else can do it! I’m busy! You, said Niall. Ring the four. Fiend.
But I got through Kent. It was, as I have a habit of saying about touches I’ve been ringing in, not a thing of beauty, but we got to the end. I was trying not to congratulate myself audibly when Richard started giving me one of his little frelling essays on ringing—I like Richard’s essays, and I particularly like the way he presents them in this calm, reasonable tone of voice as if you have half a clue what he’s talking about—but this one began with the shocking declaration that the line for Kent was easy to learn, it was the practicalities of ringing it accurately that are the problem, and I lost focus a trifle. Easy to learn. There speaks someone who has been ringing for sixty years.
I’m not going to get my day on the sofa tomorrow either. I have a frelling wedding to ring at Ditherington. Never mind. I will come home to flowers.§
* * *
* No, I haven’t warned them to brace themselves for a deeply embarrassing public expression of appreciation. What would be the fun in that?
** Don’t even ask.
*** And it’s been a beautiful day. April in February, as I said on Twitter earlier. Nearly shirtsleeve weather and sunny.^ Wha’? Huh? Hellhounds and I couldn’t cope. We tottered around feeling unstrung and looking nervously in the shadows. Sunlight produces such dramatic shadows. And shivering keeps you awake.
^ Mud to the ankles though. Whew. Some connection with familiar reality.
† The card does not say ‘frelling’. I’m not sure if this is restraint on the mods’ part or an understandable desire not to complicate matters. That’s f, r, e, l, l . . . oh, never mind. I know from experience florists’ clerks can be rather creative even when you spell things out really carefully.
†† They apparently arrived in English, too, which is a bonus. I wasn’t at all sure. By the time I hit the ‘send’ button yesterday evening the stuff on the screen was starting to swim around and form strange new clusters, racemes and inflorescences hitherto unknown to science, botany, or human visual range. But I got a note from my editor’s assistant today saying that she was working her way through them and while you can’t get bloodstains on email it didn’t break off in the middle of a word or anything.
††† There are moments when this frelling blog is worth it.
‡ Oversleeping. And I had another cup of tea with Oisin. Who is going all mean and fierce and telling me he’s expecting something musical out of me next week. Just because I got my novel turned in! What a big bully!^ He had even finally got me my own copy of the Capriol Suite^^. Mind you there is no reason I couldn’t go on playing off the photocopies he’d made for me^^^. I also may have led him on a little because I said that some of my blog people had suggested I set the lullaby at the beginning of PEGASUS and he replied kindly and sympathetically that while he will look forward to it, the thought of what I might consider a suitable lullaby for a three-armed witch and a feminist dragon gives him pause. Ha ha ha ha very frelling funny ha ha. You be nice or I’ll write it for organ.
^ Blondel will probably whap me around on Tuesday too
^^ Which has been OS at the publisher forever. Sheet music publishers make book publishers look like unfallen archangels and shiny harp-plucking seraphim.
^^^And because I am a lazy slut I will undoubtedly continue to play off the photocopies for some time because they’ve got all my painfully worked out fingering on them, and the large red slashes that mean pay attention to this bit, you idiot, and I’m going to resist going to the extra effort to move it all over. Aside from the fact that I am intimidated by all those glossy new clean pages with, you know, covers on either end.
‡‡ I am surrounded by musical male bullies.^ Where did I go wrong?
^ Of course this includes the hellhounds. It does not include Peter, however, who is slightly prouder of being unmusical than the facts support. But it will do for keeping him off this list.
‡‡‡Vicky would not approve of rude gestures. Our tower is even cleaner than this blog. Sigh.
§ More beaming. More awwwwwww.
PEGASUS Tuesday
It has been a seriously sucky day. It started with oversleeping by two hours. Which meant I did at least get two hours of sleep, but this is still not optimum. I’m used to having bad nights, and a lot of the time it’s not a totally huge deal; for one thing, if I can’t sleep, I turn the light back on, and read. Insomniac nights are probably my best opportunity for catching up on all the homeopathic journals I go on subscribing to; I have found through trial and error that I will be less pissed off at myself in the morning (I’m going to be tired; at least I can try not to be pissed off) if I’ve actually done something with that time I would rather have been asleep in. But in the middle of the Week of the Copyedit Nightmare, I don’t dare. I put a pillow over my head and try to count sheep.*
I have cancelled Blondel so many times that when I finally go next week** I will probably find I’ve forgotten his street number—I’m sure I remember his street*** but assuming that I will have let the RaspBerry go flat† and in this mobile-phone era the nearest public phone†† being about a mile away I am having no trouble at all imagining††† trotting up and down that hill looking for a front door that seems familiar. . . . And Niall was having one of his Upper Level Handbell Evenings tonight which I had briefly entertained a fantasy of taking an hour off this evening‡, if I’d got my daily page count sufficiently appeased by then, to attend long enough to have a go at plain bob major‡‡ Silly old me.
There have been a positive cascade of yucky publishing details that discretion, a desire to go on getting published by someone, and Fear of Merrilee prevent me from detailing here, much as I long so to do.‡‡‡ One bright spot however is that—I remember telling you that this was happening, but I haven’t been telling you how many times we’ve gone over the Final Cliff of Failure and then been snatched painfully back to the possibility of firm ground, and let me tell you, standing on the possibility of firm ground is unpleasantly vertiginous—we do, in fact, have a cover for the new YA edition of the much-repackaged SUNSHINE.§ I thought the end of last week that this had crashed and burned at the foot of the Final Cliff of Failure—they wanted to use a photo cover and I Have This Thing About Photo Covers.§§ And there wasn’t time to try again. Was. Not. Time.§§§ I knew this. So I went off to have a sulk over the weekend# and . . . lo and behold, yesterday they had magicked something out of nowhere and today . . . we have our cover. Yaay. ##
And then there is PEGASUS. PEGASUS, as often happens at this stage, is rapidly deliquescing into mrgmp*&^qvvvll%@j????frell. I should get through it tomorrow, leaving myself an evening### and the following morning to make sure my notes look like they make sense, whether or not they relate sensibly to the manuscript, before I shoot them back to Putnams. Supposing I can recognise relative proportions of sense/nonsense when I see it/them. If you’ve got any candles to spare, I could use one or two.~
Let’s have a couple more pictures of roses. 
And then I’m going to go lie down in that bed thing again and think about sleep.
* * *
* Or pegasi, or hellhounds, or bottles of champagne, or roses, or bars of Green & Black’s. . . .
** Yes. Next week. Nothing shall come between me and a voice lesson next Tuesday. Although we’re just about going to be starting at the beginning again. Larynx? Soft palate? Vocal cords/folds? I forget. Coming in on a note all by yourself with no accompaniment? Hell. I remember that bit.
*** Nothing is sure in this life, especially when it relies to any extent on my memory.
† Oh, it’s good for another day . . . oops
†† Mobiles fry your brains! Bring back phone booths! And stop ripping out the old red ones^ which are not merely an ornament to the countryside and an enticement to the tourist trade but a haven in a sudden hailstorm! Ask me how I know this! And yes, I can get the hellhounds in too!^^
^ Unless you’re going to do something really wizard with it http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/somerset/8385313.stm
^^ Disturbingly underfoot is kind of their default position anyway, unless there are rabbits, pheasants, or trundling bits of wind-galvanized garbage to attract them.
††† But I have a vivid, one might almost say overactive, imagination
‡ Note that Blondel, with commute, takes two hours, and he’s earlier in the day. There was never any way I’d’ve got enough pages done by midafternoon.
‡‡ Eight bells. Ie needs one more person than Niall, Colin and me.
‡‡‡ Mmph! Mmmmmblrggggglphmp! ARRRGH!
§ All my books have been through the odd new edition or two, but SUNSHINE is in a league of its own. The one constant is the Neil Gaiman quote.
§§ Also about Body Parts. What is it about pieces of people that is so popular on today’s face-out bookshelf? Ugh.
§§§ This is all based on a promotion opportunity that will either include SUNSHINE or it won’t. The promotion is already scheduled.
# I haven’t had time to sulk. I have three weeks’ work to get done in six days.
## Yes, I’ll post it here when I can. I think they’re still gajoining up the squirglicks and blethering the gazambles. Art departments. You know.
###Will I make it to Ditherington bell practise tomorrow night? Stay tuned
~ Although Luke’s need is still a whole lot greater. I think we’ve still got about a month before the next big consultants’ summit.
PEGASUS Friday
I was late giving hellhounds their final hurtle this evening and was therefore streaking around town because I was going to go bell ringing, I don’t care if PEGASUS is 6,723,598 pages long.* As we were bolting uphill on Market Street, which is one of those extra-wide streets from the days of farmers’ markets that involved entire flocks of sheep, a woman came out of her front door on the opposite side of the street. This happens. People live here, and they do things like go in and out of their front doors. I do it myself.
However she started across the street toward us saying, Excuse me. Oh gods, I thought. If someone is leaving dog crap on your doorstep It isn’t me. I miss on footpath margins sometimes when the landscape all looks like dog crap, but I never ever leave dog crap on pavement.**
I braced myself as she approached. She looked at me earnestly and said, Do you have strong hands?
Uh. . . .
I should have strong hands, she said. I’m a pianist.
I almost said, And I’m a bell ringer. Playing the piano and ringing bells go together really well. You should learn to ring. You’re right down the street from the tower.
But, she went on, I can’t get the handle of my central heating to turn and it’s so cold.***
Not to mention 7:20 on a Friday evening. Yes. So hellhounds and I followed her across the street and into one of the tiny, terrifyingly bijou residences that this old part of town specialises in: the exposed beams and One Exquisite Piece of Furniture per room system. †
She ushered all three of us into her sitting room.†† I turned her central heating on with my strong bell-ringer’s hand.††† We left her settling down for a quiet evening in front of the TV. Lady! You could be learning to ring bells!
We then blasted home where I shoved hellhounds through the door and took off again for tower practise.
I am barely upright and/or breathing. I had a Very Bad Night last night, worrying about Fedex and PEGASUS‡ and when the alarm went off at the appalling hour of eight a.m. I was like, kill it! I don’t care, just kill it!
But the Fedex man did arrive.‡‡ In fact he arrived at ten o’clock.‡‡‡ Peter and I did not have to spend the day passing the claustrophobia baton back and forth—ordinarily I like being shut up in my tiny cottage so long as there’s plenty of books, tea, hellhounds and broadband, but when I’m waiting for something suddenly the cottage is as small as everybody else thinks it is.§ Peter starts breathing a little harder as soon as he crosses the threshold here and the whites of his eyes show more.
I sent him home again. §§ And went off to hurtle hellhounds. And then put my head down over PEGASUS. Yes, I did break for a short cup of tea§§§ with Oisin and I went to bell practise. But especially when you are holding your brain in place with green garden twine, you can barely get hellhound leads clipped onto their d-rings because your hands are shaking so badly from all the caffeine, and you’re hallucinating# pegasi in the corners##, you need breaks.
Bell ringing was not going to be good. And Niall Our Gallant Ringing Master called for a touch of Grandsire Triples and Penelope the ratbag nailed the treble. You didn’t move fast enough, she said, smirking. Which left me to ring inside. I’ve never rung a touch of Grandsire Triples inside. I can barely get through a plain course. Oh, it’s just like Grandsire doubles, they all said, the way frelling ringing people do. Oh it’s just like . . . except. Yeah. Except it’s on seven bells instead of five and you’ve got two more dodges to keep track of. And if you’re used to counting to five, counting to seven is a lot. Especially if your conductor calls something and blows you off course.
It was not a thing of beauty, my first proper touch of Grandsire Triples, but it was recognisable, and I had at least a third of a clue most of the time what was happening, and was sometimes already looking in the right direction before someone shouted at me—and, crucially, we got through to the end. This counts as victory.
And I can maybe manage another few pages of PEGASUS tonight before I fall irrevocably face down in my keyboard. . . .
* * *
* Which it isn’t. Quite.
** Which is to say pedestrian sidewalk. And while it’s legal to let your dog crap in the street, I pick it up there too. I mean . . . ewwww.
*** It is too. It’s gone below freezing again, the sneak. Somebody tell me why all my hardy fuchsias have croaked.
† My kitchen has both exposed beams and one exquisite piece of furniture, but no one would mistake the cottage for bijou. Even if hellhounds didn’t disqualify me, the hellhound crate would.^ And the poor old tallboy badly needs restoring. And then there’s the two foot pile of magazines. And the kitchen magnets which say things like ‘Housework is evil. It must be stopped’ and ‘A mind is a terrible thing to waste on housework.’ And the fact that the cobwebs are dense enough to cast shadows.
^ There are beautiful wooden crates in an assortment of fine finishes available for those with taste and a bank account the size of Lake Superior.
†† Saying, please excuse my sitting room, it is the smallest sitting room in the world. No it isn’t, I said, mine is smaller. It can’t be, she said. It occurred to me later that mine in fact had been bigger, before I put bookshelves on all the walls that don’t have either a window or a fireplace in them.
††† Which was bogus. It was one of those situations as where you can’t get the lid of the jar off, and you can’t and you can’t and you can’t, so you pass it to someone else who takes it off easily, because you’d actually just done it and had given up too fast.
‡ Aggravated by this book I’m reading. It’s one of these, yes! This is the best! Best bestbestbestbestbest!, and you are a FOOL if you don’t read it! Occasionally I fall for these things. I fell for this one. And something totally horrible happens to the female lead—why? It’s grotesque and gratuitous and why? Well, so she can exact grotesque and gratuitous revenge, which I think we’re supposed to applaud. I have the nasty feeling that this whole show is supposed to demonstrate feminism and how women Don’t Have to Take It. Uh. No. That’s not what’s being demonstrated. Not least because the grotesque and gratuitous revenge is also totally implausible and pretty damn silly. The episode did, however, serve to raise my blood pressure and make it that much harder for me to get to sleep.
‡‡ And it was PEGASUS he brought. At 5 a.m. you can imagine all sorts of hazards.
‡‡‡ I tweeted this at the time. See what you’re missing?
§ Colin, Niall and I are plotting trying to entrap a fourth person—my old ringing master, in fact—into handbell ringing with us. We usually ring at my cottage. We have occasional one-offs but we’re wondering if we could fit a fourth person in on a regular basis.
§§ He tried really hard not to look tremendously relieved.
§§§ Caffeine! Yes! Caffeine is your friend!
# Well . . . I think I’m hallucinating. . . .
## This is also bogus. I’m always hallucinating^ characters and landscapes and monsters and things by this point of finishing a novel. The characters and landscapes tend to be from the novel. Some of the monsters are new and original.
^ I think it’s hallucinating. . . .
Look at what arrived in the post today:
Another writer friend—let’s call her Rosalind—sent it, saying that I could take notes on PEG II in it, and included a bookmark with a teeny weeny pegasus on it.* And if you want such a notebook, you can get it here: http://longbarnbooks.com/ , where indeed it appears in a number of guises. Oooh. I may have to have the tea mug too.**
This is the same friend who gave me a tote bag*** with Erasmus’ deathless remark on it: ‘When I get a little money, I buy books. And if there is any left over, I buy food.’ † It’s good to have friends. After the previous few days and the immediate few days to come in the world of publishing††, friends are even more necessary than usual.†††
And I have to go to bed early so that I can be not merely awake but functional by 8:30 a.m. tomorrow. Sunday service ring isn’t till eight forty five.‡ Fedex’s delivery hours are any time from 8:30 to 6. Isn’t that lovely? Isn’t that charming? I don’t understand why we are swamped in terrible delivery services—there must be a dozen of the wretched things, all of them with oversized logo-besmirched vehicles clogging up our roads and polluting our atmosphere—when there is obviously a gigantic market niche for a good one. Eight thirty a.m. to six p.m.: this means, for example, that if you’re a private individual who maybe needs a pee occasionally, let alone has hellhounds with a high hurtling requirement, you can’t even get your friendly local health food store to take delivery for you‡‡ because ordinary shops are open something like 9 to 5:30. I may or may not get a cup of tea and a rant with Oisin tomorrow‡‡‡ at the end of the day—but if Fedex doesn’t arrive till 6:05 I’ll be hanging from the ceiling and eating the wallpaper.§ If it arrives at all, of course. Fedex: Sure We’ll Guarantee It. Ptttht. We Don’t Give A Damn, and We Don’t Care Who Knows It.
* * *
* I have, however, got the wind up badly about pegasus merchandise. I hadn’t thought about this—not that thinking has ever got me much of anywhere about the books I write—till Tasmin sent me about a dozen pegasus-decorated refrigerator magnets, each one more terrifyingly ugly than the last. Zowie. I was afraid to put them up because they might give the hellhounds nightmares.^ I disengaged with unicorns decades ago as a result of unicorn merchandise. ^^ Maybe I could write a novel about warthogs. Or threadworms. I think it would be hard to attract many corporate investors with threadworm kitchen magnets.
^ For those of you not over-acquainted with the floor plan at the cottage, I have a kitchen the size of a Smart Car. It contains a table, a tallboy, an Aga+, and a hellhound crate. With difficulty. And an assortment of dwarf appliances crammed under the stairs. The refrigerator is immediately opposite the hellhound crate. The crate door has just enough clearance to open past the refrigerator. Just. Sometimes it hooks a magnet or two in its sweep.
+ http://www.johnwraycountrystoves.co.uk/image20.html Theirs is a lot cleaner. Also you don’t get the same effect when it’s not WEDGED among its environs.
Mine came with the cottage. I like green, it’s okay. But I didn’t know they came in pink. http://www.aveccookers.co.uk/aga-cookers-choosing.htm Never mind. Pink would be really hard to keep clean.
^^ I have elsewhere mentioned my rage and despair when unicorns insisted on invading ROSE DAUGHTER. I keep telling you what happens in my stories is not up to me.
** I’d love to know the context; a hasty Google^ isn’t bringing up anything useful. But Louisa was a character—a single, income-earning, family-supporting woman who worked for women’s rights in an era when all of this was frowned on—she could be saying it in a story or out of it, and with almost any level of irony. Is anyone still reading her thrillers? BEHIND A MASK and so on? They’re dreadful. Really, really, really dreadful . . . but with a kind of intoxicating, page-turning, gothic fascination. They make Wilkie Collins’ THE WOMAN IN WHITE, say, seem positively inhibited.
^ I have to go back to work here in a minute. —Sleep? That would be what?
*** Or I’d probably be looking at the Alcott tote bag as well. I may be anyway. A woman can never have too many tote bags. The Erasmus is full of plant catalogues at the moment. I was ordering snowdrops yesterday to cheer myself up. And I’ve only just discovered that magnolia stellata comes in pink. http://www.hort.net/gallery/view/mag/magksjp/ Speaking of pink. As I often am.
† I’d give you a photo of it too only it and my camera flash don’t get along. I can’t find it on the web, although other editions of it exist. http://www.zazzle.co.uk/when_i_get_a_little_money_i_buy_books_bag-149606564280811630
Or how about this incarnation: http://www.cafepress.co.uk/brownbagdesigns.79598963
†† Mmmmngghthrmmph. Professional prudence—and a judicious fear of Merrilee’s wrath—keep me silent. Unfortunately. Mmmmmngghthrmmph.
††† I also made a dog’s dinner of ringing last night. Siiiiigh. Niall, who occasionally has pity on the feckless, did not mention my diabolical new status at our home tower to the assemblage at our usual Wednesday practise in Ditherington. He exercised no such restraint tonight at handbells with Colin: feh. And Colin is on the list of Top Ten Worst Teases in the Universe. Feh. However we were all going radically wrong tonight. That was you! No, that was you! No, that was all of us, plus hellhounds and the ghost.
‡ And I don’t have to sign my name Sunday mornings. Although with the new electronic berserker screens all the delivery services have now that you scrabble at with a plastic sylus, neither legible nor identifiable is an issue any more.
‡‡Our friendly local health food shop is happy to take delivery occasionally for good customers. Peter orders my Green & Black’s mint chocolate from them. By the box. You don’t need to know any more, do you?
‡‡‡ I’ve done a little work on my choral masterpiece A Pox Upon Their Heads this week, but not really enough to be worth showing.
§ The cottage doesn’t have wallpaper.
