Happy happy happy. Happy. Happy. Grrrrrr.
IT’S THE FIRST DAY OF A THREE-DAY BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND. AND THE CROWN ON ONE OF MY HORRIBLE STUPID TEETH HAS JUST FALLEN OUT. I’m so happy. Happy, happy, happy, happy.
It has not been a brilliant day and furthermore Peter is in Cardamomlinghamshire visiting relatives so I don’t even have him around to blame.*
Gemma told me last night, cheerfully, on her way out the door after handbells** that she probably won’t be there for afternoon ringing at the abbey on Sunday. She saw the stark panic flood my face and said hastily, you’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. I’ll be fine, eggs grow on trees, teabags make the best tea, and Charlemagne was a girl. AAAAAAUGH. Last Sunday it was five fabulous male ringers . . . and Gemma and me. AAAAAAAAUGH.
I’ll be fine. Yes. I’ll be fine. I’ll take my knitting. . . .
AND WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A FROST TOMORROW NIGHT. A FROST! A FRELLING, FRELLING, FRELLING, FRELLING FROST! IT’S MAY! IT’S MAY IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND! WE’RE ALLOWED TO PLANT LITTLE TENDER GREEN THINGS OUTDOORS IN THE GROUND IN MAY IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND!***
Usually.
I had quite a nice time in the garden a couple of days ago—when it finally stopped raining long enough to make this practical—playing eenie meanie with all the racks and rows of little green mail-order things that arrived during the floods and are still waiting to be put somewhere they can settle down and grow.† I planted the sweet peas, finally, some begonias, some (tender) fuchsias, most of the rest of the glads, some petunias. Today . . . today I (furiously) planted the dahlia cuttings in pots two or three sizes smaller than I meant to—I don’t have TIME for endless potting-on: stuff goes in an intermediate pot and then it goes into the ground or into its big permanent pot—so they’d all fit on a tray in case I’m bringing them indoors tomorrow night. The stuff that is already in the ground is going to have to take its chances†† . . . but the sitting-room is going to be frelling impassable if I have to bring in all the unfrost-proof things in trays and pots or still in their mail-order plastic cells. . . .
* * *
* You made my crown fall out! You did! You know you did!
** Have I told you we seem to have morphed into Thursday and Friday handbells?? Wait, wait, I have a novel to finish and I do need to reserve some brain. I think I’ve told you Gemma is a doctor, and she’s just changed clinics/surgeries which means her schedule has changed, and Thursday afternoon handbells are no longer possible. So we had, I thought, moved handbells to Fridays right before New Arcadia bell practise^ . . . except that it turns out Colin can’t do Fridays but was too polite to say so.^^ I have this habit of not really paying attention to details and therefore found myself saying to Niall and Colin, well, okay, we’ll just have to keep on with Thursdays, and Niall and I can ring with Gemma on Fridays . . . WHAT AM I SAYING. This week was the first of the new schedule and . . . two days in a row of handbells is . . . intense.
^ Which means I will now stuff hellhounds into their harnesses and pelt out the door so as to be out of earshot by the time they start ringing up. I’m getting better at sleeping through Sunday mornings though.
^ The British. ARRRRRRRGH.
*** I’m having another of those ‘why do I DO this to myself??’ moments. I moaned this to Peter tonight over the phone and he said, because you’d think less well of yourself if you didn’t^, which is true as far as it goes, but it still begs the question why do I have to choose activities where terror will be my natural environment? Why couldn’t I collect stamps or go to more films?^^
^ And given my standard level of self-appreciation this could get dangerous.
^^ No horror, of course.+
+ Avengers Assemble is playing semi-around here this weekend and I am half-tempted to go except for two things: (a) it’s in frelling 3D, and my loathing for (frelling) 3D was renewed and reinforced by (multi-frelling) THOR and (b) I haven’t got time. If I’m going to ring bells and sing and rescue all the little green things drowning in my garden(s) and finish a novel before the hellhounds and I have to stop eating, although the hellhounds wouldn’t mind, I haven’t got time.# And, just by the way, Sunday morning ringing at New Arcadia is forty minutes plus a one-minute bolt from the cottage to the tower and a more leisurely several-minute stroll back. Sunday afternoon ringing at the abbey is an hour, plus a half hour commute. Also, terror is tiring.
# And the blog is a not insignificant eater of time.~
~ And there are a lot of doodles waiting to be doodled. Siiiigh. I should draw you a Venn diagram of Available Energy Usage by Robin McKinley some time. I don’t know if this is the frelling ME, or advancing age, or just that I’ve always been peculiar, but what I can and can’t do isn’t just about whether I feel (relatively) alert and intelligent or as if I have ham salad for brains and limbs made of half deflated inner tubes. It’s more of a Chinese-menu situation where you want stuff from as many columns as possible. And your fortune cookie is still going to tell you you’re frelled.
*** Meanwhile friends in the Midwestern prairie are having temperatures pushing ninety (°F).
† I’m still seeing disturbingly few little feathered things in the shrubbery.^ I wouldn’t have thought literal drowning was all that likely in my garden-on-a-hill, and there’s still the greenhouse to take shelter in. Nor would I have thought I have many predators out there, although what is that unpleasing line about there always being a rat within five feet of you? I’m sure my local rats would be more than happy to tuck into adolescent robin. But dad robin is still hanging around for mealworms. Robins are such fearless little critters^^ that you get a prime view of what’s going on with them. There were still two adults^^^ when I started putting mealworms out but they were very chary of me—which served to reinforce my guilt about how little gardening I’ve been doing recently and it’s not all down to the weather—but robins don’t really do chary and dad, at this point, pretty well gets in my face and says, Mealworms? Where are the mealworms?, if he’s dispatched the previous serving. I put them out twice a day, and he must be feeding them to someone because if he ate all of them himself he’d explode. The mealworm saucer normally lives on my potting table in the greenhouse but I put it out in the courtyard by the kitchen door when I want to use my table, on top of a tall pot that will have a dahlia in it eventually. He knows this. So first he sits in the apple tree next to the greenhouse and stares at me, and then he perches on that pot and looks at me meaningfully. I may have to start buying more mealworms.
^ I did get a couple of photos of the babies, but they’re not very good. The nest is tucked back behind various jars and plastic boxes of plant food and it’s dark. I didn’t want to blow a flash in their tiny fluffy faces and I haven’t been very lucky with the right angles of sunlight . . . or any angles of sunlight, lately. They’re only in the nest about ten days, I think—maybe two weeks. Not long at all. And I didn’t notice they’d hatched immediately—they were already beginning to grow feathers by the time I saw them—since I’d been trying to leave mum alone so she’d go on sitting. But I’m reasonably sure there were five of them to begin with. Five’s a lot.
^^ Unlike their human namesake
^^^ If there’s only one parent left, it’s probably dad, because mum has sashayed off to start a new nest somewhere else.
†† I may raise the odds a bit by throwing a bit of bubble wrap around. After potting up the frelling sweet peas—usually I just slap them in the ground to begin with—and bringing them in and out for about a fortnight I am VERY RELUCTANT TO LOSE THEM NOW.
More tea. More lack of sympathy. More frelling bells.
Arrrrrrgh. Ringing at the abbey. Arrrrrrgh. My first go of Grandsire Triples tonight was a complete retro meltdown. METHOD BELL RINGING IS A STUPID OBSESSION. I AM GOING TO TAKE UP SOMETHING SENSIBLE LIKE CUTTING USED PLASTIC BAGS IN STRIPS, PLAITING THEM TOGETHER, AND MAKING RUGS OUT OF THEM. And then, as if this was not humiliation enough . . . Peter and I went to Tabitha, the Bowen-massage lady, this afternoon, and she has this frelling fixation on drinking water.* She gives you this frelling ewer of water to drink at the end of your session ‘to help flush the toxins out quickly.’ Uh huh. By the time we got home again I had barely an hour before bell ringing . . . and of course I had to have a cup of tea. Face Grandsire Triples with a bell-rope in my hands without a recent injection of caffeine to stiffen my resolve? No chance. And the result was. . . .
I had thought there was a loo at the abbey. Well, there is, but the public one closes at the end of abbey-as-museum visiting hours.** And the staff one is available only by Delphic utterance, and while Og gave me the correct orison, no one had a spare golden apple with which to placate the guardian dragon. So . . . I climbed down through the centuries again to ground level . . . and staggered dizzily out into a good-sized town with dozens of public loos—the fabulous public loo system is high on my list of good reasons to live in this frelling country—all of which were closed. Nobody needs to pee after 6 pm. It’s probably in the fine print of my visa. Eventually I gatecrashed a hotel. I might as well have been in New York City. Arrrrrgh.***
And, not that these two events had anything to do with each other . . . but my second trial of Grandsire Triples . . . was not too bad. Therefore I am writing this blog rather than getting my sword off the wall to make it easier to fall on.
I did realise I was speaking rather provocatively the other night about tea and critters. . . .
Mirkat
Have I shared this before? http://www.adagio.com/teaware/ingenuiTEA_teapot.html
Hmm. Do you use this? Do you like it? I’m having a little plaintive ‘why?’ moment. I like my teapot. And it works just fine. But if this one makes you happy then that’s good.
Or do you have a favorite tea infuser?
About fifteen years ago some bright spark finally invented—or anyway marketed—or anyway marketed in the UK—a proper frelling tea sieve. It’s the shape of a tea mug, and just enough smaller to fit inside the mug, and with a lip around the top so it hangs on the rim and you don’t have to fish for it. Peter and I have several, partly in case of accidents or visitors, and partly because since I tend to like my tea STRONG any infuser I employ regularly tends to pick up flavours, so I want different infusers for different teas. And that’s what I use. I also have two teapots with very large lids, which means very large holes where the lids fit, which will take one of these infusers—or an even bigger one, suitable for teapots belonging to people who like their tea STRONG. Whittards was the first I know of to introduce these purpose-built mesh infusers, but most tea shops that sell loose tea have them now.
EMoon
I think being in central Texas defeats the whole notion of tea.
Phooey. Don’t any of you forum people watch THE AFRICAN QUEEN at regular intervals? In which Katharine Hepburn drinks lots of hot tea in the tropics?
When visiting in England, I loved tea. . . . But here I have a) sulphury, hard, heavily treated water, b) water that is, for much of the year, emerging from the faucet warm to hot, and c) no real desire for anything hot to drink because it’s so hot.
Have you ever tried a cup of good tea in hot weather? I drink it year round and while English summers are nothing on Texas summers, in a bad year we’ll get weather quite hot enough to lay me out and make me miserable. Hot drinks may have the curious effect of cooling you off.
And no desire to waste the water that filling a pot with hot water, tossing that water, and then filling it again means, because we’re still in drought. (Or for that matter having the stove on long enough to boil that much water.)
Good lord, who said anything about tossing it? You put it back in the kettle. It’s still half-warm too, so the kettle will re-boil that much quicker. AND YOU NEED AN ELECTRIC KETTLE. You can now get them in America although I’m not sure how common they are. But they are THE BEST.
In our rare cold spells, I wish very hard for good hot tea. But make it? In these conditions? Probably never.
Different water filters will deal with different things; presumably your local Water Filter Experts have not endeared themselves to you. I doubt I’d drink the stuff you’re describing either in tea or at all. But there is always bottled water. Bottled water varies too—there’s a lot of fancy expensive mineral water out there I actively dislike the taste of—but if you used bottled water just for tea you wouldn’t get through it fast enough to put the mortgage at risk.
nickithomas
I use loose tea in the cup . . . Put milk in cup first ( . . . I am one of those unreasonably fanatical milk-firsters), a generous spoon of tea in a strainer, shake strainer over bin (to get rid of the dusty bits that will end up floating on your tea otherwise) before putting on cup then pour boiling water in SLOWLY and moving around to cover all the tea. When full, leave a minute or 2 before removing strainer and stirring.
SHUDDER. Well, as above, to each her own. If this works for you then that’s fine. But your tea can’t infuse properly if you treat it like this. Milk first isn’t a problem—you just brew your tea in a one-mug-sized pot, and pour it into your mug with the milk in it. PS: Good tea does not have dusty bits.
Have to admit that this does not work well with the really good expensive tea that tends be much bigger leaves and requires more steeping – but I can’t afford that very often anyway.
It’s not just more steeping—you need hot water. There’s a whole fal-lal about water temperature, and how different teas do better at different temperatures. Generally speaking you don’t want furiously-boiling water, which may burn or anyway damage good tea. You want it some kind of just-barely-off the boil. Which if you’ve already put your milk in, isn’t going to happen.
glanalaw
I drink PG Tips, but only because it’s the only halfway decent loose tea to be had in this part of the country.
I’ve heard rumours that PG Tips does a not-bad loose tea. As someone who remembers PG Tips in their heyday of powdered charcoal briquettes and black widow spider legs, I am dubious, but I will take your word for it. Since I plunged into the Fussy Snob Tea world a long time ago I’m not likely to try it myself.
Short of mail-ordering from England, which isn’t an option on the poor-starving-college-student budget.
Oh, now wait a golly gosh darn minute. I don’t for a minute believe there aren’t a million posh tea web sites in America. The British tea fetish is pretty much a myth—the overwhelming majority of cuppas are made of (bleaugh) cheap tea bags, and overall, the British drink more coffee than they do tea. Sacrilege. But cult tea is alive and thriving—it’s come on pretty much parallel to the availability of proper strainers, I think. In the dark ages your only option for loose tea was those damned little tea balls on chains that you hooked round the handle of your tea pot. Except that they were TOO SMALL so you might as well use bags after all, the tea still had no room to expand. Mostly I just dumped the tea in the bottom of the pot (or the mug) and let it swirl. Since I like loooooong steeping, by the time I was ready to drink it the tea leaves had all settled tactfully to the bottom anyway. If I was using a pot, I poured through a sieve. This did mean that by the time you drank your last cup it was getting kind of . . . violent. But one of the laws of the universe is that good tea does not stew. It may get a little exciting, but it never goes bitter.
If I was making tea that someone else was going to drink with me I would sometimes use a festoon of those wretched little tea balls, so I could pull them out. I had about six.
Regarding cats vs. dogs: I’ve always preferred cats (and at my present stage of life, a dog would be impossible because I’m not home often enough).
Buy two dogs. Then they keep each other company. People roll their eyes when I say this, but it’s perfectly practical. It’s the first dog that’s the huge leap of responsibility. Dog or no dog is the big one. One dog or two dogs is details—including important details such as getting two dogs that like each other—and a little extra dog food.
But then most of the cats I’ve know, definitely including the current one, seem to think they are dogs actually, at least in terms of the being-glad-to-see-you and the cuddling.
It’s individuals really, on both sides, the humans and the critters. If I have to come down on a side, then I’m a dog person. Clearly. But there are plenty of dogs out there I wouldn’t have even if they came with a guaranteed charm for ringing Grandsire Triples (just add boiling water). And even within categories of dogs I don’t like—little frelling terriers, say—there are individuals I’m all over. I met up with Titus’ little frelling terrier puppy again about a fortnight ago and he’s still adorable. And I was taking care of the hellcat again while Cathy was here, while Phineas was golfing in Scotland [sic]. I’m actually pretty pathetic: if it’s furry and it acts like it likes me, then it’s my friend.
I hope your baby robins don’t wash away!
Me too. I’m worried I’m not seeing more little rustling things in the shrubbery. I did see dad robin stuffing mealworms into something yesterday, so I think there’s at least one of them still undrowned.
Blogmom
Cats rule! Dogs drool.
Flapdoodle. In the first place, you have a dog, and I bet he does not drool, any more than the hellhounds do, who are an entirely drool-free zone. In the second place, worst droolers I’ve ever met have been cats. I’m told it’s something to do with having been weaned too young. But they knead your lap or your chest and DROOL. Ewwwww. Give me an honest Great Dane any day.
Kathy S
Dogs set booby traps. Cats courteously bury it.
Again, flapdoodle. I have cat crap all over my garden at Third House and I don’t feel the least kindly and tolerant about it. One of my absolute pet peeves is the fact that cats are allowed utter freedom to trash other people’s property, shred, roll in or dig up their plants, crap all over their driveways, claw their doorframes, eat their endangered songbirds and have yowling cat fights under their windows and that’s just the way cats are. I completely agree that dog owners should pick up after and generally control their dogs . . . but it bites me big time that there is no regulation of cats. Including that they get to make your dogs’ lives hell because it amuses them to act like jerks.
b_twin_1
I will acknowledge that dogs are inclined to leave landmines. BUT…. Cats also leave them. In your garden beds. Where you can find them whilst you are on your hands and knees weeding….
Yes.
I think that we’re frelled no matter which side we take…
Yes. That’s about it.
Diane in MN
I like cats–at least, I like doggish cats–but I seriously do not like litterboxes, or the little kitty feet on the countertops after they’ve been in the litterbox. I admit that my dogs can slime the countertops, but there is a difference, however slight.
This is pretty much the deal breaker with me. The little kitty feet on my counters. I’ve lived with cats. And I’ve liked the cats I’ve lived with, and I find purring very soothing to go to sleep to. But cats leap. That’s the way they are.
shalea
I love both dogs and cats, but I have an absolute No Feet or Butts on Food Preparation Surfaces rule for everyone — cats, dogs, small children (who might sit on countertops).
And how do you ENFORCE this? Dogs and children are (relatively) straightforward to train. Cats, not so much. I know they can be trained, and that what I react to as head games is the cat idea of social interaction, but how do you keep them off your countertops? Barring poisoned spikes, that is, which would be kind of in the way at suppertime.
AbigailW
So what kind of tea do you drink? I like a good cup of black tea and I know that bags are cheating, but what do real Brits drink? I suspect it’s not Twinings.
CathyR
Well, this Brit drinks Twinings. Teabags. English Breakfast. Weak, no milk, 1/2 a sugar. A brew less like Robin’s it would be hard to imagine!
Which is to say everything is about individuals.
* * *
* Speaking of obsessions. I wonder if she’d like to go halves on developing the plastic rag rug market.
** I think the loos stay open later if there’s a late service or a concert. —The admin, and the proliferating admin decisions, about trying to run a major national centre of practising Christianity and an internationally famous tourist attraction must be mind-blowing, and not in a good way. Any big corporation is a complex mess to run but when the widget your factory produces is spiritual enlightenment, wowzah, oil and water are soulmates in comparison. I know people who know people, and the abbey is a complex mess. And I’m told our tower captain watches the abbey diary like Jeremy Lin watching the ball,^ and not infrequently phones up this or that person and says, pardon me, but shouldn’t the bell ringers know about this? Oh—er—yes, says this or that person. Sorry.
^ Good gods, I just made a sports reference+. Sorry. But I like stereotype breakers, and he is one.
+ That isn’t about horses. Hey, did you know that Great Britain has a very strong dressage team for the Olympics this summer? First flicker of interest I’ve felt in the Olympics, which I would much rather were being held somewhere else. Katmandu. Neuquen City.
*** Gemma had given me the keys to her house. This would have involved driving, for pity’s sake. For a LOO? I thought she was joking. She wasn’t. I was jingling her keys in my pocket and wondering what the chances were that Wolfgang would start not once but twice only about twenty minutes after I’d turned him off^ when I took a sharp right and shot through the doors of the Hotel Forza Verduta. Fortunately the only receptionist was on the phone. I heard her say ‘There is a train from London . . .’
^ No, I still haven’t booked him in to get his starter motor replaced. I know, I know. And I don’t like living dangerously. I’m just disorganised.
YESSSSSSSSSSS.
I have brought Hannah over to the DARK SIDE. She is going to LEARN TO KNIT. —Well, relearn. She, like so many of you—my family of origin seems to have been a knitting-free zone—was originally taught by her grandmother. But when she and I were festive, swinging, cutting-edge young things, knitting was antiquated, déclassé, extinct. Your grandmother still did it, but nobody else did.* And then other things like career, family, and the need for at least three and a half hours of sleep per night, get in the way of rediscovering your handcrafty roots: How to knit, how to sew a fine seam, how to make nightgaunts out of pipe cleaners. And then one day you look up from your desk and think, I can make publishing CEOs on the other side of the city/planet** tremble but I’ve never (re)learnt to knit.***
Or possibly you’ve been moaning on the phone to your best friend about how you spend too much time on airplanes.† And how when things go well you can read or watch a film†† or even get some work done, but things so often don’t go well, and you’re sitting in the gate area and the PA system is telling you every five minutes that you will be loading momentarily, and then when you finally do get on the frelling plane you have a really annoying seatmate who is afraid of flying, freaked out by whatever was holding up loading, and needs to chat. And the requisite screaming baby is in the seat behind you.††† And then, because the plane loaded late, you’ve lost your place in the take-off queue, and you’re going to be frelling around here on the ground for quite some time and I hope there isn’t a connecting flight at the other end and . . .
At which point your friend may say smugly, You should learn to knit.
Which is what I said to Hannah tonight. And there was a long pause on the other end of the phone, and then she said, You’re right. That’s exactly what I should do. . . . So then we both spent some time looking up knitting shops in New York City‡ and she’s totally going to do this thing.
YESSSSSSSSSSSSS.
I am glad today has had a chance to go out on a high.‡‡ High moments in the last fourteen hours have been somewhat thin on the ground. To begin with it’s been a gorgeous day . . . the first non-dire day we’ve had in about a fortnight. I COULD GET SOME GARDENING DONE. I COULD POT UP THE MILLION LITTLE GREEN THINGS WAITING TO BE POTTED UP.
Except I can’t. Mondays are voice lesson and ringing at Colin’s. I haven’t got time for more extracurriculars. Tomorrow it’s going to rain again. Indeed it’s warming up to raining again tomorrow right now.‡‡‡ I did slam in a few sweet peas this afternoon in the little gap of time between getting hellhounds back to the cottage for the dog minder to sweep them away and when I need to leave for my singing lesson, but ‘slam’ is the operating word here and remember I said they needed to be potted on? Yes. They’ve got a good quarter-inch of white root showing around the bottom of the porous plant-in-situ pots I put them in weeks and weeks ago.
And . . . I think I told you that I had gone to Oisin’s on Friday positively charged with tragedy, and was going to amaze him with my profound aural empathy with Orfeo mourning his lost Eurydice. Ha. Frelling ha ha ha. About 95% of all that rich, blossoming cornballery went away the moment Oisin raised his hands over his keyboard.§ GODS FRELL IT. I knew some of it would go away as soon as there was Someone Else Listening but I was pretty depressed that nearly all of it did. This demoralised me sufficiently that I never really got it back over the weekend, and the Che Faro I took to Nadia today was a poor thin shadow of its last-week self.
It was not all bad. In the first place, Nadia knows. She’s a singer, and when she says ‘you’re your own worst enemy, Robin,’ she says it sympathetically. In the second place she’s a girl. (This was pretty funny. She was saying ‘I’m a girl’ simultaneously as I was saying ‘he’s a bloke’.) In the third place . . . she was serious about letting me work on it with her.§§ And in the fourth place . . . I went in saying, you know, even at my cornball best last week when I really was ( . . . I think . . . ) producing some vague, uncertain drama about the whole thing, that top F is an utter ratbag . . . and F isn’t high enough to inspire this amount of angst and perturbation. And she said immediately, it’s on ‘ben’, isn’t it? (Yes.) That’s a really bad vowel sound for singing. —So at least I wasn’t just being hopeless. And she gave me some stuff to do. And I love my voice lessons, even when they’re on THE ONLY GOOD DAY WE’RE GOING TO HAVE ALL MONTH, and when I’m singing like a slightly defective robot.
And then tonight’s ‘tower’ ring was in Colin’s garage, with his inverted flower-pots. I am so useless with those ridiculous bells.§§§ But tonight uselessness was general. We all went home healthier than we came because laughter as we all know is the best medicine. But in terms of ringing. . . .
OH GODS IT’S SHEETING OUT THERE.
But at least Hannah is learning to knit.
* * *
* And the things your grandmother knitted for you—I had friends with knitting machines for grandmothers—made you cringe in fashion horror, as you drew up your leopardskin spandex with the roses and skulls,^ and snicked on your stud bracelets.^^ A lot of white rats and guinea pigs belonging to dashing, contemporary young things with knitting machines for grandmothers slept extremely well in those days.
^ I had a pair of jeans-equivalent in this fabric until fairly recently.
^^ I still have most of these. I amuse easily.
** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Steinberg_New_Yorker_Cover.png
. . . Whew. Read the caveats at the bottom of the page. Art is harder. You can’t excerpt 200 words from art. If you just drew a square with ‘Kansas City’ written in it it wouldn’t have the same effect.
*** Or how to make nightgaunts out of pipe cleaners. Your grandmother probably didn’t teach you that one.
† Uh-huh. There was that convention in Hawaii you went to several times. There was that other convention in San Francisco that gave you enough free time to go on a wine-tasting tour of the Napa Valley. I’m pretty sure that last trip to Paris—when you came home with the fabulous dress—was work-related. My heart frelling bleeds.
†† On your iPad. In hindsight I realise that I should have known that when both Hannah and Merrilee not only bought iPads but adored them, that I might as well embrace my doom. I don’t think either of them plays computer games though. And I’m afraid to ask. I think they might yell at me.
††† Or the requisite screaming baby is being held in a parental lap behind your really annoying seatmate so that the requisite marked-for-death toddler with legs just long enough to kick the back of the chair ahead of it every time its parents are looking the other way can be behind you.
‡ Oh gods look at that gorgeous yarn. Thank the gods it’s three thousand miles away.^
^ No! I don’t want to know if they ship overseas! Nor do I want to know the brand so I can see if anyone over here sells it! NO!
‡‡ I say nothing about the night. Which is young and full of dreadful promise.
‡‡‡ All right, all right, it’s after midnight, it is tomorrow. The frelling rain doesn’t have to be so sharp off the flapdoodling blocks.
§ Or keyboards, in this case: he suggested he try the organ. The accompaniment sounded really nice on the organ. What we’re doing here is giving a miss to the main event, which would be me.
§§ YAAAAAAAAAY. Sorry. But . . . YAAAAAAAAAAAAY.
§§§ From the sublime to the ridiculous or what. Colin’s entire garage would fit inside the mouth of the abbey’s biggest bell.
Chirpity chirpity chirp chirp chirp
I rang my first ordinary Sunday service at the abbey this afternoon. Chirpity chirpity, etc. And I did not humiliate myself.* Quadruple chirpity. Sextuple chirpity. Icosahedronic chirpity.
I didn’t tell you this last night because there’s a limit to how much gruesome suspense I’m willing to share. Gemma has kept on telling me that the abbey is always short at Sunday afternoon service, and that last week, for example, they almost didn’t ring at all because only four ringers turned up—apparently they have a status to maintain, and with eighty-seven bells refuse to countenance minimus**—and then Wild Robert, who I believe shows at the abbey most Sunday afternoons except when he’s in London practising for the national twenty-six-bell demolition derby, arrived in the nick of time***. Indeed Wild Robert told me a similar story about Sunday afternoon at the abbey a fortnight ago. And then after the reification of the overgoddess last week I was thinking, okay, McKinley, they didn’t need you but they let you ring, when are you going to start paying your way† by showing up for ordinary service ringing?
Dither dither dither dither dither. The other side of service ringing is that you don’t get to do it till you’re ready. Till you can, you know, ring. Which I’m not showing really rampant signs of being able to do at the abbey (yet). I’m clearly improving, if raggedly, but . . . but if they’re that short-handed we could ring frelling call changes.†† Dither. Dither.
So last night, Saturday night, at the last possible minute for Sunday, I wrote—emailed—Ulrich, saying that I felt I should wait till I was asked but Gemma keeps telling me the abbey needs ringers for Sunday afternoons and while I’m finding ringing at the abbey a steep learning curve if/when they think I might be more of an asset than a liability . . . I could maybe come along.
Then I spent the rest of the evening twitching wildly every time my email pinged.††† But by the time I went to bed last night at seriously mmph o’clock‡ Ulrich had not answered. He could have clutched his forehead and reeled away from his email with a cry of dismay . . . or he could have a life and been out doing pleasant things on Saturday night. But apparently my Sunday afternoon was to be free to keep on with SHADOWS.‡‡
I was staggering around, perhaps rather late, this morning, grappling with difficult issues like tea and underwear, and I had Astarte on the kitchen counter. And she pinged. I stared at her with a wild surmise. That email ping could have been any number of people. It could have been my homeopathic mailing list. It could have been someone wondering where I was and why I hadn’t answered their last (a lot of choice here). It could have been first contact with a sentient alien species.
It wasn’t. It was Ulrich. Please do come along, he said.
So I did.‡‡‡
And I wasn’t brilliant.§ But I was okay.§§
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* This is me, right? I don’t say ‘I did well’ or even ‘I did pretty well’ or even ‘I didn’t do too badly’. I say ‘I did not humiliate myself.’ Siiiiigh. I wonder if I could ask for a positive attitude for my sixtieth birthday?^
^ I could ask.
** Four bells. Remember that method ringing is about jumbling up the order, but that a bell can only move one place each row. There’s not a lot you can do with only four bells. People have been known to ring full peals on four bells . . . but they’re madder even than the usual run of method ringers. At New Arcadia, however, if there are four ringers for Sunday service, they ring minimus.
*** Which is not to say that he hadn’t been to London. He had. In several locations. Wild Robert spends all day on a train on Sundays, punctuated by bursts of ringing. By the time he gets to the afternoon ring at the abbey the edge, I believe, is wearing off, and he’s almost ready for the new week, which contains things other than ringing.
† I’ve said all this before but I’ll say it again because it’s important. Bell ringing lives and dies on a huge amount of volunteer effort. A huge amount of volunteer effort. Being a paid-up member costs you about £7.50 a year and if you are a cheap s.o.b. your church will pay your sub for you. The rest is the hours that you and the other ringers put into it. All those millions of hours ringing teachers put into teaching people to ring—most of whom will drop out again before they become useful ringers—are all gratis. All those hours the bands around those learners put into ringing for the learners to bounce off of are all gratis.
But we need bells to ring. Bells are housed in churches^ and maintained by church admin.^^ And we pay for the enormous privilege of having bells to ring . . . by ringing services. Ordinary Sunday services, and anything else the priest or semi-sacred minion or congregation member asks for—reification of goddesses, weddings, funerals, births of grandchildren, first official contact with sentient alien species^^^, whatever. It’s what we’re for. And yes, there are lots of ringers who don’t honour this unwritten contract, but they are all slime moulds.
And personally, as someone who needs endless practise grinding to frelling LEARN anything, I get anxious about payback pretty quickly.
^ There are, I believe, a few Catholic churches with method bells, but the overwhelming majority of method ringing goes on in Anglican church towers. I think this is true world-wide as well as the UK, but then method ringing as it is done in the UK is a British invention and British art form, and it tends to show up only in (chiefly) English-speaking ex-colonies: USA, Australia, South Africa. The UK and particularly England however is the only place there are lots of bell ringing towers.
^^ With occasional help from ringer-driven Bell Funds, especially when major work needs to be done. Churches haven’t been wealthy since Henry VIII. Ha ha.
^^^ I’m looking forward to this one. Perhaps they’ll compose a new method, like they have for the Olympics+. Spock Royal. Aeryn Sun Surprise. Vorlon Vector Double Spliced.
+But don’t get me started.
†† I’m not looking forward to call changes at the abbey. The ringing chamber, as I keep moaning, is gigantic, and the sound-carrying is dire. As it is I’m just about guessing when there’s a sharp barking noise during a touch that it’s the conductor shouting ‘bob’ or ‘single’. Now all I have to do is figure out which. Call changes are dependent on the conductor calling EACH change. Which means you have to be able to hear them. But call changes mean that people who haven’t learnt any methods^ can still ring.
^ Or are too panic-stricken or intimidated to remember them
††† It does this kind of a lot. I belong to a distressingly lively homeopathic list.
‡ I have many wicked friends who want the worst for me, and introduce me to evil computer games. I’m also rereading CHARMED LIFE for the umpty-mumbleth time, but I’m trying to read it as slowly as possible, which leaves me easy prey to evil computer games. Aaaaaugh.
‡‡ Speaking of aaaaaaugh. AAAAAAAAAAUGH.
‡‡‡ Note that I wasn’t sacrificing a good gardening afternoon or anything. The gale didn’t merely knock all my rosebushes over, it drove water both under my front door and through the stable-door crack in the middle. I hope the baby robins are hugging the ground. The hellhounds and I, attempting to hurtle, remained earthbound chiefly because they hated the whole situation so much that they became little anvils at the ends of their leads.
§ Brilliance, with me and bells, is not an option.
§§ I was half grateful and half amused, watching Og figuring out how best to handle me. He called an easy touch of bob minor while I was ringing inside. I rang the tenor-behind for Stedman doubles—at a tower that isn’t the abbey I can ring Stedman. And we finished with rounds on the back six, which was kind of a hoot. The last four bells at the abbey are all seriously, INCREASINGLY huge. I’ve told you about ringing rounds on forty-six, where you pull off and then have to wait till it’s your turn again, because there are so many bells that have to go first. In a way the effect of waiting is more pronounced when you’re ringing only the back six because it is only six, but the pauses between the big bells are so marked. I was, of course, on the treble. Dong . . . dong . . . . . . . dong . . . . . . . . . DONG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DONG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DONG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . DOOOOOOOOONG.
But it was also useful, this afternoon’s ring. I’m finding my feet at the abbey. I hope.
Tea and No Sympathy
IT’S RAINING. Of course it’s raining. It has always rained. It will always rain.* Tomorrow we’re supposed to have gales. I’m so happy. Meanwhile the robins have dispersed. Silly little beggars. They should stay in the greenhouse where there’s a roof. I’ve thought of this a lot in the last ten days or so—at least the baby robins in the greenhouse aren’t melting. There is a good EIGHT INCHES of rain in my buckets. I’ve emptied my two-inch-measure rain gauge several times. Robins were still in the nest yesterday but gone without a trace today. Usually the little-things-in-the-shrubbery start making themselves known immediately—and there’s no way in or out of the cottage garden except by flying** unless I open the greenhouse door, which I haven’t in over a week.*** They’re probably in shock: they hop out of the nest, stumble along the shelf, nose-dive to the ground, yell, YAAY! FREEDOM!, and are instantly smacked to the floor by a large handful of rain.
The double daily serving of mealworms disappeared as normal today however, so something is eating them. The mealworm saucer—also inside the greenhouse, where dinner won’t drown—is on the flight path to the nest and I haven’t seen anything else hanging around, so I prefer to think it’s dad robin. I’ve seen him a few times, looking harassed. If perhaps there’s a break in the gales tomorrow I would quite like to get outdoors and pot up a few little green things (this will involve moving the dish of mealworms, which is on my potting table) and will try to catch dad poking mealworms into little things in the shrubbery.
I rang for a wedding today, in South Desuetude, poor things. I hope the bride’s gown had mud flaps.† But Colin is bonkers.†† We rang some rather good call changes, nice and brisk and crisp. I’ve said this before, that you’re usually so fixated on trying to learn methods that you forget that (mostly) well-struck call changes are pretty cool. Then Colin cast his eye over his band and declared that we would ring bob triples. For pity’s sake. Four of us out of eight knew what we were doing—I can’t remember the last time I was offered the opportunity to have a go at a practise course of bob triples. And we’re ringing it for a wedding??††† Two of us clueless ones were on the treble and the tenor—but I was ringing inside as was Cora, who promptly went wrong on her first dodge. Colin dragged us jovially out of the resulting morass and we continued . . . and then Boadicea went wrong. No fair. You’re one of the ones who knows what she’s doing. I never did figure out who I was making long sevenths over. I know the line on the page, as opposed to in the hurly-burly of ringing, so I just kept counting my line—and Colin kept yanking us on. We came round. I have no idea how. It cleared the churchyard however. . . .
And I went home for a bracing cup of tea.
libby.gorman
I do not know about this “warming the cup” part of making tea. Doesn’t the hot water make the cup warm?
b_twin_1
Depends how long you want the cup of tea to stay hot. If you want the tea to cool quickly so you can gulp it down before you dash out the door then a cold cup will assist. If you want a leisurely cuppa then warming the cup is “proper”.
::Clutches forehead:: Where were you people RAISED? Is NOTHING SACRED? Have the younger generations been DENIED THE WISDOM OF THE AGES? You warm your vessel for brewing tea—cup or pot—so the tea steeps correctly. ‡ And then there’s the whole commotion about whether you add the milk first or second: but since I don’t use milk I am allowed to give a miss to this embattled controversy.‡‡
Now I am going to SING. Oisin gave me a, you should forgive the term, new thing yesterday, which casts an interesting light on his view of my singing, but I’ll tell you all about it if I manage to learn it. Mwa ha ha ha ha.
* * *
* Except when there’s a drought, of course.
** All right. I admit it. Phineas’ previous cat once made it over his garden-room roof into my garden. I was not amused. He^ received a bucket of water for his pains and I didn’t see him again. Grrrrrr.^^
^ The cat, that is. Not Phineas.
^^Q&A page today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/apr/27/joss-whedon-screenwriter-director
Cat or dog?
Cat! Dog: need need, poop, chew, need, lick, need. Cat: whatev. Meow, yo. Here’s a mouse.
Feh.
Cat: misses litterbox, plays head games, leaves dismembered corpses on your pillow. Dog: craps outdoors, doesn’t mind admitting is glad to see you, finds sleeping in heaps with chosen goddess sufficient glory and does not keep presenting asshole for admiration when you’re trying to watch a film.
. . . AT WHICH POINT The Cat Anti-Defamation League, or possibly the Joss Whedon for Galactic Supremo Party, nailed me and WORD CRASHED . . . taking, among other things, New Thing with it. Granted I have New Thing backed up liberally but I hadn’t copied today’s ep yet. GAAAAAAAH. Microsoft Recovery seems, in fact, to have recovered . . . this post, anyway, but I’m thinking maybe I’ll start a new file with today’s ep of New Thing, just in case of retrospective accidents. And the four hundred and six empty documents also recovered are making me nervous. What I had been trying to do was copy and paste one other quote from this article which maybe I’ll just type in . . .
How do you relax?
I do not understand your earthworld questionings.
Maybe Whedon should take up bell ringing.
*** I have MILLIONS of little green (mostly) mail-order things waiting to be potted on and/or planted out. MILLIONS. I swear every day Cathy was here there was another frelling delivery of little green things wanting to be potted on. I’M SURE I DIDN’T ORDER ALL OF THIS STUFF. And the day of our expedition, the one that was foiled, we stopped at a garden centre on the way home^ so that I could assuage my lacerated feelings and . . . MILLIONS. I’M TELLING YOU. MILLIONS.
^ I was driving. Cathy couldn’t stop me. She tried.
† Although my sympathy dwindled to negligible when she was half an hour late. I am near as near to finishing my second leg-warmer however. I wonder what horrors I will produce/reveal when I try to seam the frellers up.
†† We knew this, of course. Meanwhile Niall is disloyally going back to Curlyewe on Monday—which is their tower practise night, so it’s easier to organise them to come along early for a slug of handbells first. He promises this will not become a regular event. I’ve never rung at Curlyewe (tower) so I’m jealous . . . and then it turns out Colin’s tower practise this Monday is on his grisly little garage ring—with the flowerpots in the ceiling, and the tenor, the biggest bell, weighs eleven frelling pounds. It’s like trying to cook with a doll’s tea set. ARRRRRGH.
††† Maybe if she hadn’t been half an hour late. . . .
‡ You need half-decent tea for the effect to be noticeable however. Do not speak to me of tea BAGS if you wish to live. And the latest fashion nonsense about triangular-solid-shaped bags that bloom in hot water, frelling spare me. As if anyone who drinks PG Tips cares. Mind you, if all you want/need is a slug of caffeine as rapidly as possible, it’s all good. But a really excellent cup of tea worth lingering over requires finesse. Which includes superior-quality LOOSE tea . . . and warming whatever you’re making it in first.
‡‡ When I did use milk, I added it second. But this was not because of philosophical deliberations or considerations of the physics of creaminess. It was because I wanted to be sure the sixty-four spoons of sugar I put in first dissolved properly.