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Skylarks
The Skylark
by John Clare
The rolls and harrows lie at rest beside
The battered road; and spreading far and wide
Above the russet clods, the corn is seen
Sprouting its spiry points of tender green,
Where squats the hare, to terrors wide awake,
Like some brown clod the harrows failed to break.
Opening their golden caskets to the sun,
The buttercups make schoolboys eager run,
To see who shall be first to pluck the prize—
Up from their hurry, see, the skylark flies,
And o’er her half-formed nest, with happy wings
Winnows the air, till in the cloud she sings,
Then hangs a dust-spot in the sunny skies,
And drops, and drops, till in her nest she lies,
Which they unheeded passed—not dreaming then
That birds which flew so high would drop agen
To nests upon the ground, which anything
May come at to destroy. Had they the wing
Like such a bird, themselves would be too proud,
And build on nothing but a passing cloud!
As free from danger as the heavens are free
From pain and toil, there would they build and be,
And sail about the world to scenes unheard
Of and unseen—Oh, were they but a bird!
So think they, while they listen to its song,
And smile and fancy and so pass along;
While its low nest, moist with the dews of morn,
Lies safely, with the leveret, in the corn.
This is the third year in early spring that I’ve said to myself, the day I hear my first skylark I’m going to hang Clare’s* poem on the blog.** And then I forget. It’s a long time from morning hurtle—when we’re out somewhere we might hear skylarks—to the middle of the night when I’m squeezing the last remnants of semi-coherent thought out of my brain for a blog entry. I’m remembering this year, finally, perhaps because it’s so late—usually I start hearing skylarks in February. Apparently they haven’t liked this winter any better than us humans and hellhounds. I hope the extravagant cold has merely stopped them singing and that the local countryside is not dotted this spring with unmarked skylark graves. Skylarks are endangered, but not around here; we’re teeming with the things. I hope we’re still teeming with the things. I love them. Love, love, love, love, love. I can be in the blackest, bleakest mood, stomping grimly after hellhounds because hellhounds must be hurtled, and . . . for the duration of a skylark’s song I am the world’s greatest living writer, the Dalai Lama, the Archangel Michaela, and the inventor of Green & Black’s mint dark chocolate, all rolled up into one. It’s a thrilling sensation. It’s a thrilling song.
There are plenty of recordings of skylarks on the web, but I’m not even bothering with a link. They don’t sound like much, recorded. Oh, you can tell it’s probably an exciting noise—but it isn’t exciting when it’s tinging out of a computer at you. It’s like the difference between a poster of [insert name of chosen iconic heartthrob here***] and Zaphod Beeblebrox† himself. WOW.†† I like to say, grandly, that I’ll take skylarks over nightingales any day . . . but I’ve never heard a nightingale live.††† And I’m happy with my skylarks.
And I’m glad finally to have heard one this year. Except when I’m complaining about the weather I like the middle of March, because the days are suddenly as if impelled by rocket launchers getting longer—it’s about this time of year I always really notice that they’re getting longer. We had sunlight this morning too so hellhounds and I had a delicious hurtle, accompanied by a skylark who is apparently ready at last to set up housekeeping.
I had read very little John Clare before I moved over here; he’s one of those slightly obscure English English writers who [cheesy generalisation alert] while you may have admired them in a semi-engaged sort of way‡ suddenly make profound and exhilarating sense when you’re standing on English ground viewing English landscape. And, if you’re very lucky, listening to English skylarks. There’s a solidity, a reality, to Clare’s skylark that appeals to me—the song is the thing, but what produces it is a little brown dust-spot with ‘happy wings’—I like the happy wings. I also like the hare ‘like some brown clod the harrows failed to break’—which nests on the ground among those clods. None of the aerial high jinks of swallows, say; any metaphor you want to hang on a skylark has to include the low nest in the corn.
And my low nest among the corn at present is the frelling proofs of PEGASUS.‡‡ See you tomorrow.
* * *
* No, not frelling Shelley and frelling Shelley’s very famous skylark. http://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic%20Poems/Shelley/ode_to_a_skylark.htm
I think frelling Shelley is a big washy self-regarding pain in the behind. Sure he was talented. He wasn’t as talented as he thought he was and gods does he go on.^ He’d’ve been scary if he’d lived in the computer age, when everyone goes on too much.^^
^ HAVE YOU EVER READ ADONAIS? CHEEZUM ZORK.+ GAH. ETC.
+ Here speaketh the Phi Beta Kappa English lit major.
^^ Ahem.
** There are, I’m sure, plenty of copies of it on the web, but I’ve typed this one in so it’s here.
*** No, I’m not being coy. I don’t seem to get crushes on photogenic celebrities any more.^
^ I keep telling you old is better. Although maybe you enjoy your overheated fantasies more than I ever did. This may be a downside to having this vivid an imagination: coming back to ordinary reality always felt like waking up to discover I was a liver fluke. The better I’ve got at channelling this stuff into stories the happier I’ve become.
Although this does bring up a sensitive topic. I don’t like graphic on the page—I have a number of rants inappropriate for these (mostly) clean family pages on the subject of Bad Silly Literary Sex—and I’m damned if I’m going to write it. I think the best steam is produced in pressure cookers with the lids on.
† Oh come on you Windows programmers. You’re giving me a jagged red underline for Zaphod Beeblebrox?
†† Although in Zaphod’s case, probably not a good wow.
††† Peter says we ought to have nightingales around here, that it’s the right habitat. They don’t think so.
‡ For at least having the decency not to be William Wordsworth^
^ Yes. Another of my unspeakable prejudices. The English department at Bowdoin College and I really did not get on at all well. Even Peter has trouble with my attitude toward Wordsworth. Another of these fatuous spoilt self-regarding blokes who thinks that golden daffodils shine out of his backside.
‡‡ Not feeling too archangelish at the moment.
SHORT DRANGLEFABBING MONDAY*, OKAY?
What is the matter with me? I keep saying I need to spend less time on the blog, I need to learn to write shorter, and if I can’t write shorter . . . I’m going to have to disappear, and will be discovered thirty years from now on an atoll with my sixty-seven hellhounds and 1,893,712 rosebushes (very good drainage on atolls, and lots of fish mulch) happy and content and having forgotten how to type.**
Oh . . . well . . . I guess I have to finish PEGASUS II first.***
So let’s try again with Short Mondays.
It is really really really dumb that here I am a writer who is also a compulsive reader who almost never mentions or recommends books. There are two reasons for this. One of them you know: that I am an evil cow. For every ten books I read, eight of them I throw against the wall.† One of them gets a ‘meh’. One of them I like. But over time that’s still a lot of liked books.
Which brings up the second reason. Which is that books matter and in my well-known when-I’m-not-being-an-evil-cow-I’m-a-little-damp-pudding-of-self-doubt way, I quail at the notion of doing it wrong. Of not doing it right enough. Of writing a bad book report of a book I really liked. A great big sticky reason why this blog is days in the life is because if I mess me up . . . only I will care. And I can cope with me in a bad mood. I do it all the time.
So let’s try to start a new trend. With a book that Peter gave me for Christmas. He found it all by himself. I read book reviews so erratically any more I never know what’s going on, even when it’s hot, so I didn’t know to ask for it. Peter saw ‘Gothic’, ‘velvety purple cover’ and ‘HP Lovecraft’ and knew I had to have it.
http://www.walker.co.uk/Salem-Brownstone-All-Along-the-Watchtowers-9781406320527.aspx
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pz8cgCDvskc
(Whoever wrote the opening blurb either hasn’t read the book, or has already read the rest of the series. Never mind. Look at the pictures.)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2009/nov/28/salem-brownstone-john-dunning-review
I don’t know from graphic novels, but I liked this one a lot.†† There’s heaps of stuff out there on the net about it—the three links here should be enough to tell you if you want to hunt it down or not.
I’m looking forward to the next one.
* * *
* Yes, I went ringing at Colin and Anthea’s home tower tonight. Yes, I went with Niall. Yes, I rang Cambridge. I rang Cambridge without a minder. But I am SPARING you the details (like that I didn’t do it very well, and that it took two tries. BUT WE GOT THROUGH TO THE END ON THE SECOND GO).
** There’s a bell tower out back^ and a piano on the veranda.
^ I have been selectively breeding hellhounds for bell ringing ability
*** And trying to get back into it after three days^ of mostly being unable to make my eyes focus on anything smaller than a hellhound has been like trying to get into a pair of jeans two sizes too small. A pair of wet jeans two sizes too small. Backwards. And one leg has been sewed shut.
^ I am much better today . . . and trying not to race around at 200 mph and give myself a relapse. Um . . .
† As Dorothy Parker memorably said, This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.
†† And this may be too obvious for proper graphic novel readers but one of my favourite bits of throwaway humour is that while our hero is having a conversation with Cassandra hanging upside down in a tree, her speech-bubbles are printed upside down. Maybe I amuse easily.
Tirra lira
. . . by the river, sang Sir Lancelot.* I hope he has a better voice than I do. Elizabeth Moon @emoontx and I have been having a little fun on Twitter about singing—those of you with long memories** may remember that it was a long comment from EMoon about having a voice lesson from her choir director that tipped me over the voice-lesson edge last summer, the difference being that she evidently has a voice worth developing and I don’t. I just have a strange lust for humiliation. Well, and voice lessons are doing what they’re supposed to do—they’re giving me a greater and more flexible understanding of what singing is. Whether this is going to have any real effect on my song-composing . . . feh, who knows? *** But I’m having a good time, and that counts for something.
My voice lesson today was way more fun than I was expecting. I went in there absolutely prepared for disaster. I’ve been thumping myself with the Evening Hymn and didn’t seem to be getting ANYWHERE.† My best guess is just that I haven’t tackled anything this early before and there’s more difference in mindset than I had realised.†† One of the surprising things is that the breathing is not (much of) a problem. Almost everything else is, but not the breathing. I said this to Blondel and he said, your breathing has revolutionised since you started last summer. —Yes. That’s even true.†††
But while today I was still horribly dependent on Blondel illegally playing my line to keep me on it I have some hope that by next week I’ll be able to let him play the accompaniment and twiddle away on my own. Just like James Bowman. Well, sort of. And we have to get back to Finzi.
But . . . oh gods I have to sing for Oisin on Friday.
* * *
* http://www.poetry-online.org/tennyson_the_lady_of_shalott.htm
Okay, sue me. I love The Lady of Shalott. I’m reasonably sure that I read the poem first; I was always reading reading reading when I was a kid, and it was years before the concept of pictures that other people had already painted for you—that you didn’t have to make up for yourself—really registered. Then, of course, like millions of other soppy preteens I fell horribly in love with the PreRaphaelites^ . . . and the truth is I’ve never really recovered, although I’ve stopped apologising for it. During my black leather Harley Davidson jacket phase I had so many chips on my shoulder some of them had to fall off^^, and the PreRaphs—and Tennyson—were among them.
But now I’m old^^^ I’ve stopped apologising for thinking Tennyson is a great poet too. This evening I have had the delicious experience of wanting my Collected Tennyson . . . and going into the sitting room and immediately laying my hand on it~. I needed to check on the spelling of tirra lira and was, predictably, immediately ensorcelled into rereading the whole damn poem. I then compounded this error by spending most of the next hour rereading Maud. Anybody else out there Marked for Life by Tennyson’s Maud, long before Night of the Living Dead, let alone Blair Witch?~~ It’s an extraordinary piece of work, and scared me silly when I was nine or so, not only because I couldn’t follow half of it.~~~
^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_Shalott_(painting) : yes, the Waterhouse one that is, I believe, one of the best-selling posters of all time.+ But much as I love that painting, for representations of the Lady of Shalott I prefer this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HuntShallotlarge.jpg Generally speaking I’m not a big Holman Hunt fan, barring that he’s a PreRaph and I’m therefore obliged to dote; I think his colours are garish.++ But I like this one for the energy of it. She’s pissed off and she’s not gonna take it any more. Reading masses of Victorian literature at an early age probably did me a lot of harm in terms of believing that a girl can grow up to have her own adventures—all those drooping heroines, GAAAAAH—and the PreRaph Brotherhood+++ were no help. I tended to fall on anything that looked like it might be an exception with a desperate glee. It is a combination of the Holman Hunt painting, the Loreena McKennitt++++ song, and the original poem that will, some day, produce Red Sonja of Shalott, which is still festering in my back files, and emerges to bite my dreams occasionally. But first there’s RATPEG and then there’s ALBION and after that . . . I’m not sure. But it’s on the list.
+ I have it on a kitchen magnet. . . .
++ The Awakening Conscience? Ewwww.
+++ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pre-Raphaelite-Sisterhood-Jan-Marsh/dp/0704301695 Yes, I know. And if you type in ‘PreRaph sisterhood’ on google you get a sheaf of sites. But that is now. This was then.
++++ http://www.quinlanroad.com/
^^ Despite the added width those black leather shoulders gave me
^^^ I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: the wrinkles and the sags and the slowings down and the weird aches in places you didn’t know had the equipment for aching and the loosenings and losses are a big drawback, but everything has drawbacks, and being old beats hell out of being young.+ Penelope and I were talking about this yesterday. The chief drawback, it seems to me, is the lack of future. When you’re young you get to look forward to being old. When you’re old . . . well. It does focus the mind. If you’re going to try it do it now. Voice lessons, say.
+ Some restrictions apply, of course, like the guarantee says. You can really screw up, or you can have incurably bad luck. But for the rest of us, old is better.
~ Bless you, Fiona, Queen of Alphabetization and the Rendering of Heaps.
~~ Neither of which I’ve ever seen, perhaps partly because I was early Marked for Life by Maud by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
~~~ Still can’t. I always assumed Maud herself died, as well as her revolting brother and the fruit loop narrator’s dad, whose gruesome end begins the poem (‘I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood . . . ’) and warns you that this isn’t one of your hearts-and-flowers Victorian ballads+ But it doesn’t really say one way or another. I think. Our nutter just sails off into the Crimean (?) sunset there at the end to an unknown fate.
+ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1hCN3-COYk A great deal can perhaps be explained by my not being prepared, at a tender age, to encompass both the original poem and the fact that someone managed to excerpt a bit of it and do this to it. Don’t go, Maud! He’s a nutter! —Although your revolting brother did strike the first blow. ‘. . . . And he struck me, madman, over the face . . . And a million horrible bellowing echoes broke/ From the red-ribb’d hollow behind the wood/ And thunder’d up into Heaven the Christless code/ That must have life for a blow . . .’ I’d forgotten that the brother, dying: ‘ “The fault was mine,” he whisper’d, “fly!” ’ . . . which our poor nutter does, though little joy it gives him: ‘. . . And my heart is a handful of dust/ And the wheels go over my head/ And my bones are shaken with pain/ For into a shallow grave they are thrust/ Only a yard beneath the street/ And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat/ The hoofs of the horses beat . . . . I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;/ To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?/ But up and down and to and fro,/ Ever about me the dead men go . . .’
** Who clearly need something better to be using them for
*** What I am uneasily aware it’s also doing is making me a terrible snob about other people singing—professionals, I mean, not chumps like me. Which is a self-indulgent rant for another post. But . . . it is also a way of developing your own from-the-inside-out experience of music, which is a good thing too.
† I’ve been reduced to listening to Alfred Deller on YouTube because he sings it almost a minute slower than anybody else. Not a big Deller fan I’m afraid. But his notorious laggardliness is a boon to the feebler student.
†† That and the frelling 3/2 time signature. By the way, you guys who said ‘coloratura’ to me about the Purcell twiddles . . . Blondel started to say today: this is almost colora— STOP, I said. I AM NOT READY TO HEAR THIS.
††† Yaaay Blondel.
PEGASUS Monday
AKA Dead person walking. Well, comatose person sitting in a chair. The hour and a half I spent staring at one paragraph yesterday is still a personal worst, but there’s always tomorrow.*
Meanwhile. It’s February**, it’s cold, dark, nasty, I have another frellingest of frelling deadlines*** in two days, and I want roses. 
And then I’m going to bed again, which is a standard recourse for tired and late at night, although this works better for some people than others. Lately the effort hasn’t been really great for deriving any sleep out of, but it’ll make a change from this chair.
* * *
* And the day after. And then . . . And then it’s Thursday, and the whole show goes back to my publisher, lions, tigers, bears, elephants, bareback riders, bearded ladies and highwire acts^ . . . petrified paragraphs, chryselephantine commas, scintillant semicolons^^, the lot. And then . . . and then there’s PEG II. Oh gods. You know, lots of people write series. Real series. One book after another after another after another after another. Meep. I think I missed that gene. Meep.
^ No clowns. We don’t do clowns.
^^ I tweeted yesterday+ about the fact that I punctuate by ear++ which regularly brings me into collision with well-bred copyeditors: every frelling book it brings me into collision, to be precise. There was an outburst of solidarity in response to this tweet—as it happens at about the same time as Melissa Marr tweeted a new blog post: http://melissa-writing.livejournal.com/393726.html
I knew she had been a teacher, but that’s all I knew. I did not know that she used to teach grammar, and liked it. Wowzah. Meanwhile, if you want a good, crisp, funny+++ basic breakdown of sentence types, here it is. But the bit that pastes my ears back is that she says: ‘I know that my familiarity with grammar & mech[anics] has been as much (more?) of an asset to me than anything else so far. . . . It’s not as fun as conferences, and honestly, it’s not as QUICK as some people want. . . . I firmly believe that it’s a necessity. I KNOW that you don’t need to network (I certainly didn’t) or go to “what[‘s] hot in the market” panels. You can do that stuff, but it’s not required. What IS required is knowing how to play with words. I think this stuff is essential.’ Emphasis mine.
I entirely agree that knowing how to play with words is essential, and I agree that writing—good writing anyway—is hard work. I also agree that networking and panel-attending is mostly fluff. It can be interesting, it can boost energy and morale, and yes, you may learn something. But mostly writing is about sitting at home and staring at the screen/piece of paper.
But the idea that any storyteller gets there in any manner fundamentally by her knowledge of grammar just blows me away. What little I know about grammar and structure as grammar and structure is strictly after the fact. I can, for example, tell you something about how I put my stories together because they’re there on the page in this shape rather than that one and therefore it is possible to say things like that I have an unhealthy love of semicolons and of starting sentences with conjunctions. I can’t begin to imagine thinking about this before the words have gone down on paper.
Ultimately however . . . whatever works. So all you secret sentence-parsers out there . . . it’s okay. It’s okay (ahem) to know what you’re doing. And your copyeditor will love you.
+ I also tweeted yesterday asking what the computer equivalent of sharpening pencils is and got way more suggestions than is good for me. (I especially liked the one about lining up your desktop icons with a protractor.) One of the most frequently mentioned is cruising the internet in one form or another. The bottomless abyss I find is the work-related stuff—I know that reading back issues of http://xkcd.com/ and http://wondermark.com/ counts as goofing around, but shouldn’t I want to know about stuff like the ever grinding-on of the Google mess: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/01/authors-google-rights-grab-books?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Or the details of how an old-fashioned print publisher managed to twist Amazon’s tail (anything that twists Amazon’s tail is a good thing): http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/feb/01/amazon-macmillan-ebooks-apple?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
Well. Yes. But there were advantages to being sad, clueless and retro. More spare [sic] hours, for example. I also sort of miss the shock of what? when Peter reads something out of the newspaper or the New Scientist that I got off Twitter an hour or several days ago.
++The tweet in its entirety reads: I PUNCTUATE BY *EAR*, OKAY? GET USED TO IT. ::Clutches semicolons to chest::
+++ ‘I . . . made up my own examples for class [because] weird sticks better’
My favourite (now, read this, and tell me if you’ll ever have any trouble remembering sentence types again):
‘QUICK CHART
SIMPLE: He ran.
COMPLEX: When the zombies chased his girlfriend, he ran.
COMPOUND-COMPLEX: When the zombies chased his girlfriend, he ran, but they caught him too.
COMPOUND: He ran, but the zombies caught him.’
** http://www.english-test.net/forum/ftopic15617.html although that should be right off your feet
*** I swear I’ve had nothing but frellingest deadlines since about . . . August. 
Bookshelves and reality
A few days ago this email conversation occurred with my friend Tasmin, who is another writer. Another somewhat (ahem) book- and space-challenged writer.* She’s spent a lot of time (and money) over the last year or so in turning the second parlour in her old farmhouse into a library**, and now, finally, with the shelves in, she is beginning to unpack.
I asked her if I could use her email and my reply as a blog entry because I felt that rather a lot of you would understand what happened next. Indeed, will have already predicted what happened next. She graciously agreed.
And so I began, in true sympathetic, supportive friendship mode:
I’m not laughing. I’m NOT laughing. I’m NOT LAUGHING! MMMMMRMMMMMRRRRMMPH
—–Original Message—–
From: Tasmin Hohenzollern
Sent: 18 January 2010 23:09
To: Robin
Subject: Bookshelves are INADEQUATE
I know that you will understand this.
I’ve just about got the library bookshelves crammed full, and I have books that are Not On Shelves. Boxes of them. Thirty or forty boxes of them. “Oh, quelle surprise!” I hear you cry.
That would be pretty much what I’m crying, yes. Mmmmmrmmmrrrmph.
This is going to make me cull and cull again. Unfortunately it’s a slow process, culling.
Yes. You suddenly realise you have a crick in your back, need a pee, and are dying for a fresh cup of tea/coffee . . . and it’s two hours later, and you’ve been reading a book you decided two hours ago to cull. Yes?
Why, just this morning I got rid of PAVILION OF WOMEN by Pearl S. Buck and two of the three (why? Who knows?) copies of JANE EYRE.
Uh . . . I have several copies of JANE EYRE. I often have several copies, particularly different editions, of favourite books (aside from the dozen or so different editions of LOTR), and JANE’s definitely a favourite. Why should a good friend have only one suit of clothes?
At this rate it will take me… um… mathematically challenged, remember?*** this may take a moment or two… YEARS to reconcile the books with the space available on the bookshelves.
Yep. I still probably have a couple of months before I get to play this game at Third House. Atlas is Building Shelves now.†
Unless I make a clean sweep of the more prolific authors – Edgar Rice Burroughs, say, or Lovecraft, or Fay Weldon -
Not Lovecraft! Not Lovecraft!!! –But if you stick to just him, it’s not so bad. You can get rid of all the Derleth etc.†† I cut Edgar††† back in Maine–and I never developed the Weldon habit.‡
there is going to be a major, MAJOR space shortage.
Yep. Reality. Don’t worry, it’s just reality. Happens to all of us. Like breathing. Shortage of bookshelves. Breathing.
There are Too Many Books (and mind you, I haven’t even touched the contents of my office upstairs, or the bookshelves in my room or the one in the guestroom or the ones on the landing. Sigh. THERE ARE TOO MANY BOOKS!
There are NEVER too many books. THAT’S the problem. Shortage of bookshelves and breathing is just the way life works, badly planned and built as it is.
And that’s not even counting the many boxes of my own books – something I’ve always been religiously opposed to keeping around the house, but when you buy up the copies before they’re remaindered, well, damn, there they are, first they cost you money and then they’re right in your way in the form of a stack of boxes. Eek.
Oh, well, I DO keep backlist in boxes. You weren’t fantasizing wasting shelf space on BACKLIST were you?!? Are you feeling quite well??
Perhaps you should plan to come and spend a week or two helping me cull. It’s always much easier to cull other people’s books (and then you can take lots of them home with you, heheheheh).‡‡
Yes, THAT’s why it’s easier to cull other people’s books! I KNOW that scam!!!!
Doesn’t that sound like a lovely holiday? And just think how you would enjoy convincing me that I don’t actually NEED twenty different editions of specific books… only, of course, I DO.
Well, I think twenty might be the upper limit. Except for LOTR. And possibly JANE EYRE.‡‡‡
[Here ends the amusing bit of the email. The rest of it trails away into mutual inquiries about the behaviour of respective domestic fauna, meteorlogical insults, the inexplicable behaviour of publishers, etc.]
* * *
* Is there another kind? Well, Peter might be another kind, only he married me.
** Which is to say she too went through the Weight-Bearing Floor follies. She, however, was only dealing with the ground floor. No fabulously expensive additional staircases were demanded of her. No perfectly respectable second bedrooms were turned into cupboards with stairs running through them.
*** He has also begun building the brick planter in front of the cottage. So that the next time some moron in an SUV swings grandly out of the driveway across the road^ and slams into my pots, it’s going to hurt him a lot more than it hurts me. For a change.
^ Note that these are not my neighbours themselves, but they hang out with some overvehicled riffraff. The thing that totally gets up my nose is that for the four big, heavy pots I’ve lost . . . not one person has ever knocked on my door and said, Er, I’m really sorry but . . . And no, there is no way they can’t have noticed. These are—were—big heavy pots. Grrrrrr.
† Yes. Tasmin and I have a lot in common.
†† I can be cruel and decisive when there’s no longer space for . . . a bed^, say, and a kettle to boil water for tea.
^ In extreme circumstances, hellhounds could sleep on the bed.
††† Cruel! Cruel! Cruel! Especially toward writers who write by the yard. I got rid of my 1,000,000 E Phillips Oppenheim at the same time.
‡ I’m a cow, remember? Moooooo.
‡‡ Yes, I know. This is what happened the last time I visited Tasmin.
‡‡‡ And . . .
