I was climbing through eight hundred years and forty-six thousand miles of church history this evening, which is the system for gaining access to Forza’s ringing chamber, and thinking, you could want to join this tower for its scenic approach alone.  Or possibly as an exciting addition to your fitness programme.  I dragged myself through the last arrow slit, which is at the top of a spiral staircase so tight that even the outsides of the steps are only long enough for Flower Fairy feet, and collapsed fainting on the floor . . . next to Charlotte, who, by her gasping breaths, had clearly only just arrived before me—and who is also a visitor.  Maybe you get used to it.  Maybe the members have a secret lift. 

            I had spent a good bit of today telling myself briskly that I was going to Forza tonight** and that it was just another tower and the years, the miles, the thirty-seven bells and the Rhode-Island-sized ringing chamber*** are all incidental.  Then I got there.  I suppose the fact that your first view of it, every time, is from the floor with a red haze of oxygen deprivation and lactic acid build-up clouding your vision, may have a demoralising effect.  I lay there tonight thinking, well, I did bring my knitting . . . †

            And I did not get off to at all good start with a bell rope in my hands.  Which is to say I once again made a drooling foozle of Grandsire Triples.  ARRRRGH.  It was so drooling a foozle that even standing behind someone ringing it accurately I still couldn’t see what was frelling going on.  I’m going to develop a complex.  I can ring it perfectly well †† in other towers.  But put me in an 800-year-old abbey with a ringing chamber you need satnav to negotiate and I lose my mind.†††  ARRRRRRRRRRRRRGH.  If there had been a sword I’d’ve fallen on it.  You’d think in a ringing chamber the size of Rhode Island there would be at least one sword hanging on the wall somewhere, wouldn’t you?  But nooooooo.  Just peal boards,‡ notices,‡‡ and handbells.§  So I crawled away and hid in a dark corner.‡‡

            I was hauled back out again by a call for plain frelling hunt on ten.  I can’t do ANYTHING on ten.  Ten is too many, even when it’s just plain hunt.  The thing about ten is that you have to hold up and wait, every frelling blow, because there are so many other bells in the row to ring before it’s your turn again.  So it’s bong and then you stand there with your arms over your head thinking you could have got half a row of knitting done while you’re waiting§§, and then it’s bong again.  Also there’s always a bit of necessary speed control adjustment—not only do you ring more slowly going out than going in, you also ring closer over smaller bells and with more of a gap over bigger bells.§§§  When there are ten of the frellers all of this is very exaggerated, which makes it additionally difficult for notable foozlers like me. 

            And then . . . it wasn’t too bad.  I was actually getting the hang of the holding-up-and-WAAAAAAAITING thing.  I tied up my rope at the end without having a last despairing look round the walls for a sword.

            I hung around watching people ringing things I should to be able to ring, but probably can’t at Forza.#  And then finally, at the very end, I was offered a rope of my very own again, to ring bob minor.  Dear miserable gods of ringing and disgrace, I OUGHT to be able to ring bob minor.  I ought to be able to ring bob minor dead, drunk, asleep, and suffering severe lactic acid overload.##  

            And, indeed, I did ring it, despite being alive, sober, awake and maybe a little lactically acidulated.  I also did despite the fact that someone else was going wrong, this being the true sign of knowing a method, being able to hold your line when other people are failing to hold theirs.  I was not ringing it beautifully, but I was ringing it—and I was ringing it in one of Forza’s horrible queues, and since I was on the four I had several### people on each side, which means you need 358.5° vision like a horse (or a robin). 

            So.  Yaay.  There is hope.  I will go back next week.  Note that I am announcing that here in public.  I am going back to Forza for next Wednesday’s bell practise.

            And tomorrow I start the third draft of SHADOWS. 

* * *

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaand . . . look what arrived in the post today: 

* * *

* Maybe. 

** After all I had told the blog I was going to Forza tonight.  

*** Sure it’s a small state.^  It’s a VERY LARGE ringing chamber. 

^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhode_Island 

†  I have half a leg warmer on my needles.  Maybe even two thirds of a leg warmer. 

†† sometimes 

††† Maybe I have lactic acid build-up in my brain. 

‡ My situation was made somewhat more precarious by the fact that the Scary Man was in charge tonight.  They have a kind of rotating ringing mastership and you don’t know till you get there on the night who’s going to be beating you with the knotted rope . . . I mean, who’s going to decide what methods to ring and who’s going to ring them, and whapping you up longside the head when you . . . I mean, who tries to wrest a modicum of order out of campanological chaos.  I confess to feeling a little fragile about ringing admins at the moment but he hasn’t done anything to me yet . . . except give me bells to ring and say I’m welcome to come again. 

‡‡ Full peals are these ghastly feats of ringing endurance, and significant ones frequently get painted on a varnished plank—the names of the method and the ringers, the date, and sometimes the time it took, which is usually around three and a half hours—and hung on the wall of the ringing chamber involved. 

‡‡‡ ‘On 18 February there will be a sale of all the umbrellas, bicycles,  spectacles, spectacle cases, mobile phones and small children left in the abbey grounds, proceeds to the after-service cake fund, the canons have been complaining about the shop biscuits’ 

§ I have no idea.  If I keep going, I’ll ask. 

§§ It’s almost as bad as that frelling stoplight on the way to Nadia. 

§§§ Yes.  It’s horrible physics.  And I don’t think you can even get any of the fun quantum stuff out of it.  It’s all that unpleasant fellow Newton. 

# I’ve told you on previous devastatingly humiliating evenings I’ve spent there:  in the first place because there are SO MANY FREAKING BELLS if you’re only ringing six or eight of them, they’re in a queue, not a circle, which is maddeningly confusing for those of us who are easily confused and are used to ringing in a CIRCLE,^ and also, I assume again because of the frelling SIZE of the ringing chamber there’s something peculiar about the acoustics.  Which in my case is to say I can’t hear a thing but a kind of smudgy blast of noise. 

^ Remember that you’re always looking frantically around for the next bell to follow.  Your sheer frelling depth perception is off if you’re suddenly looking along a line instead of across and around a circle.  

## Gemma was there tonight and said to me after, of course we can ring bob minor.  It’s ringing it on only one bell that is challenging.  

### All right, my definition of several is a little loose.

b_twin_1

Eeek. I’m so conflicted. I want the rest of the week to go sloooooow for you but I want it to go fast for Jodi.

It was less than a fortnight ago that I finally really noticed that Jodi’s frelling* novel** is coming out on the SAME GLAMFARBING DAY THAT SHADOWS IS DUE.  How frigglegobblasting unfair is THAT? 

http://ya-sisterhood.blogspot.com/2012/01/exclusive-reveal-incarnate-by-jodi.html *** 

* * *

I rang handbells tonight—rather to my own astonishment.  What’s worse is that the other three ringers are getting steady enough that It Was Decided—not by me—that it was time for some evil fiend or other to start calling bobs—you remember bobs (and singles)?  It’s not bad enough you have to learn the frelling method line in the first place, or rather, in handbells, lines, plural, and each pair has a different set of lines with a different relationship between the two bells so in a minor method with six bells it’s like learning three different methods and in a major method with eight bells it’s like learning four different methods, at the point when you’re beginning to get through a plain course more often than you aren’t, someone starts calling bobs.  Bobs mix up the order of the bells so that what bell two or three was doing is now being done by (say) bell five or six—which also changes the tune, which is a clue you’ve come to depend on without realising you’re doing it.  Bell methods are all basically canons, you know?  Everybody rings the same pattern, it’s just each bell starts at a different place in the pattern.†  But how you swap places when some ratbag calls ‘bob’ ALSO VARIES.  Ohmigods, he just called a bob, do I run in, make the freller, run out, am I unaffected, can I just burst into tears and dash out of the room?††

            I won’t say we did it well.†††  But we were doing it.‡  And I noticed something.  The big boys, which is to say Colin and Niall, are always handing us peons great steaming heaps of . . . twaddle, for example that it’s actually easier to ring on eight bells than it is on six.  Don’t make me frelling laugh.  Counting to six is sordid enough.  Eight bells means two more chances to go wrong.  Except . . . if you live long enough to be ringing on eight at all, to have (more or less) learnt all four of the plain courses on the four different pairs of bells for your method, in this case bob major . . . they have a point.  Things don’t happen quite as fast on eight bells as they do on six, because eight bells have to ring in each line before anything else can happen in the next line.  Calling it ‘more time to think’ is a bit extreme‡‡ but . . . well . . . we did stagger through a short touch.

            I find it pretty funny that bell ringing is one of the things keeping me sane right now.  But with the counter-computer effect there’s also the feeling that I need to go on believing in myself as a bell ringer while I get used to this no-home-bell-tower thing.  So I scrape myself off the seat of my chair and go ring.  Last night was one of Wild Robert’s wandering monthly spectaculars‡‡‡, this month, crucially, at a tower I could find in the dark, so I went.  And it was okay.  It was good.§  And maybe my new footloose status is an opportunity to ring for Wild Robert more often. . . . 

ENOUGH WITH THE CHAT.  BACK TO SHADOWS. 

* * *

* . . . says the author who HATES ALL AUTHORS who have books coming out till she gets her frelling manuscript FINISHED AND TURNED IN. 

** FIRST novel!  For anyone coming to the party late, this is Jodi’s FIRST EVER PUBLISHED NOVEL!!!!   A brand new shiny fresh just-published book is always a major chocolate, champagne, velvet, rhinestones^, heavenly choirs and beautiful young man/woman driving the Rolls event, but your first book . . . well.  Despite the ghastly ravages of Menopause Brain I totally remember the whole run up to BEAUTY’s publication. 

^ Really good rhinestones.  Possibly attached to All Stars. 

*** I think it’s a really good trailer too.  Mostly I don’t like trailers.  I know they’re all the rage and anyone who is anyone has trailers^ but mostly I don’t like them.  I like this one. 

^ I don’t have trailers 

† While you’re singing ‘row, row, row, your boat’ the person ahead of you is singing ‘gently down the stream’ 

†† This is fairly easy to do with handbells.  It’s a little harder to perform effectively in the tower. 

††† Some of us did it better than others. 

‡ And I kept thinking of things I have to go back and do to SHADOWS in the next five days while we were ringing plain courses, so maybe bobs were a good idea.  WHA’?  WHA’ YOU SAY?   What are you doing in my sitting room?  Why am I holding the leather strap-handles of two little bronze bells? 

                  The problem with turning a book in unfinished is that it’s . . . unfinished.  I know it’s unfinished, Merrilee knows it’s unfinished, my editor knows it’s unfinished, the janitor’s boyfriend’s dog knows it’s unfinished.  But I want the storyline to read roughly the way it’s supposed to even if I use ‘ecphonesis’ three times in the same paragraph^ and the scene with the eggplant and the philosopher really should come out altogether.  So I keep making notes of the things I need to stick a temporary storyline patch on, to get it through (I hope) its exam next week.  

^ I don’t think I do use ecphonesis three times in the same paragraph.  Maybe twice.+ 

+ I mean, I use ecphonesis, usually rude, frequently.  But I don’t often hang around to label it as such. 

‡‡ If you’re bungie jumping off the Chrysler Building instead of the Empire State, the 200 feet it’s shorter isn’t really going to matter if your bungies break:  you’re still going to die. 

‡‡‡ Where several people said to me, hi, Robin, how’s it going at New Arcadia?, and I said, ah, hmmm. 

§ And I was still holding my line when everyone else went horribly wrong in the Cambridge.  Wild Robert was, of course, mad to be trying to ring Cambridge at all with the people he had available, but this is Wild Robert’s way:  and you will probably find you can ring all kinds of ridiculous stuff with Wild Robert’s beady eye on you.  I was, for example, ringing Cambridge despite havoc in other areas of the ringing chamber—and I’m pretty sure the woman who was the most out of her depth went home saying, you know, I got through three leads of Cambridge, I wouldn’t have thought it was possible, but that’s Wild Robert. . . .

It was such a gorgeous day today that hellhounds and I had a proper hurtle, despite my feeling about as lively as that mess in the bottom of your gutters, thanks to another of those ten-hours-in-bed, two-hours-of-broken-sleep nights.**  I’m catching up on back issues of magazines.  I’ve thrown a few more books against the wall.***  I finally downloaded BEJEWELED from the iTunes store because I’m keep hearing that it’s the original and still the best of those line-up-the-same-shape/colour-things-they-go-bang-and-you-get-points games.  It’s okay, although I could do without the Fu Manchu voiceover.  It’s not as good as MONTEZUMA. 

            But when I finally crawled permanently out of bed† it was a beautiful blue sunny day and the frelling birds were frelling singing and the hellhounds were all over me†† and I, drowning in guilt as I am because all things considered they’ve been very good about my less than impeccable maintaining of standards the last week and some†††, decided, okay, countryside is in order, and we went out to seek same.  And it really was pretty fabulous.  We didn’t even meet any unusually savage off-lead dogs.‡ 

katinseattle

I want more Mongo. I want a whole book of Mongo.

No pressure. 

Certainly not.  I’m very relieved, since I’ve been working to this plan since the last time we had this conversation.  Mongo did, in fact, break training in a big way today . . .  noooooooo you moron you were told to [mmrgllrrrmph].  This is not how this scene went last time.  Yelp!  Arrrgh!  Yaaaah!  —It’s going to go a lot differently with Mongo in it.   I so need sleep.  

blondviolinist

You know how there’s Team Gale and Team Peeta for the HUNGER GAMES trilogy? And Jodi Meadows wants Team Sylph and Team Dragon for her INCARNATE trilogy?‡ 

I’m on team Mongo. 

::Beams:: 

* * *

* Does anyone else keep having their eye caught by the ‘12’ of our new year and have brief dazzled moments of thinking that means it’s still last month?  Or is that just someone with a lurgy and a deadline the end of the month that unfortunately it is? 

** Colin and I have been emailing lethargically back and forth today, ostensibly about tower ringing tomorrow night, but a certain amount of reciprocal whining has crept into the conversation.  I admit I’m a bit relieved that not everybody else that has this lurgy is all shiny and new after three days.  Uuuuuuungh.  And unless I’ve developed bubonic plague by tomorrow I probably will go ringing.  I may not be able to do much but ring rounds for beginners, but Colin has beginners who need rounds rung for them, and it would at least mean pulling on a bell rope.  Maybe Colin and I can cough in harmony. 

*** I’m an even nastier reader when I’m ill and short of sleep. 

† Having wept through the sound of my bells ringing. 

†† I was talking to a friend today who’d been ill in the night too.  She has cats.  And while she was sitting in the bathroom at a totally untoward hour having a small private self-absorbed moan, as one does under these circumstances, the cats were of course all over her.  Hey!  You’re up!  Great!  Aren’t you glad to see us?  Aren’t you going to feed us?   Barring the ‘feed us’ part, hellhounds have a similar reaction.  Hey!  You’re up!  Hey!  All these critters that sleep about twenty hours a day and don’t care which four they’re awake for are very disorienting . . . when you’re pretty disoriented anyway.  But last night I kept coming downstairs for more (filtered) water and fetching more magazines, and then back upstairs again getting up for a pee because I’m drinking all this flaming water, and by the time I officially let hellhounds out of their crate they were all it took you long enough.  So, we’re going out NOW, right?  I wonder if they could learn the concept of ‘dressing gown’?^ 

^ Mongo could.  The problem with the Mongos of the world is that they do not sleep twenty hours a day, and they need stuff to do.  If you don’t give them stuff to do, they will find stuff to do.    

††† Here four bright beady little eyes roll significantly toward the sofa.  You just keep giving us extra sofa time, beloved hellgoddess, they say, and much may be forgiven.^ 

^ I’m also practising using the argleblarging new TV set up with the new freeview, non-satellite box and the forty-seven new remotes.+  I’m practising in case the Nice TV Man turns out to have more little stories he would like professional writers’ opinions on.  Why don’t people do their homework.  His manuscript starts with an elaborate description of what the first illustration should be.  Two seconds—okay, maybe twelve seconds—on any reputable how-to-write-for-kids site will tell you this is not what you do.    

          I realise the line about what is acceptable advice-seeking and what isn’t may be blurry in some areas.  I try to double-check before I ask Gemma any medical questions, for example, that I’m asking out of my natural, not to say pathological, inquisitiveness, and not out of a desire for free advice.++  And she’s also a friend, and I give friends a whole lot of slack because I think if you actually know someone who does something it’s reasonable to ask them first, and if she started asking me about illustrations in kids’ books I’d just tell her what I know.  Which is not, in fact, much, and she’d be better off researching some good how-to-write-for-children web sites.

          And if this joker had said, the first time he was here, oh, hey, wow, you’re professional writers?  Say, I’m writing a children’s book, and I wanted to know how detailed I should make the descriptions of the illustrations, maybe you can tell me?, I would have.  There wouldn’t even have been any blood loss (probably).  But he shows up on our (Peter’s) doorstep without warning one afternoon with his frelling story in his frelling hand?  No.  Not on.+++

            So I don’t want to have to ask him any more questions about the TV.  So I’m practising.  I’m not watching TV, mind you, but when I’m going to be lying on the sofa for a while, I turn it on. 

Ajlr

I’m so sorry to hear that The Cough is still unwilling to leave, Robin. I hate that feeling one gets where it seems as if one’s brain is going to be shaken out through one’s forehead at the very next convulsion. 

I tend to specialise in the brains-leaking-out-your ears cough.  Whatever that is that is causing intolerable pressure on my forehead is unlikely to be brains. 

            Yesterday while I was not watching television there was something so clearly bizarre on the screen that I found myself distracted from the book I was going to throw across the room in a minute anyway#.  Eventually I figured out how to call up ‘information’ and was apprised that this was a film called ‘The Trail of the Screaming Forehead’ in which a small harmless American town is taken over by . . . alien foreheads.  Ahem.  I think whoever came up with this idea was having a really bad case of flu-with-pounding-headache at the time and had been hitting the cough medicine a lot harder than is safe. 

+ They breed.  Like coathangers and odd socks. 

++ Even over here, where we do have the NHS, so the absolute question of money is not acute, doctors in their off-duty hours are off duty.  

+++ I am a curmudgeon.  But we knew that.  And I haven’t read it—that’s Peter’s self-immolation.  But Peter mentioned the illustration thing, and I picked the ms up off the table and . . . yup. 

# Carefully missing the Christmas tree.  I’m not even feeling shame about its continued upness yet.  Hey, I’m sick.  

‡ Although the herd of pygmy rhinoceros was a surprise. 

‡‡ Team Sylph and Team Dragon?  Ewwwwww.  I’m on Team Sam.

Okay, that’s not your average mixture.  Let’s have the good news first: 

http://www.jodimeadows.com/?p=525  

YAAAAAAAAAAAY.  It’s alive! 

* * *

. . . We are now, I fear, about to plunge down a steep slope.  I was feeling a little odd last night but in my current state of whatever it’s always easy to put oddness down to a surfeit of quantum physics.*  Unfortunately not so in this case.  I nearly didn’t get out of bed this morning, except that there are hellhounds.  And SHADOWS.  Which is still due the end of the month.  I can’t frelling believe I’m ILL again.  I was ill in October, for pity’s sake**.  I’m not sure yet whether this is merely (!!!!) a sick cold or whether it’s going to insist on the full panoply of flu.  At the moment the jury is still out.  But I feel like stale death on toast.  AND CRANKY. 

            So I got out of bed at about . . . noon.  I barely fell down at all.  There are hardly any bruises from caroming off the four-poster on the way to the bathroom, which had mysteriously moved to a new location overnight.

            I got dressed.  I don’t guarantee that my tee shirt is on the right way around (who cares?  It’s covered up by six woolly jumpers) but I got the shoes on the right feet.***  I hurtled hounds.  Yes.  I did.†  Twice.†† 

            And I worked on SHADOWS.  I did. 

            . . . And this is as much blog entry as I can hold myself together for.†††  Good night.  May you sleep better than I’m likely to. 

* * *

*  Brief, according to my present state of non-brain, update on ABSOLUTELY SMALL:  It’s all maths.  I don’t know how even a crazed mathematician/physicist can have had the effrontery to look Average Reader in the face in the introduction and claim that understanding quantum mechanics does not require mathematics.  You are so lying, Professor Award-Winning Scientist Bloke.  It’s all maths.^ 

            What is true is something else he said in the introduction however:  that in most physics books the author says something like, blah blah blah blah, and here are the equations to prove it.  And you’re supposed to read the equations.  What’s different about ABSOLUTELY SMALL is that he then tells you the equations over in words.  The equations are still there.  You still have to deal with equations.  They may not look like a lot of equations to Mr/Ms Science Brain but they are totally equations.  But once he gets away from those poor cats waiting trembling in boxes for the Killing Look, he explains stuff pretty well.^^ 

            If you’re up for it . . . it’s pretty fascinating.  It’s so insane.  It’s so not Newtonian.^^^  I also just love that most of it you can’t know exactly.  HA HA HA HA ALL YOU CREEPY OVERBEARING SCIENCE BRAINS WHEN I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL.  HA HA HA HA HA.  Granted I still don’t get it, but I’m a lot happier with the concept of a world that cannot be known/measured exactly—can’t be nailed down.  This sounds a lot more plausible to me—more like my experience of the daily life this book is supposed to let me fit quantum theory into. ^^^^   And as he says, approximate doesn’t mean wrong:  it means . . . approximate. 

            Anyway.  It’s fascinating.  But it’s probably not a book you want to strain to your bosom when you stagger off to lie on the sofa with hellhounds and minister to your brain-destroying illness. 

^ Now that I’m committed, which is to say I’ve bought the thing, twice, audio and hard copy,+ I notice with a jaundiced eye that the three encomiums on the back cover about how This Is The Book We’ve Been Waiting for to Explain Quantum Mechanics in Daily Life are all by hard liners.  There are two scientists and a lawyer.  I’m sure he’s a very hard-line lawyer.  And probably the author’s best friend since childhood.  I want a hat check girl/boy or a brewer or ballroom dancing coach to tell me it changed their concept of life. 

+ I cannot believe that anyone would survive the experience by audio only.  If audio helps you focus, as it does help me, then the audio is worthwhile, and audible’s reader gets a medal.  But you’re still going to have to have the hard copy.  For the equations.  If it takes the reader too long to say one of the frellers, you’ll have forgotten the beginning by the time he gets to the end.  Lambda squared of the hypotenuse of the lobotomy . . . um. . . . 

^^ I do wish he’d stay away from real-world examples.  Even I know that a baseball is not a free particle, even when it’s left the field and is busy arcing over the stands.  Speaking of the physics of gliding, however, is anyone playing Tiny Wings?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6pT_2E5xI0   I don’t know what I think of the game, but I love the graphics. 

^^^ I have a new theory about why Newton was such an ugly piece of work as a human being.  It’s because in his secret heart he knew he was wrong.  

^^^^ Look at human nature.  Look at hellhound nature. 

** I think it was October.  Autumn anyway.  A few months ago.  And my stupid throat hasn’t recovered from the last assault which is why the Muddlehamptons are forgetting my name.  ARRRRRRRGH.  And here I am again with an inflamed throat, a throbbing head, and that interesting kind of fever that makes you feel like you’re made of boiling aluminium.  I RARELY GET THESE MALADIES.  RARELY.  Except lately ARRRRRRRRRGH. 

*** One right foot.  One left foot. 

† I also deserve a medal.  But so do they.  At the ripe old age of five and a half, although generally speaking the advent of maturity is a little thin on the ground, they are very good about waiting till I get my crap together, even when I seem to be having unreasonably more trouble than usual with said crap, and of hurtling slowly, with pauses, once we get outside.  I know the location of every public dustbin in this town . . . I also know the location of every bench, not that kerbs won’t do in a pinch.  They probably just think I’m having a bad ME day.  Multi-application hellhound training. 

†† And the dog minder is going to take them out tomorrow.  Another medal. 

††† I told an American friend that what I really needed, Peter having made some excellent turkey stock for the bodily nutrition side, was someone to tell me Really Bad American Jokes.  So she’s taken it upon herself to send me Really Bad American Jokes all day at intervals—for the support of my suffering soul.  Here’s my favourite: 

It’s the old west, and a newcomer to town sees there’s a big crowd gathered in the town square.  So he spots the local newspaperman, and asks him what’s going on.
          ”It’s a hanging,” says the newsman.  “They’re hanging Brown Paper Pete today.” 
          “Brown Paper Pete?  Why do they call him that?” asks the visitor. 
          “Because he always wears brown paper pants, a brown paper shirt, a brown paper hat, and carries a brown paper satchel,” says the newsman.
           “Wow,” says the visitor, “What are they hanging him for?” 
           “Rustling.” 

She’s just sent me this one, but she says that I’m sick enough to worry her if I think these are funny. 

Guy walks into a bar, sits down and orders a beer.  While he’s drinking, he hears a tiny voice say, “Hey mister!  I like your tie!”  He looks around, but doesn’t see anybody.  A few minutes later, the same tiny voice says, “Hey mister! Nice shirt!”  Again, he looks around, but there’s no one around except him and the bartender.  A little while later, the voice says, “Hey mister! You look like you’ve lost some weight!”  So the guy calls the bartender over and asks him what’s going on.  The bartender says, “Oh, that’s the peanuts.  They’re complimentary.”

Okay I’m having some trouble with Mr Fayer and his ABSOLUTELY SMALL.  Has anyone else read it?  In the first place.  His Schrodinger’s cats.  He suggests 1000 boxes with 1000 cats in them, one each.  The cats—ALL the cats, each and EVERY ONE of the cats—are a mixture of 50% alive and 50% dead.  Already I’m confused.  What do you MEAN 50% alive and 50% dead?   What?  How?  Why?  By what MEASUREMENT (which of course is The Question*) are they 50% alive and 50% dead?  What does this mean to the CATS?  And then, having shut up all these possibly ailing and distressed cats in boxes, which cannot be a positive reinforcement of whatever their level of well-being might have been before you did shut them up in the boxes**, you start . . . opening the boxes.  And by the fact of your opening the box and peering inside the cat magically—yes, I said magically—mutates into a pure state of either 100% aliveness or 100% deadness.  WHY?  THIS IS NOT HOW A CAT IN A BOX BEHAVES.***   Unless of course it DIES of a HEART ATTACK the moment it sees you.  And after the first few hundred boxes you have a nervous breakdown as a result of your sense of responsibility for the deaths of (approximately) 500 out of 1000 cats.  Not to mention the prospect of trying to support the liveness of 500 frelling cats until you can convince the RSPCA to come and take them away . . . and also try to convince the RSPCA that they shouldn’t sue the crap out of you for animal abuse, although, supposing they arrive before you run out of cat food, the vibrant, 100% healthiness of the 500 live cats should at least confuse the issue.

            I don’t think I’m getting out of this example what I’m supposed to be getting out of it.†

            And then there’s the whole ‘absolute’ size thing.  He goes through the business of how we interpret size as relative.  Something is large or small as soon as we have something to compare it to.  A photograph of two rocks with a blank background tells us nothing about the size of the rocks till the background is adjusted to have a piece of human being in it for scale.  I don’t myself see how this is a difference in kind with his ‘absolutes’ of ‘large’ being something you can set up an experiment to observe with a negligible alteration to the thing observed compared with ‘small’ being something you cannot set up an experiment to observe with negligible alterations—‘small’ means all experiments create non-negligible, which is to say substantial, alterations, no matter how clever you think you are, which pretty well futzes your experiment.  How is this not relative?  It’s relative to your ability to create an experiment with this or that outcome.  It’s relative to your size and galumphingness.  If we were the size of photons, we could create a sufficiently sub-photonic experiment to measure photons,†† photons being one of those absolutely-small things.  I get it (I think I get it) that large means you can straightforwardly create useful experiments and small means you can’t, but—to this English lit major—this just means some science bozo is inventing new definitions for ‘small’ and ‘large’.  That’s fine.  The small and large part works.  It’s the stuff around it I’m having some trouble with.

            And then . . . back to reality . . . He says, ‘Imagine that a small boy weighing 50 pounds runs into you going 20 miles per hour.’  WHAT?  How is this small boy weighing 50 pounds managing to run into you going 20 miles per hour?  Turbo-charged roller skates?†††  His parents should be had up for criminal negligence.  Then he says, ‘Now imagine that a 200-pound man runs into you going 5 miles per hour. . . . The small boy is light and moving fast.  The man is heavy and moving slow.’  EDITOR’S NOTE:  that should be slowly.  ‘Both have the same momentum. . . . In some sense, both would have the same impact when they collide with you.  Of course, this example should not be taken too literally.  The boy might hit you in the legs while the man would hit you in the chest. . . .’  Emphasis mine.  He never does mention the boy’s propulsion system.  I’m still worried about the chances of a small boy with negligent parents and turbo-charged roller skates living long enough to grow up and become a famous Olympic sprinter.

            And finally . . . the maths question.  On the VERY FIRST PAGE of the preface Fayer says that all we have to do is develop our ‘quantum mechanics intuition’ which is what this book is for.  He says:  ‘This lack of a picture of how [certain quantum-challenged] things work arises from a seemingly insurmountable barrier to understanding.  Usually that barrier is mathematics.’  To understand these things not immediately obvious to the unenhanced human eye ‘ . . . requires an understanding of quantum theory BUT IT ACTUALLY DOESN’T REQUIRE MATHEMATICS.’  Emphasis again mine.  ‘ . . . the presentation in this book is descriptive.  Diagrams replace the many equations with the exception of SOME SMALL ALGEBRAIC EQUATIONS—AND THESE SIMPLE EQUATIONS ARE EXPLAINED IN DETAIL.’

THIS IS MATHS! THIS IS TOTALLY MATHS!

 I don’t think it’s merely an excess of figgy pudding pressing on my brain here.‡ 

* * *

* See:  absolutely small, which means that you can’t create a means to observe it without also creating non-negligible change to what you’re trying to observe.  This is also a working definition of ‘spitchered’.  

** Speaking of altering what you were trying to observe. 

*** This is much more my experience of cats in boxes:  http://www.cafepress.co.uk/+womens_dark_tshirt,137590640 

† He says demurely ‘I have to admit to simplifying a little bit here. . . .’  Um.  But it turns out all he’s referring to is the number of live and dead cats.  You probably would not get exactly 500 of the one and 500 of the other.  Oh.  Okay.  Like that addresses any of my problems with this parable. 

†† And if he gets his totally-ignoring-reality Schrodinger’s cat metaphor then I get this totally-ignoring-reality itty-bitty extremely molecularly dense human metaphor.  

††† Aren’t there some physics, speaking of physics, about how fast it’s literally possible for a substantially shorter rather than a substantially taller person to run, aside from talent and fitness and so on?  Which means a small boy—fifty pounds is little—is even more unlikely to be going 20 mph.  Without turbo-charged roller skates. 

‡ EMoon:

Where is the digestion I had in my 20s, when immense amounts of anything I liked could be ingested without discomfort or weight gain or…whatever? 

The one . . . the one thing to be said for having spent the last forty frelling years fighting my own personal daily battle with my waistline is that when I hit menopause and the diet wars became dirty, scorched-earth and take-no-prisoners, I was to some degree ready.  I mean, I wasn’t ready, I’m appalled at how little I get to eat^ and how much I pay for it when I stray a spoonful of brandy butter over the line.  But I am used to the mindset of Calories Are the Enemy, and most of my menopausal friends weren’t, aren’t and won’t be.  I’m not utterly without, you should forgive the term, form in the matter of assuming all food is guilty until proved innocent.^^  This is not to say I won’t eventually get old and tired and say THE HELL WITH IT.  I WANT TO EAT TOAST AGAIN.  WITH BUTTER.  AND MARMALADE.    But at the moment—and this is a conversation I have had with myself at least every winter solstice holiday period for several years now, and at various less predictable times dotted about the calendar, and the situation is getting relentlessly more extreme—I’m still thinking about my rather ramshackle skeletal system, its weight-bearing capacity, and the hurtling of hellhounds, and I figure I can live like this a while longer.  Which is, I repeat, not to say there will not come a day when I decide on toast.^^^  But preferably after SHADOWS—or the PEGASUS trilogy—has made me a multi-zillionaire and I can afford to replace my entire wardrobe. 

^ And how much less than that I do in fact eat, so I can keep my CHOCOLATE and sugar in my tea. 

^^ And in this courtroom, it won’t be proved innocent.  

^^^ One might almost say ‘plump for’.

In which we take all the boxes, the bags, the ribbons, the wrapping paper, the already-broken bits, the totally unidentifiable shreds of whatever and the stuff that should go straight to Oxfam and bundle it up somehow and start making vague plans to have a Major Dump Run in the near future.

I think I’m suffering Caloric Hangover.  Or that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.*  I started ABSOLUTELY SMALL on Pooka on the morning hurtle** and it’s like . . . what?***   Oh, gods, frelling science again.†   I thought it was going to be the last lost volume of THE BORROWERS.

I’m also still listening to Christmas carols while hellhounds and I lie on the sofa admiring the view††† and reading about roses and maths.‡  This year’s favourite album is an old Maddy Prior and the Carnival Band one:  Gold Frankincense & Myrrh‡‡ which I slap back into the player every time Peter is out of the room for a bit.‡‡‡  The lyrics are included.  Maybe I could try singing along. . . . 

* * *

* Mmmm.  Christmas pudding with brandy butter.  Mmmm.  

** The drawback to frelling holidays is that TOTALLY FRAUDULENT sense that you HAVE MORE TIME TO DO STUFF.  Of course in the present situation what I haven’t got is more time, but there are only so many hours a day I can spend on SHADOWS without a total systems crash, and trying to defibrillate wetware can be tricky.  So I spent some quality time this morning, while I was testing the amount of caffeine required to get us on line, putting 1,000,000,000 pairs of All Stars back on their shelves^ and hoovering up the ankle-deep shed geranium petals in the cottage attic.  And in consequence found myself eating lunch at 3 pm again.  Drat. 

^  Yes.  I have All Star shelves. 

*** I’m also having some trouble with the narrator, who I think in an attempt to sound properly serious and scientific instead sounds like your old chemistry teacher who really wanted to fail you.  

† Although I suspect Fayer of having forgotten, or rather of never having known in the first place, what it’s like being an ordinary dumb^ non-science person.  In my day one of the few things I ‘learnt’ about the scientific method was that it was lofty and detached and had no contact either with individual subjective humanness^^ or with whatever was being studied.  The scientist stood at the correct distance with his (or occasionally her) clipboard and took cool objective notes.^^^  Then they discovered that inconvenient business about how the simple fact of observing certain things—teeny subatomic particles, say—changed them, and what do we all do now?   In this 2010 book Fayer mentions in passing at the beginning that ‘of course we interact with what we observe’ . . . and then keeps going to make his real point about the ‘absolute’ difference between small and large.~  WAIT A MINUTE.  EVERY SCIENCE TEACHER I EVER HAD~~ IS STANDING IN THE BACK OF THE ROOM AND GIBBERING.

            And if that’s not bad enough, he starts with Schrodinger’s damn cat.  But @juliagertrud posted the perfect answer to all things Schrodinger’s cat on Twitter a few days ago:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itQVDA6_TME&feature=g-user-u&context=G2ac07aeUCGXQYbcTJ33bJuwRQr7QRamAJkMSiCooYTc_y_vBnibw

And I’m delighted to hear that Schrodinger himself called it ‘burlesque’.  

^ I’m still going to get back to you on the not-calling-myself-dumb thing.  But not tonight.  

^^ ‘I ate too much Christmas pudding last night.’  ‘Is that really cute lab tech trying to catch my eye?’  ‘If I don’t pick up my dry cleaning soon they’re going to give it to Oxfam.’

^^^ This is, just by the way, one of the reasons I bailed on the scientific method.  There is no such thing as objectivity.  Except in a pure, philosophical, Plato’s-cave sort of way, which is of limited use down here on the ground. 

~ Which seems to be—but I haven’t got my hard copy of the paper book here to check, and this is probably another one I’ll have to listen to twice—that ‘absolutely small’ means that you can’t set up an experiment that won’t disturb it to a disruptive degree.  ‘Large’ means that you can set up an experiment that will not be derailed by the fact that you’re observing it.   I think this is deeply cool (supposing I’ve got it right).  It’s like you grew up with north, south, east and west and if you ever said well what about in or out or Middle Earth you were given detention.  And someone is now telling you no, it’s vortex, gron, megabat, dibbleworthy and trout, and it’s more like Middle Earth than it is like north and south.  Oh.  Okay.  Give me a minute.  I think I’ll like this.  If maybe you could just give me a bucket of ice water for my head. 

~~ This would be up to fifty years ago, remember.  Fifty years ago we were still hunting mammoths with spears. 

†† Diane in MN wrote:

May your computer come to the miracle step of its flowchart and return to normal function. 

How I love Sidney Harris, who decades before xkcd^  was telling us science was funny: http://www.leasingnews.org/Sidney_Harris/probability.gif

http://two.leasingnews.org/cartoons/RUSTY-(5).jpg

. . . And who clearly also has dogs.

            But we will not discuss my computers the day after Christmas.^^ 

^ http://xkcd.com/54/ 

^^ The fact that there is a blog post is all you need to know on the day after Christmas.  

††† Didn’t get any tinsel up today however.  Hoovering the attic was enough.  But Georgiana did come for tea and trained Peter and me rigorously in Kindle use.  I had to go download a couple of new things onto Astarte afterward just so I didn’t feel all hopeless and retro.  I wonder if I can convince Peter that his Kindle needs a name? 

‡ Now there is a combination to fry the eyeballs and turn the brain into pancake batter. 

‡‡ Which I bought that year, 2001, when we saw them live at South Bank . . . and I was too chickenlivered to ask for an autograph.  Yes.  Really. 

‡‡‡ When I was first over here we had to negotiate how long and how intensely I was allowed to play my Christmas music.  Generally speaking I play it nonstop from Peter’s birthday through New Year’s and stop, and Peter promises not to kill me.  Although we do get the MESSIAH all year. 

Susan in Melbourne wrote:

To which I offer http://www.youtube.com:80/watch?v=ZCFCeJTEzNU, but you’ll have to watch, not just listen. 

My favourite is this, and I can’t remember how I first saw it, but it may well have been someone on the forum: 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SXh7JR9oKVE

Which you also have to watch as well as listen.  One of the things that makes me catch my breath every time is that very first woman standing up and singing.  In the circumstances where does she get the nerve? 

Okay, so I got to bed later than I meant to last night either.*   And then at about 8 a.m. I was dragged out of sleep by a short, sharp, authoritative bark—very like Darkness either when he feels that insufficient attention has been paid to hellhounds lately or when he’s in trouble and needs to go out now.  I realised after it was too late to block the adrenaline spike that it was not Darkness—it wasn’t loud enough to be from the kitchen, and it was coming from the wrong direction anyway.  I began to drift uneasily back to sleep again—one is not rational about dogs that may need to go out now, even when one’s intellect is saying it’s not your dog—and the wretched animal did it again.  There are dogs at the top of our hill which have been known to bark, but both of them, one lab going rarfrarfrarfrarfrarfrarf and one dachshund going yipyipyipyipyipyipyipyip, you, which is to say I, can turn into white noise and ignore, both because of the stupid stuck-on quality (I’m more likely to wake up again when they stop) and because these are CLEARLY not my dogs.  This abominable creature, whatever it is, did the one short commanding bark once or twice a minute, and then silence for three or four or five minutes, for about an hour, by which time I was longing to let the air out of its tyres and call the cops.  It was also beginning to get to the hellhounds, who ordinarily ignore exterior barking.  So there’d be BARK and then rustling from the hellhound crate and I’d think, in my woozy state, oh, gods, it is Darkness after all. . . .

            We did all eventually get back to sleep again, but it was not the most restful night/morning of my life.  And I’ve been thumping away at SHADOWS** and when it was time for hellhounds’ second hurtle tonight it was like, you mean I have to get out of this chair?  And do what? 

            So I thought, to spare the brain I don’t have available anyway, I’d respond to a few forum comments.*** 

gamma

Honestly, I would give Hugo a miss anyway. 

You comfort me.  It did get mixed reviews over here, but they were interestingly mixed, and Penelope really wanted to go.  I’ll ask her what she thought.

EMoon

Oh gods…audience at a [voice] lesson???

At first my voice died to nothing if I heard footsteps in the hall outside the choir room where my lessons usually are. Which, considering that it’s the church complex and people move around it all day, was not helpful. Then it died only if they opened the door to the choir room (instantly. stopped.) . . . Now I still don’t want anyone there during a lesson, but Suzanne . . . sometimes needs to come into the room…and I can sort of keep going. . . . Sort of. After a couple of years.

Someone else? A friend? At the thought my throat tightens up. And yet I can sing in the choir…but there are others around me, covering up my voice (I think. Maybe not true but I can think that.)

Yes.  This would be me too.   Blondel kept threatening to take us to one of the practise rooms where he was a professional vicar choral, and I kept saying that if he did I wouldn’t be able to sing.  I’ve got used perforce to Nadia’s mum† but I have to not think about it really hard, and one of the things that went wrong the day I had my lesson at Nadia’s house was the presence of other people.  Aren’t we a little old for this nonsense?  Feh.  And totally, about the choir covering you up.  Although in my case I haven’t got much doubt that it’s true.  At best I make an on-pitch noise which helps to thicken up the more interesting noise that the singers are all making.  My usefulness is as a kind of audible corn starch.  

Besunami

Extra protein in your broccoli? Ewww! Yuck! When I was little I loved lettuce and munched happily with our bunnies. One night I bit down on a leaf and there was a big crunch where no crunch should have been. My father told me I’d probably gotten a spider egg sac. Great parenting, Dad! To this day I can’t eat any crunchy lettuce parts. 

Ewwww.  I’m amazed you haven’t needed years of intensive therapy to overcome this damaging trauma.††  I think I’ve told the story?, about an entire branch of the Dickinson clan swearing off broccoli forever after Peter served them some from his garden—this was before my time I wish to emphasise—that was perhaps somewhat overpopulated.  He gave up trying to grow broccoli shortly thereafter because it tends to be rather liberally inhabited.  Let the professionals deal.

Susan inMelbourne

Q: What’s worse than finding a worm in your apple?
A: Finding half a worm in your apple!! 

I think I grew up with this one.  I can’t remember when I didn’t know it—speaking of trauma—I’ve eaten a lot of apples in my life.  I started cutting them up young, however, so I could check their insides.  When I persuaded Peter to go organic at the old house and we stopped spraying our apples, this got a bit crucial, but since there were always far more apples than we could eat anyway, having to cut away the occupied bits was not too sad.  (My little apple tree at the cottage seems relatively immune.  I have no idea why.)  I will say however, delicately, this being a family blog and all, that while I’m not happy about finding protein in my broccoli, still, it’s cooked.  And I spent five years in Japan at an impressionable age where I ate all kinds of weird-to-the-western-mind stuff like deep-fried grasshoppers and chocolate-covered ants.^   I can deal with the occasional  cooked half caterpillar in my broccoli.  I have not yet however had to face the raw half worm in my apple and I don’t want to.  (Raw!  Spider sac!  EWWWWWWW!!!!) 

^ Hey.  It’s chocolate.  

PamAdams

Perhaps you could settle for being the ‘pretty cabin boy.’ 

::falls down laughing:: 

 http://folksongcollector.com/handsome.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sDn_3VysILs

I’ve always liked the captain’s wife’s comment at the end:  Yes, Mrs Captain?  And what are you hiding? 

* * *

* Hey, I’m just doing what I’m told.  Singing Christmas carols is fun.  And it does give me an opportunity to notice that I do have a bit more voice than I did this time last year.  When I was whining to Nadia on Monday about thin and reedy—and about the continuing frustration of not know what to do about this when it happens—she said in her best brisk manner that I should concentrate on the fact that even when I’m singing less than my best (and she’s big on the fact that ‘best’ by definition is rare and you can’t beat yourself up for failing to attain it every time you open your mouth) I am singing better than I was ten months ago.  Yes.  True.  It also amuses me a lot to be brisked at—I’m not quite sure what the correct verb is:  she’s not patronising me, she’s brisking me—by someone about thirty years younger than I am.  

** I am still doodling, of course, but I admit the factory conveyor belt has slowed.  Nothing else is going to get there before Christmas;  I might as well concentrate on SHADOWS for a few days.  So I am.  

*** I should resurrect Ask Robin.  Good grief.  The problem—it’s not a problem, it’s me being shiftless—is that most of the questions people want to ask authors are about . . . authory and publishing things.  Which is reasonable.  It’s just that I have about have .01 micrograms’ interest and/or knowledge of these things.  About writing, it’s something I do, like walking or breathing.  I can’t tell you how I do it and it seems to me a bit daft (and embarrassing) to try.  Merrilee exists as a sort of Deep Space Nine/Babylon Five where my publishers and I can both dock and find someone who can talk/walk/breathe with both of us.^    Over here on the planet Gonzo Mongo we are mostly interested in hellhounds, bells, singing, yarn, roses, chocolate, etc.

             I am ashamed that I almost never blog about other people’s books however, since I still read all the time and it’s not all maths and physics (and knitting.  And roses).  I’m enormously enjoying Lauren Beukes’ ZOO CITY right now for example. 

^ I have never satisfactorily decided if my publisher is the Vorlon, or I am. 

† As I got used—more or less—to Blondel’s neighbour, who, on a week day afternoon, had the revolting habit of sitting in his garden.  Which Blondel’s studio overlooked.  And Blondel would kind of stare at me if I suggested he close the window.  I comforted myself with the thought that I wasn’t very loud, and Blondel’s piano was between me and the window.  I’m louder now.  And there’s an open hatch between Nadia’s mum’s kitchen and the dining room, where the piano is.  I’m not thinking about it.  I’m.  Not.  Thinking.  About.  It. 

†† Also, lettuce is one of the cheap joys of life, and there aren’t that many cheap joys, aside from library cards.

But we had eight ringers this morning.  EIGHT.  I’m trying to remember the last time we had eight ringers for our eight bells.  After a howling gale with rain hammering on the windows at 7:45 am when the frelling alarm went off, and me lurching swollen-eyed around the cottage saying, I don’t want to go out in this, I don’t WANT to go out in this . . . at 8:45 it suddenly cleared off and became blue and dazzling and glorious.  And all the bells rang out. . . .

            Another day passes as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie.**  I envy her the amount she can still eat, but other than that I’m okay to stick with the elderly decrepit me.  She’s also a lot better constructed*** to cope with the intrusive magic besieging her landscape than I am.  I was thinking about this again after posting about how unsettling I found Aeon Flux the other night at the cinema:  I’m what you might call professionally off balance, I’d really rather not fall down the rest of the way, I might hurt myself†.  So if a dragon†† flew into the courtyard at the mews††† tomorrow would I be more or less likely than the average bystanding human to say, oh, hey, cool, that’s a dragon, or run screaming?

            Blither blither blither blither.  It’s been another good day as a seventeen-year-old named Maggie and as a result (a) I have no brain and (b) I’m having some trouble climbing back out of the vocabulary of an alternate-reality teenager.  I was also thinking‡ about the way I think of SHADOWS as my first ‘genuine’ teenage high school novel, which probably ought to be DRAGONHAVEN.  Except that Jake’s a grown up by the end with a kid of his own‡‡ . . . and more crucially, since a lot of my protagonists start out teenagers, he doesn’t go to high school.  Maggie goes to high school.  Yeep.  She takes algebra.  Double yeep.  With reference to my saying on these virtual pages some time recently that my hard sciences/maths phobia is probably largely due to very bad teaching . . . it’s probably taken me these forty-plus years also to come to a point where I can face going with a character back through the doors of an average suburban high school.  Well, maybe not quite average, but . . . ‡‡‡

            Meanwhile, speaking of hard science, I’m about to download§ James Gleick’s CHAOS.  www.Audible.co.uk, that ratbag, is having another 25% off sale for members so I was cruising for more tasty hard(ish) science.  As I’ve told you before I tend to avoid customer reviews of fiction—what ordinary readers want out of fiction is just too, um, various—but I usually do read reviews of nonfiction because there I am a very ordinary reader and may learn something from the same.  Not infrequently you see some aggrieved and outraged person saying, you’re going to have to buy the hard copy too!  You’re not going to be able to make sense of the maths from the audio!  Snork.  I wouldn’t frelling dream of trying to cope with any of this stuff without having the underlinable-paper copy also at hand.  Self-improvement is expensive.§§

            Having said that, I got out of step with BRIEFER HISTORY OF TIME and, having finished the audiobook a couple of days ago, the paper version finally fell through my door yesterday.  And . . . um . . . well, there are no equations§§§ but the illustrations make it worse.  Electron interference (p 98)?  Feynman diagram of Virtual Particle/Antiparticle Pair (p 123)?  What?  If I’d picked it up in a shop, instead of on Audible, I’d’ve put it down again.

            Meanwhile . . . Hannah is going to read CHAOS too.  We’re going to have a book club of two.  And if anyone had told me thirty years ago that Hannah and I were going to agree to read a book describing The Third Great 20^th Century Revolution in the Physical Sciences (after relativity and quantum mechanics) at all, let alone over the Christmas holidays for light distraction from the figgy pudding, I’d have probably made myself sick laughing.

            Menopause Brain Rules. 

* * *

 * I was distracted from the passage of time by reading UNDER MILKWOOD.  Haven’t read it since college, I think.  Golly.  I may have to blog about this.  I read Dylan Thomas in my teens, of course, As One Does, or at least As One Did if one fancied oneself a sensitive literary intellectual in the 1960s (adolescence, I believe, optional).  But . . . GOLLY.  Also WOW. 

** Over-identification with fictional characters?  What you say?

 *** You should forgive the term 

† Also being elderly, decrepit etc. 

†† Although there aren’t any dragons in SHADOWS.  I don’t think.  Er. 

††† And good luck to it:  parking is already an ordeal and a torment. 

‡ Which is generally considered to be a function limited to those in possession of brains 

‡‡ This is not my idea of a spoiler, but if it is any of yours, apologies.  

‡‡‡ It’s not as if all my teachers were dire.  I had a lovely algebra teacher—I’ve told you about her.  We left Japan, and the algebra teacher who told me I was the stupidest child she’d ever taught, mid-school-year, and when we got back to America two months later the principal at my new school laughed a lot and tried to put me back a grade.  I could cope with the catch-up everywhere but algebra—and they would have put me back a grade if it hadn’t been for Penelope Windsor Curry.  If you’re out there anywhere, and have taken to reading fantasy writers’ blogs in your retirement, thank you very much. 

§ I hope I’m about to download . . . insert a few practise screams of rage and frustration here.    

§§ And it’s not, it seems to me, as if they’ve got all the bugs out of the electronic delivery system yet either.  An iPhone is a finite entity.^  After I’ve listened to something I delete it, of course:  if I want to listen to it again I can always re-download it^^ from my Audible ‘library’.   But—as the little iPhone warning box tells you—if you delete it you will lose all your notes and bookmarks.  Gee.  Thanks guys.  That’s really foresightful programming. 

^ Speaking of finite, as in computer memory, I had an email from Raphael, Computer Archangel, on Friday, and he says what a good thing I went for the ridiculously huge hard drive, that he’d been doing the sums, and . . .

            I should have my new laptop next week. 

^^ . . . theoretically 

§§§ As I recall this was one of the red herrings about the previous one—there were no equations, how hard can it be?  Um. . . .

The latest item to be left in the pouring rain was the authors’ copies of the new trade paper edition of FIRE.  In this carrier’s defence, the space under the little roof by the dustbins is not large, and the box was an awkward shape.  Still.  Feh.  However, the knight in her shining raincoat* arrived before the damsel drowned.  I’d forgotten the trade-ed FIRE was due—I mean, I assume it was due.  Publishers have been known to be delayed or to push things back to a later list, but they rarely produce books at random.**

            It can now stop raining till my final box of auction-ordered backlist is scheduled to arrive***, and then it might want to get a head start on the ankle-deep puddles†.   The ankle-deep puddles are doing really well at the moment:  one of our standard hurtling routes is navigable only by wellies†† and I made an effort to be back at the cottage yesterday on time so that my handbellers did not have to stand around in the rain waiting for me.†††

            Speaking of handbells . . . tonight at tower practise we had a progress report on the bell fund, and gobsmackedness was generally expressed‡ at the amount the Days in the Life auction/sale has raised.‡‡  At the moment the bell fund is not only on track, it’s ahead of the game.  Yaaaaaaaay.  Of course we’re also busy finding out that just as the original £10,000 quote was low, the £12,000 it was raised to probably isn’t going to cover it either, so we may not be as ahead as all that.  However I’ve already said that I don’t mind where our—that is yours and my—bell money goes as long as it goes to bells.  There are at least two bell-restoration charities that work within the central council—I know this because we’re eligible for grants from them—so if we end up with money left over when all is said and done I’ll simply plough the Days in the Life money back into someone else’s bell restoration.‡‡‡

            Meanwhile Vicky said that we might consider making up a wish list§ for what might be done if we can afford it.  And Niall’s eyes went to a certain plain wooden cabinet that hangs on the wall of our ringing chamber.  We could get those old handbells repaired and retuned, he said.§§

            Yesssssss.  

* * *

* Actually it’s an extremely old, hard-used and beat-up raincoat and the zip doesn’t work any more.  I’m still wearing it.  I’m fond of it.  As soon as it starts getting cold as well as wet I will shift over to my fabulous raspberry pink Goretex coat bought in that dazzling crescendo of serendipity at the end of the season last year.^ 

^ I blogged about it, but I think I’d be sorry to hear you remembered. 

** I have this sudden vision of the entire sales, editorial and marketing departments of this or that megapublisher at one of those epic twice-yearly meetings crouched around a table with two dice on it.^  Or possibly a roulette wheel.^^ 

^ Did you know that slot machines—the one-armed bandits of yore—are now digital?  You don’t get to pull anything?  Hey, what’s the fun of that? 

^^ And the devil plays the croupier. 

*** This one, for once, is not my fault.  The hardback BLUE SWORD was between printings and out of stock when I ordered it back in August or so—which of course explains why it was our biggest bell-fund-sale title.  I had a few copies but nothing like enough.  But they reprinted about a fortnight ago so, barring further postal malfeasance, all is well. 

† I was thinking comfortably that the book depository  http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/ always sends books individually, so they fit through the mail slot in my door.  If it’s going to keep raining, however, perhaps they would like to make an exception.  I am sure there’s an amusing equation to be had out of the penetrability of cardboard to rain depending on the cube root of the hypotenuse of the contents.^ 

^ Because moderation is not my best trick and because the end of January is very soon and because I don’t, in fact, know what I’m looking for+, and because I have been a math phobic for thirteen months short of sixty years++ and I’m waiting somewhat nervously for it to kick in now and would like to get this over with+++, I picked up a book I’d given Peter last Christmas:  PROFESSOR STEWART’S HOARD OF MATHEMATHICAL TREASURES.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2010/mar/18/ian-stewart-curiosities-treasures ++++

Which is a hoot.  Not all of it is puzzles and equations.  The third snippet is about Bhaskara, a twelfth-century Indian mathematician.  After he screwed up his daughter’s marriage prospects, he wrote one of his most famous brain-bending treatises and named it after her:  Lilavati.+++++  As Stewart puts it:  Hey, thanks, Dad. 

+ And thanks to you generous maths-and-hard-sciences folk out there who have offered assistance.  I am compiling a list.  Meanwhile, or in the very very short term, like between now and the end of January, I suppose my generic question is, if you had an elderly hellgoddess, not awfully bright but given to enthusiasms and capable of considerable stubbornness, who wanted to know something about how mathematicians and physicists grapple with numbers and theorems and things (and possibly each other) to Define the Universe, what would you tell her?  

++ Yes, since you ask, I do remember lying in my bassinette and thinking, inchoately, because words were still some months off yet, ewwww.  Maths.  Ewwwwww.  

+++ Arnica at the ready.  Phobias can kick very hard.  I am really going to have to register a protest with the Story Council on this one~.  Which they will no doubt file in the ‘no action’ bin with all my other protests.~~ 

~ But not till after the end of January 

~~ If pressed, some harassed flunkey will probably snarl at me, You said you wanted something in a hurry.  You got it.  So stop complaining. 

++++ I’ve now got the first one on my book depository wish list.  The other book of Stewart’s that, by its description, I really want is WHAT DOES A MARTIAN LOOK LIKE? which is out of print.  Like I need more stuff to read.   

+++++ Nice name.  Hmmmm.   I’m sure, after having the standard life path closed to her~, an intelligent~~, well-educated young woman would want some adventures.  Hmmmm. 

~ Indeed she may have engineered this.  

~~ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lilavati 

†† No I am not going to carry you.  You can jump.   

†††  The little roof beside the dustbins is definitely too small for two people and a bag of handbells.  Not to mention that it’s only about shoulder high. 

‡ I believe ‘gibble gibble gibble’ might be a rough translation of Vicky’s reaction—as tower secretary and all-purposes dominatrix she’s been pretty much single-handedly responsible for the running of the bell fund:  organisation, keeping track of money coming in and money promised, follow ups, resulting reporting to the church and various councils and so on and so on and so on.  She must have a flow chart the size of Balmoral.  

‡‡ I gave a ‘not less than’ figure since I haven’t even booked my appointment with the Tax Man yet. 

‡‡‡ There are at least two local towers I’d be delighted to contribute to the rehabilitation of, so if it comes to that I’ll keep you posted.  It being my name on the cheque I’d be able to assign where it goes.

§ New ropes cost a fortune for example, and there are a lot of really grotty hateful old ropes out there still in service because the tower in question can’t afford to buy new ones.  And no tower puts up a new rope till the old one is at least somewhat grotty and hateful. 

§§ You know he hadn’t even NOTICED that yesterday was the first time I’d got through to the end of Cambridge on frelling handbells without resort to reading it off a piece of paper with the lines on?  Lksdjfhgkjdsfjkliowerunvn&^%$£”!!!!!!!

In the first place . . . as demonstrated by this blog, which in this case is not lying by omission very much*, I stay the hell away from politics, both the governmental and the literary.  Politics make me crazy.  People in groups make me crazy even when they’re not trying to organise my life, real-world or book-world, for me.**  A good local council can get stuff done;  national government I think is a disaster almost by definition and I have no real idea what I would do if someone knocked on my door one morning and said, pardon me, madam, but you are now absolute monarch, what is your first decree?***

            But every now and then something breaches my defenses.  Anyone out there not know about the mind-boggling, eyeball-frying, credibility-demolishing, dog’s-dinner muck-up the National Book Award admin has made of this year’s YA shortlist?  Gibble gibble gibble gibble gibble.   I don’t like awards much;   I think, like national government, they’re kind of a disaster by definition and the one best mentality is so bogus.   Lists are helpful, good reviews—and by ‘good’ I include that the reviewer is careful to acknowledge his/her own subjectivity—are excellent;  that one book is the winner and everyone else is an also-ran is just silly.  Anyway.  I don’t watch for the NBA—for the Booker, for the Orange, for the Newbery, for the Pulitzer, for anything else you care to name—but I did notice the tweets going past the last few days about . . . well . . . let’s be polite.  That there was a sixth title added to the YA shortlist for this year’s NBA, and that there was perhaps some confusion because that book’s name is CHIME and there was already on the shortlist a book titled SHINE.  My original thought, casual half-attending naïve twit that I am, was that CHIME had been left off because it was so like SHINE that everybody saw both titles in the one, if you follow me, which you probably don’t, because not everyone has the kind of brain that makes it a good idea to doublecheck that there are two hellhounds in the back of Wolfgang before she turns the ignition key.  Stupid and embarrassing but essentially harmless.

            But no.  Apparently SHINE was not supposed to be on the shortlist at all.  Shock horror.  Well, you know, it’s really very likely that no one would have died if they’d (a) left it on the list and (b) had six titles this year.  They could just give the award to someone else, you know?

            So far, so grotesque.  But this is where my head explodes:  the NBA rang up the author of SHINE and asked her to withdraw her book from the list ‘to maintain the integrity of the award.’†

            I’m not going to go through all of it again, I’m still throwing up.  But Libba Bray has done a magnificent job of telling the story.  I’ve already tweeted it—thank you, @radimilibrarian—but just in case not everyone who reads this blog is a mad internet junkie who has already seen it six times on their other web feeds:  http://libba-bray.livejournal.com/62266.html   Read it and weep.  Or throw up.  Yes, one of the things that the morons on the NBA seem entirely to have discounted is the wear and tear on poor Lauren Myracle—for pity’s sake, she’s a human being.  She may—and I hope she does—come out of this with a furious liberal-backlash best seller on her hands.  But one more thing I haven’t seen anyone mention yet, although I’m sure someone has somewhere, is that there is now no way for any winner to win gracefully.  What is the winner going to do?  Say ‘no thanks’?  The NBA is still a very shiny and generally admired and desirable thing.  So the NBA admin, in its infinite vainglorious obtuseness, is wrecking it for the winner too.  Way to go, guys!  When I’m queen, I’m going to bust you to liver flukes! 

* * *

Somehow my usual line of rabbiting-on doesn’t follow very well.  But this is meant to be mostly a frivolous, hot-chocolate-and-fuzzy-slippers sort of blog.††  So let me tell you that Nadia says that I’ve come on really well this week.†††

            But here’s the underlying ratbag.  My voice has been frayed to breaking by the mutant virus, like old stirrup leathers or the heels of hurtling socks.  At the same time what it can do, before it cracks and falls over, has taken another lurch forward.  I found another top-end note last Tuesday and even I’m aware that I’m making a bigger, rounder sound generally. ‡ I just (evidently) can’t do it for long.  I suppose it’s not unreasonable that someone who hasn’t sung in a choir for (over) forty years would have vocal stamina problems—and the choirs I sang in as a teenager never had anything like Ravenel.  So I’ve been dubbing along, first with Blondel and now with Nadia, singing half an hour a day most days—and even the half an hour is broken up because I’ve found that two fifteen-minute squirts add up to a larger whole than one half an hour—and then suddenly I’ve self-propelled into a situation where I’m singing flat out and mostly at the edge of my range for two hours.  Plus warming up at home first, because Ravenel expects us to be ready to go. 

            And then I get an Upper Respiratory Lurgi which is being INCREDIBLY slow to clear.  So, I am a mature, sensible grown-up.  I get it.  I understand what’s happening.  I still hate the frell out of it.  One of the reasons Nadia is pleased with me is that I’ve been working on those dratblatted open Italian vowels—but you can walk around going ‘oooooooohhhhh’ and ‘eeeeeeehhhhhhh’ without singing them, you know?  You just make funny mouths and blow through them.

            Whatever.  Improvement is improvement, right?  And I rang a proper touch of Stedman doubles tonight, which is to say I was in the way when Colin called a single, and had to climb through a jungle gym of coathangers‡‡ to get to the other side. 

* * *

 Maybe I’ll go take a long hot bath and read a book. 

* * *

* There is the odd non-family-friendly outburst from time to time. 

** My upper limit is my home tower’s AGM.  I generally manage to miss the district AGM. 

*** The book I have just downloaded^ is 23 THINGS THEY DON’T TELL YOU ABOUT CAPITALISM^^ which may give me some ideas.  I bought it because of this interview:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/aug/29/my-bright-idea-ha-joon-chang in which he says (among other things, although this is everyone’s favourite quote) the washing machine was more transformative than the internet has yet proved because the washing machine allowed women to enter the work force.  Okay.  My attention is caught. 

^ maybe 

^^ http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/browse/book/isbn/9780141047973

 † And . . . just by the way . . . can anyone think of any reason for this disgusting display except that the NBA judges think that their pure holy status would be fatally besmirched if a book that wasn’t supposed to be on their shortlist!!!!! was allowed to put ‘NBA finalist’ on future editions?   Can any mortal get any farther up themselves than this? 

†† Okay, cranky hot chocolate and fuzzy slippers. 

††† I’ll leave out the part about Wolfgang not starting and getting a last-minute ride to Colin’s tower practise with Roger.

‡ Don’t forget we’re still talking mouse squeakings, not Janet Baker.  I’m a larger mouse with better breath control is all.      

‡‡Bellspeak.  The trickier of the two positions for a Stedman single is familiarly known as a coathanger.