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Ice This
Okay, what is this?
I mean, I know what it is. It’s ice. It’s a very strange ice self-sculpture as discovered in my rain gauge this morning. I’ve been trying to remember if there’s been any weird ice effects before this; we’ve been having hard frosts pretty much every night for a week or so I think—certainly last night and the night before. And we’ve had lots of hard frosts all winter long.
But yesterday was positively warm, so anything that might have happened the night before that would have melted. I also did some gardening yesterday and I’m pretty sure I would have noticed gnomish* water. But is there some inscrutable Memory of Water going on here?
All the ice crystals held hands/tentacles/tendrils/teenyweeny subatomic appendages when they melted yesterday and last night as they hardened up again since they were all friends now they started building a cheerleader pyramid? 
I haven’t dumped the rain gauge out since falling lake over the weekend—maybe it has something to do with the drastic slope of the gauge? Beats the heck out of me. Maybe I’ll send it to the New Scientist and ask them. They like stuff like this.
And it was a nightmare to photograph. I must have taken two dozen photos** and they’re all out of focus.*** These are merely less out of focus than the others. My camera has these little orange squares that tell you what it’s going to focus on . . . wrong. It can’t stand shiny translucent ice, so it just ducks around the orange squares and finds a nice daphne or plant pot or dead thing to focus on.
I emailed Blondel last night and said that I’d lost about half of this week to ME, that I’d just tried singing for the first time since about Thursday and . . . oh dear. That I still wanted to come for my lesson† but not to expect much. He emailed back that he was sure we could ‘make good use of the time’†† if I was feeling up to it.
Right at the moment about ninety percent of what I learn about singing every week happens in that single hour in Blondel’s tiny spare-bedroom studio. The ten percent is just me at home picking out the melody on the piano with one finger, or urgently re-re-listening to selected youtube tracks.††† I am hoping that eventually I can do some of that what-needs-supporting, where-it’s-tight stuff for myself, but at the moment all I ever seem to do at home—aside from trying to learn the frelling tune‡—is recognise that the noise I’m making is more good or less good‡‡ and beyond that it’s all unfathomable . . . squeaking.‡‡‡
Sigh.
I had forgotten more than I had learnt since last lesson § but at the end Blondel still said, I’ll have a new song for you next week. Your coloratura is really very good,§§ I’ll look for something else with coloratura in it.
Squeak.
* * *
* Gnomish: to do with gnomes. Yes, I want to say gnomic but that’s about aphorisms. Hmm. Aphoristic water. Woo ooh.
** I looove my digital camera. It took a little while. I was last on the block. I might still be last on the block without a digital camera except that Peter bought me one because he thought I was being silly about them. Silly? Me?
Now who’s going to fix my attitude toward my little videocam? Yup. I have one. Poor thing. It sure has stamina. It’s been buried in a heap of early draft manuscripts for months. I finally fished it out about a week ago and gave it a charge, expecting it to tell me that it had eaten itself and all its software, the way rechargeables do if they aren’t. Nope. Still working. So then I put it on its bendy feet, pointed it at the piano, and sang the lullaby from PEGASUS in front of it.
BIG MISTAKE.
The bottom of a pile of early draft manuscript isn’t nearly far enough away. Not in the same county.
*** And sometimes I don’t love my digital camera quite so much.
† Have I told you that my fourteen-year-old car passed his road inspection first go? That they couldn’t even find anything wrong? Evidently there hadn’t been a hard frost recently when they went to unlock the doors.
†† Good use of the time. Sigh. I might as well be ringing Cambridge and singing and composing the second parts of lullabies^ for all the forward I’m getting on PEG II. I’m getting tired of that blank screen. This happens to me; in itself it’s not a big deal; after the fairies^^^ finish moving the furniture around they’ll let me back in the house again. Meanwhile . . . well, if I miss getting it turned in on time, you’ll just have to wonder/put off reading PEG I^^^^ a little longer.
^ Did I tell you Peter wrote me a second verse? With variants. In case I want the stress on a different part of a line, he said. Golly. We’re collaborating more on this than we ever have for ELEMENTALS.
^^ Maybe I should take up knitting.
^^^ Or possibly gnomes
^^^^ Which of course you’ve already bought
††† Now that I’m beginning to learn it a little, Alfred Deller’s performance of Purcell’s Evening Hymn is much. Too. Slow.
‡ And all those horrible where-you-come-ins
‡‡ Or possibly more bad or less bad
‡‡‡ I have the video to prove it
§ SIGH
§§ Remember that this is teacherspeak and relative. It’s true that given the general level of direness my coloratura is better than you’d expect.
Semi-frozen Sunday
I’m doing my wha’? Huh? on five hours’ sleep today. Sigh. Saturday night has lately become the night I go to bed early because I have to crawl out early for service ring on Sunday . . . good so far . . . and then get overinvolved in the books that just happen to have come to bed with me. There tend to be rather a lot of these.* And since it’s early and I’m still feeling at least half-awake and half-clever I figure I’ll tackle something a bit more substantial than usual and . . . **
Wha’? Huh?***
A surprising amount of this weekend has been spent in the garden despite snow, sleet and freezing rain.† Friday night Peter was playing bridge so we were already locked in at the cottage when the temperature plunged; last night I had the full-bore ice-in-the-mechanism†† car-doors-won’t-open-car-doors-won’t-shut thing when hellhounds and I went back to the cottage from the mews. But the days themselves are making coy little dashes at spring between cloudbursts; I even got up to Third House today to view the situation, which comes down basically to either sprouting or dead. Surprising numbers of both of these.††† But between winter and Atlas—who did a major jungle-bashing for me last autumn—and my own creeping determination to have only plants I like in my garden(s) no matter how well this or that great ugly thug is doing—great ugly thugs have their uses, but as soon as I start running out of room their days are numbered—I HAVE SOME VERY NICE EMPTY EARTH. It won’t last. Every time I hit another bump in the PEGASUS road I go on line and order more plants.
* * *
* Every fortnight or so I have a clear-off before the bed-frame breaks.^ You’d think that changing the sheets would force me to grapple with the problem, but not at all. I just put the books, magazines and other people’s manuscripts^^ in tidy^^^ piles on the floor which gives me somewhere off the floor to put the bedding.
^ Having your attic floor reinforced for carrying your and your husband’s professional backlist is one thing. Having your bed-frame reinforced because you are a cheap literary slut+ seems to me a fortification too far.
+ Helena Bonham-Carter and Tim Burton live in separate houses too. Pass it on. http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/feb/06/helena-bonham-carter-interview . . . ‘There’s a snoring issue’ . . .
^^ Yes. Very occasionally.
^^^ Sic. So they don’t fall over and let the pillows tumble onto the not-very-recently-hoovered carpet.
** Last night along with the predictable homeopathic quest for my latest gnomic case I decided to have a look at a short easy touch for plain bob doubles. I am a sad, sick person. At least I could be resisting more. I think Vicky or Niall put something in my beer after making me Deputy Ringing Master.
We had another bad turn-out on Friday and spent most of the evening ringing stuff for beginners—although at the end there were just enough people for Niall to ask me to do my Grandsire-calling trick again. We had a beginner on the tenor, which as a result wandered rather, and the treble wandered a bit too . . . aaaugh. No, it’s okay, I got through, but having an AWOL bell going CRUNCH in your ear and then having the treble disappear . . . when you call depends on where the treble is. . . . I remind myself that the truly useful Deputy Ringing Master can soldier on through anything.
After practise Niall came up to me, eyes glinting. He’s never to be trusted anyway, but he’s worse when his eyes are glinting. He said, Titus told me to tell you that you’d be welcome to come ring handbells at his house on Saturdays. I’m going tomorrow. I could give you a ride.
I looked at Niall. That’s nice, I said. Please thank him for me. How far away is Titus?
Oh, said Niall airily. He’s on the way to Frellingham.
Define on the way, I said. Frellingham is most of an hour from here. What time do you ring?^
Oh . . . said Niall, attempting further airiness. Maybe . . . around ten.
TEN O’CLOCK? I said, thinking of the mornings I am barely out of bed at ten. So you leave around NINE? I have hellhounds I have to hurtle first.
But you could do Saturday morning at ten? said Niall, sensing an opening. I’ll see if I can get Titus and Tom to come here some time.
ARRRGH, I said, poised to flee down the ladder . . . but not quite. Hey, I said, you wouldn’t like to come (tower) ringing Monday to Colin’s practise, would you?^^
Niall looks at me. I look at him. Possibly, he says, still looking at me.
Some Saturday morning in my near future, I predict, is doomed.
^ You’re absolutely right. I shouldn’t even be asking.
^^ Grind only works when you get to grind. I want to grind at Grandsire Triples, which means there have to be eight bells, five other inside ringers and a treble and a tenor-behind, none of which—except the bells themselves—have prevailed recently at New Arcadia.
*** We had a fairly grim turnout for service ring today too. Niall offered me call changes to conduct but I decided this was dangerous on a Sunday morning. I need more practise calling call changes. Kill me. Please.
† COME ON, GUYS, YOU WEATHER GOD RATBAGS, LIGHTEN UP, WILL YOU?
†† Have I mentioned that the locks on both front doors now have an interesting charcoal-and-bronze streaked patina from being melted open with matches?
††† I want to know what’s gone wrong in the greenhouse though. The geraniums, nemesias, begonias and chocolate cosmos are all croaked. I’ve got a couple of snapdragons left—but snapdragons are perverse: I have at least one each still alive outdoors at the cottage and Third House which is frankly not possible—and two frothy little New Zealand clematis, but mostly the stuff that’s come through is the stuff that is relatively borderline anyway. Tipsy Imperial Concubine looks pretty happy . . . and I have a daylily that is getting ready to flower. It was sharing pot-space with a geranium, now defunct, but I’m afraid if I put it outdoors now the shock will make it cry. Although speaking of crying if my two year old wisteria is an ex-parrot I am going to blacken my face and rend my garments. It does not look at all sappy and burgeoning. Sigh. The flipping plant is supposed to be hardy, it’s the sudden last-minute May frosts that take out the flowers. At the old house, which had a killer wisteria, we had flowers about one year in three. Arrrgh.
Life was simpler in Maine, where I had gigantic sculptural boulders in the back garden, a fabulous sugar maple that went flame-red in autumn in the front garden, a stream that went past the porch, and huge overgrown lilac bushes everywhere.
The good news however is that the heeled-in roses from last autumn all look dormant as opposed to deceased. The soil at present is that delightful combination of squishy and still frozen, so I’m not planning on a huge lot of planting right away, but soon. . . .
Wet Thursday
Okay, we are not coming from the best place I’ve ever been in terms of morale and achievement. It took me FOUR HOURS to write two paragraphs of PEG II today. Mind you, they were pretty interesting paragraphs, once I got them nailed to the page so they couldn’t escape.* But it was not a happy four hours and this has cast a pall.
Also it’s been tipping down rain most of the day, to hellhounds’ and my lasting unjoy and antidelight. At least the garden(s) got watered; I have been noticing the last few days with something like shock that some things are beginning to try and grow, despite the fact that we’re still getting down below freezing about one night in three, and things that grow tend to need water. Yesterday I was staring at the plants in pots on my front steps at the cottage and muttering, I object to using watering-cans outdoors in February.** Feh.
Handbells this evening. Hellhounds and I arrived back at the cottage only moments before Niall; I’d been waiting for the rain to let up so we could walk. Ha. Eventually we walked anyway, so I was still in mid-towelling-off stage when Niall knocked on the door.
So, how did you enjoy handbells on Tuesday? said Niall.
Wet dog, I said briefly, still towelling.
You need to ring more bob major, said Niall.
I need dry socks, I said.
You did really well ringing the trebles, said Niall.
And the floor is a lake, I said.
The trebles are really hard, and your striking was very good***, said Niall.
I HAVEN’T GOT TIME TO RING HANDBELLS MORE THAN ONCE A WEEK, I said, hanging wet socks and dog towels over the Aga railing.
You should come again, said Niall, I know you’ll pick up major† really quickly.
Fortunately Colin arrived at this opportune moment.†† And we wasted some time talking about conducting. Grrrrraaaaaugggh. . . .
* * *
* The image that comes to me involves cats, cat carriers, and vets. In a relatively low-cat existence, I’ve nonetheless had some very exciting times in situations involving cats, cat carriers, and vets.
** Indoors, of course, I spend half my life carrying watering-cans around. There are afternoons when I’m running late^ when hellhounds and I walk back to the cottage, stay just long enough for me to water the plants^^ and then turn around and go back to the mews.
Nontraditional use of small heavy lamp. Originally I had the hippeastrum turned around the other way, so the lamp was merely propping it. But the second stem has been growing over-enthusiastically toward the light, so I figured I’d better turn it around. Which meant bondage.
I am going to be in so much trouble when the roots on these get going. 
Those of you with gardens and too many plants making a mess on your window sills will know the way that however many pots you have, of all sizes, shapes and materials, the one(s) you want will have moved to Montana when you weren’t looking. Unless you live in Montana, in which case they will have moved to Sri Lanka. This is what there was.
And these too.
Aren’t these pretty glasses? I love the swirl through the stem. 
But what the hell do you do with them? They’re for champagne, and I realise that if you give grand parties where there are lots of ladies in wasp-waisted dresses and crimson lipstick and gentlemen with slicked-back hair and dubious moustaches and the champagne flows like the rain in Hampshire flat glasses are probably elegant and fashionable. But those of us who nurse our one or two glasses of champagne over the courses of long evenings at our computers^^^, want flutes.# I float broken-off flowers and pruning accidents in these glasses occasionally, or pot pourri, which is to say handfuls of petals from my garden. ## But I HOPE we’re getting late enough in the season that when these flower-stalks start diving over the brims I can just prop them against the windows### without coming downstairs to hyacinthicles some morning after a cold night.
^ ie most afternoons
^^ tripping frequently over hellhounds, who have taken up locations in the middle of the floor the better to glare at me since they want me to come upstairs and sit down at my desk so they can lie in their favourite bed in my office.
^^^ SIGH
# Cheap flutes. So if we break one, we’re only crying over the champagne.
## They will dry out nicely if you remember to stir them with a finger every time you walk past
### And I wonder why my windows are so smudgy
*** Horsemucky, just by the way. My striking was not good. What was remarkable, however, was that while I was chiefly being dragged through by the other ringers, I did have some concept of the shape of the pattern and what was happening. This is bad. This means I want to do it again.
† Major is eight bells, remember. The point about Niall’s Tuesdays is that there are enough people—enough people who know what they’re doing^—that we can ring major. Colin, Niall and I on Thursdays can only ring minor because there’s only three of us, and so six bells.
^ Especially Fred. Fred is a Legend in His Own Time. Fred would be scary if he weren’t so nice.
†† My neighbours across the road often return from somewhere while our Thursday evening handbells are going on. I never draw the sitting-room curtains—only my across-the-road neighbours could see in anyway, their house is very well set back and the cottage’s ground floor is a long half-stair up from road level. If they can see us at all through the heavy windowsill foliage, they will see three heads bent forward in a kind of circle, nearly motionless and clearly intent. They might conceivably see the occasional flash of a raised bell. It amuses me to imagine what they might surmise we’re up to. . . .
Valentine’s Day
Peter met me at the bell tower door this morning with five yellow roses.* Not quite, perhaps, as in the picture that this statement is creating in your minds. Peter and five yellow roses met me at the tower door. The roses, unfortunately, were in Peter’s knapsack** and in the process of getting them out he busted the heads off two of them.
Sigh.
But we are resourceful. I bought two more yellow roses at the florist’s—and some tulips—and I now have seven yellow roses. 
Variously arranged.***
Sunday morning, meanwhile, has morphed into the time I spend pretending to have a conservatory, when in fact what I have is some very crowded windowsills at the cottage.
Never come between a hyacinth and its destiny. And its destiny is to tip over. 
I suppose I could try nailing them to the windowsill. But pulling the nails out will leave marks. And there are always more hyacinths.
And you will remember that I had cleverly propped the primrose one up on a pile of magazines? This happened in a day, hippeastrum stems grow so fast when they really get going.
So. More magazines.
I’m not making any of this up, you know.****
And this is the hippeastrum you keep seeing the stems of. It really is this amazing dark red colour. Which is also to say pretty well impossible to get a good photo of. 
. . . So, today, when I finally got down to the mews and turned the computer on, I rushed to my inbox to open (finally) an email Peter had sent me a few days ago and then (laconically) suggested that I might want to wait till Valentine’s Day to read it. I assumed, of course, it was from Peter. This is what it said:
Though shoulder-socket tearing
And licking each ensnaring
Foulness as we’re wayfaring
Provoke volcanic swearing,
We still get sofa-sharing.
Dear Goddess, thanks for caring
Your Dark Chaotic pairing
Send you their love unsparing.
Awwwwwwww. Yes, we had extra sofa time today. While Peter made dinner. . . .
* * *
* I assume because he feels there’s enough pink^ in my life still. (I did finally cut out the lily stamens when lily pollen was starting to turn hellhounds orange. I know this is cheating. It’s a small kitchen.) 
^ Want. Want. Must have. http://www.rhsplants.co.uk/product/_/ClassID.2000006935/
THIRTY FIVE FRELLING QUID FOR A WATERING CAN? Never mind. It’s pink. Hot-blasted rocket-proof enamelled pink from Hephaestus’ own forge. And my £2.99 plastic ones are finding this weather a trial and I’m not sure either of them holds water any more.
** It entirely escapes me why he put them in his knapsack. It’s like fifteen seconds from the church to the florist.
*** One of the charities I subscribe to is sponsor-a-seeing-eye-puppy. You get a free calendar for your efforts. 
You get a free calendar that arrives in the middle of February. ^
^ Much better organised is Dogs Trust where I sponsor (you will not be amazed to hear) a lurcher.+ You get a valentine from your dog. This year it’s a refrigerator magnet. Too frelling cute.
+ Everybody know what a lurcher is? It’s a common term over here but not so much, I think, in the States (dunno about the rest of the English speaking globe). Lurcher = sighthound x something that isn’t a sighthound. Purists insist the something has to be a working dog. Purists also insist that sighthound x sighthound crosses, like my hellhounds, are longdogs, but mostly all sighthound crosses end up being called lurchers.
****And just think, if I had a proper conservatory I could have lots and lots of plants being perverse. And foolish.
Pink etc
I told you I’d show you my floral extravaganza again after I messed with it a little.*
Pink.
And just in case you think I’ve put all the pink in front to make an impressive photo, this is what it looks like from the other side. 
Meanwhile . . . it’s snowing. It’s not snowing like it’s snowing in Virginia, for which I am deeply thankful, but it’s still snowing. I’ve decided I want a conservatory. Once I finish recovering** from putting the weight-bearing floor in Third House’s attic I’m going to knock down the sitting-room wall into the garden and start putting up quadruple-glazed glass walls and solar baseboard heaters. I might put French doors in the main bedroom and have a sort of full-length bay window on that side too. And then I can fill it/them with tea and china roses and sasanqua camellias and orchids and greenhouse carnations and hippeastrums and freesias and maddenii rhododendrons . . . and chocolate cosmos and begonias and osteospermums and geraniums year round, and I don’t know what all else because I don’t have a conservatory and therefore try to avoid knowing too much about what I can’t grow.
And have I told you about the sedum roof? Yes. I also want to slap a green roof on Third House, which, unlike the cottage, has a nice gentle slope so the poor sedums won’t have to hold on with their fingernails. I’m not looking forward to getting planning permission*** for this but maybe by the time I get to that point† planted-up roofs will be commonplace and the government will be giving us eco-promoting grants to do it. A girl can dream.
Meanwhile I need to be grinding on with PEG II so I can finish recovering from putting the backlist-bearing floor in and begin saving up for the conservatory. And then Marechal Niel†† and I will sit with our feet up in the warm at Third House and admire the snow drifts.†††
* * *
* The kitchen magnet, which on my screen at least you can’t quite read unless you already know what it says, declares: They lied. Hard work has killed lots of people. It could have been a lot worse, given my collection of kitchen magnets.^ I tend not to remember to check for stuff like what’s behind something when I take pictures indoors, and this can be a dreadful mistake.^^
^ One tiny benefit to losing the old house and living in a cottage so small that everyone but the occasional urban flat-dweller suffers extreme claustrophobia upon stepping over the threshold+ is that I have felt free to get out my old collection of crass and insolent kitchen magnets and indeed to augment it. In the old house I used to worry about the grandchildren. Who are mostly by now too old to be disturbed by kitchen magnets, but they’re still all so polite.
+ Books not only furnish a room, they crowd you right out of it. Sometimes several rooms. Sometimes all the rooms in the house.= I was very amused when Diane in MN posted in the forum about lining hallways with bookshelves, and how well this works . . . till you run out of hallways. Yes.
= Okay, the bathroom only has books on the windowsill. Well, almost only.
^^ Some of the biggest cobwebs in England live in my cottage. This is a combination of deplorable housekeeping and a slight soft spot for spiders. I don’t want them on me, you understand, but a nice small tactful English spider that stays quietly in its corner will probably be left alone to get on with it. However any spider showing artistic initiative such as manifestations of ‘radiant’, ‘terrific’, or ‘some hellhound’ in web-weaving is totally welcome forever, and if it would like teeny weeny beakers of champagne or slivers of chocolate these will be provided.
** You’re all buying multiple copies of PEGASUS, yes?
*** Both Third House and the cottage are in a Conservation Area which means you need planning permission to prune your rosebushes—careful, you and your secateurs are altering the amenity level of the neighbourhood—and gods help you if you want to change the colour of your house. Which in fact I do. But not this year. I can’t face the paperwork. And Third House has this whacking monster Leylandii which is so frelling tall the army helicopters trip on it when they buzz overhead and I looooong to have the ugly thing down—and my neighbours are longing right along with me—but the Tree Removal Form is forty thousand pages long and looking at it makes me lose the will to live.
† After everyone has bought multiple copies of PEG II.
†† http://www.classicroses.co.uk/roses/m/marechal_niel.html We had one at the old house and while she was in a relatively sheltered position I don’t think her essential hardiness was the problem so much as her habit of trying to produce her first flush of big fat buds early enough to catch the last frelling late frost of a bad year. And unlike, say, Agnes, who is another early one, if she gets frosted, she sulks. Agnes heaves a deep sigh and starts growing a fresh lot of buds. But then Agnes is a rugosa and rugosas are tough. You have to be firm with your rugosas. Undisciplined rugosas eat unwary small children and absent-minded gardeners and are probably John Wyndham’s original source for triffids. I love rugosas. Just by the way. I have Agnes at the cottage. She’s doing really well. It’s a good thing I don’t get many visitors. With her and Souvenir and the three Mmes and a few others I have perhaps not introduced you to yet, it’s dangerous out there.
††† There are of course other problems with indoor gardening. One of the reasons the floors don’t get hoovered very often at the cottage^ is because I’m busy moving all the plants off the windowsills to clean the encrusted plant sludge off the window glass and the painted surfaces. Did you know that dark red geranium petals will stain your white woodwork? Gaah. And I want an entire conservatory? Well. Yes. I am insane. This is not news.
And you know those pretty little hyacinth vases? You put your bulb in the top and just add water? How about the fact that once the flower spike grows your hyacinth will plunge top-heavily over the side?
Creative use of large pile of magazines.
Creative use of Kleenex box. This bulb was a freller to begin with since it insisted on growing leaves at both ends.
^ aside from melting vacuum cleaners
