Old roses and Graham Stuart Thomas
It’s been well over a month since Penelope and I went to Mottisfont Abbey. Just in case you’ve forgotten:
http://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/main/w-vh/w-visits/w-findaplace/w-mottisfont/
. . . I’ve been wasting time trying to find more photos of the roses at Mottisfont Abbey, for pity’s sake. It’s the National Collection of Old Roses, and abbeys and Rex Whistler and stable blocks and rivers and things are all very well but what about the roses? If I’m not careful I’m going to put Hang an Album of Photos of Mottisfont Roses on my to-do list, and like my to-do list needs more items.
But several people asked me at the time I posted about Mottisfont to say more about old roses. And I’m not good at being crisp and informative. (You may have noticed.) So here’s something that does a good job of the essential rundown:
http://www.davidaustinroses.com/english/Advanced.asp?PageId=1997
This is the more romantic version:
http://www.classicroses.co.uk/articles/rose_history/rose_history.html
These guys are a find, even if they’re still in 2007:
http://www.rkdn.org/roses/History.asp
http://www.rkdn.org/roses/oldroses.asp
And anyone here in the
http://www.historicroses.org/index.php?s=history
But there are a lot of good roses and old-roses sites out there. Mmmmmm. . . . Like chocolate, only without the calories. Or possibly like chocolate for your garden, in the bursting-at-the-seams sense.*
But I also wanted to say something about Graham Stuart Thomas, who is or anyway was sort of the mage of mages of old roses, the super-guru, the supreme maven. He more or less single-handedly kept both the roses themselves and the idea of growing old roses alive through the era when no one thought they were worth the garden space, and he also designed Mottisfont’s rose garden, filled it with the roses he’d personally saved from final destruction, and made it the old roses national collection, which by the time he finished it was a highly desirable thing, and not the expensive folly of a crank.
This is the best of the obits I can find on line.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2003/may/02/guardianobituaries2
And it does cover the ground. The ones in the Historic Roses Group and the Royal National Rose Society’s journals are much livelier and more personal . . . but I still don’t know what ‘fair use’ consists of, so I’ll decline to type either of them in.
I was/am myself a fan, and I have The Graham Stuart Thomas Rose Book which is the anthology of his three classic books on old roses, and I use it all the time.** (One of these days I’ll post an annotated list of Favourite Rose Books.) But while he is generally revered, there are abstainers:
http://www.gardenvisit.com/history_theory/books_reviews/graham_stuart_thomas
I don’t know this book. I’m not too interested in the memoirs behind practical hands-on stuff like gardening—and I wouldn’t have any patience with Lady Thing and Lord Doodad either—and yes Thomas was all about historical conservation and very little about radical change. Maybe I haven’t seen enough National Trust gardens, or maybe I’m just an easily smitten American***, but I like all those old fashioned gardens, and there are a lot of modern ones I find new for the sake of newness, and absurd or ugly (or both). And that he expected garden staff to call him ‘Mr Thomas’? Please. He recently died at 94. It’s his era.
This is more the tone I’m used to:
http://www.thegoodwebguide.co.uk/index.php?art_id=383
And note it’s a review of the same book.
But I think Thomas himself should have the last word. Here’s what he says about my darling Mme Isaac Pereire:
‘Possibly the most powerfully fragrant of all roses; the flowers are enormous, of intense rose-madder, shaded magenta, bulging with rolled petals, quartered, and opening to a great saucer-face. Big, bold foliage on a fine big bush up to
Tomorrow I’ll post some rose photos. Unless I get distracted, of course.
* * *
* Which would make it/them a bad case of cholera for the wallet.
** It is also an extremely pretty book, and very pleasing to hold and read. Badly designed gardening books are positively painful, like nettle rash, and a badly designed rose book is a felony.
*** About traditional English country gardens? Guilty with knobs on.
Going to bed early
I am going to bed early. Which is going to be a good trick, because it’s already late. It’s always late on a Friday (so to speak) because of bell practise. It’s August* and everyone’s on holiday, so practises are rather hit or miss lately, although I’m worrying that this area seems to be having a downturn in ringing numbers generally. They cancelled last week’s Wednesday practise, and that tower never cancels. And slow tool that I am I need my second practise a week. As well as my once-a-month third: and last Monday Niall and I were stiffed for the second month in a row** by that ringing master–or anyone else with a key to the bell tower–and I won’t be going back next month. Niall was happy, however, he got one of the other two would-be ringers in a head lock and dragged her home to ring handbells with him and me. Local handbell ringing is in even worse shape than local tower ringing.
I’ve recently realised that I’ve crossed one of those invisible boundaries. I am pretty much still in the category of Any Time on a Rope Is Good Time in terms of practise, and even the stuff I theoretically know still needs shoring up, but the stuff I’m really trying to learn now requires skilled support from the rest of the band. I can spend weeks, sometimes, never getting out of my comfort zone, because the available band, which is to say the people who showed up to ring, isn’t up to it–except that there is no comfort zone in ringing, you can always have a mental spasm and go wrong. And I frequently do.
Tonight we were only seven–which means ringing on six bells–and five of us, which is to say them, were some of our good ringers. When you’re the only wavery one the others can kind of straitjacket you in place. First we rang bob minor, which is one of the methods I should know, but I’m kind of out of practise–which is the other drawback to learning new methods; the fools and hopeless optimists around you expect you to remember what you’ve already learnt–so I was glad of the opportunity. Now the terrible, mind-rending, 3 am and sweating thing about bob minor is the Dreaded Three-Four Down Single, when you’re quietly coming down toward lead with a little, harmless three-four down dodge on the way, and the Evil Conductor calls a single. Calls make a mess, it’s what they’re for. So if you’re about to do a three-four down dodge in bob minor and Evil Conductor calls a single, you hang around in thirds place for two blows and then turn around and go up again. Trust me, this is horribly confusing, including the physical confusion of making a u-turn and going back the way you came. You ring a little differently going up (slower, because there’s one more bell coming between you and the front at each blow) and coming down (faster, because there’s one fewer bell, etc, as you all weave your way through the pattern), and while good ringers place their bell perfectly every stroke, for those of us who are not so good, momentum is also an issue with several hundred pounds of bell. And I had four three-four down singles in a row. I was preparing to stand my bell, leap across the room, and strangle Niall–who was conducting–when he called a fifth.*** Yes, all right, it was great practise. And I did get through all of them.
And then near the end Niall–who is ringing master in Edward’s absence–called for Grandsire. I dove–hopefully–for a rope, because Grandsire is slightly my bête noire–the method I’ve never really had the opportunity to learn properly but ought to know by now, by osmosis or something. The terrible horrible no good really bad call in Grandsire is a single when you’re making seconds, because then you have to make long thirds–four blows in thirds place–which come at you from a funny angle and then sort of duck and dive at you while you’re trying to balance in thirds place and it’s surprisingly hard to count to four. Which is one of the reasons double dodging (which you also do in Grandsire) is so gruesome–you can just about remember under, over, under (as you swap places and then back again with the bell you’re dodging with). . . but do you do it again or have you already done it again? It’s not like you have time to think, when you have two-thirds of a second to pull on your rope so your bell goes dong in the right place. There is only one right place and there are so many wrong ones . . . Anyway, this was a long touch with lots of calls and I galloped through any number of long thirds and came out the other end in the right place–good heavens, what am I doing here? At the end Roger, who had been conducting, complimented me. I don’t think he meant to sound surprised. . . .
But, speaking of bells and galloping, I have to go to bed early because I have a horse to ride tomorrow morning, followed by a wedding to ring at my Wednesday tower–because they’re so short handed they haven’t got enough locals–in the very early afternoon–having hurtled hellhounds first thing so they’ll let me. Usually after a walk they’ll crash out, but Chaos has taken to standing by the door gazing at me mournfully as I suit up to do something that does not involve hellhounds. Aaaugh. I’m already staying home for the next fifteen years on account of their undomesticated digestion, this dog cannot be making me feel guilty.
* * *
* Although you’d never know by the weather. It’s been RAINING AGAIN^ and while today has been a really beautiful day it’s been a really beautiful autumn day and everybody is putting their duvets back on their beds, except those of us who never took them off. I like to complain as much as the next person, and I feel pretty silly wearing wool in August, but if you’re asking me I’ll take chilly summers to hot ones any year. The hellhounds agree.
^ This is one of those towns that has a municipal hanging-basket system, where anyone who lives or has a shop front anywhere on the two main streets can hire a pre-planted hanging basket. You’re expected to do the deadheading, but The Man comes round with a tanker, and waters them. The tanker is this extraordinary little vehicle, about the size of half a Smart Car+ whose engine not only trundles it along but also pumps the water up through the hosepipe and thus into the short access pipe buried in every overhead basket. I love the nuts and bolts of things. Hanging flower baskets on Main Street are a great idea, very Town Pride . . . unless people forget to water them++ in which case they’re a very bad idea and will repel all those money-spending tourists every town wants.+++ Hence the motorised Gunga Din: he’d need shoulders like an Olympic shot putter if he didn’t have a pump, let alone an engine. You see him out there in all weathers, including torrential downpours. Um. I figured, okay, you’ve paid for your hanging basket and you’ve paid for it to get watered, so by golly it gets watered. But he says it’s not as silly as it looks: rain runs right off because the baskets are so densely planted.++++ Oh. They really are densely planted too. It’s perhaps slightly a pity however that they are densely planted in job lots of whatever was cheapest at the Hanging Basket Store. This year’s would have just about got away with the all available shades of pink, purple and blue colour scheme . . . till the scarlet geraniums on top started flowering. Ow, my eyes.
+ Not sure what they call them in the States. Those little half-length things that you can pull frontwards (or backwards) into a parallel-parking situation and have room for another one of you in the other half
++ Or go away on holiday and their neighbour forgets to water them
+++ Barring the odd curmudgeon living up a side street
++++ Well hurrah for carelessly home-planted hanging baskets that do get watered by rainfall.
** And a month ago it wasn’t even August
*** Note that the way methods fit together, every time a call is made, all the bits of work in that method have to be made by some bell. Some methods you can cushion a beginner a little more than others–my first quarter (peal) of bob minor, for example, Edward called around me so I never had to ring a Dreaded Three-Four Down Single. There are also various practise patterns where the poor suffering learner is made to ring The Thing She Fears Most over and over and over again. But in the ordinary free-for-all of a touch no one bell should be expected to ring the same beastly bit of work over and over and OVER again. But these things happen. Conducting is a total mystery to me^ but I have these visions (especially at 3 am) of bell geeks bending over bits of graph paper and cackling madly at the prospect of calling their next touch of Splendiferous Dork Major.
^ And I plan for it to remain that way
Alas . . .
. . . still no Connie photos. It was sheeting this morning* so Jenny took her to the indoor school, which is not a lovely object, as anyone who has any experience of indoor schools for horses will know. Even fabulously upmarket indoor schools, which this is not, tend to be pretty depressing, although that may be the mirrors lining the walls so you cannot escape the awful truth about your riding or the fact that your horse really does have five legs, deny it as you will.*** I want Hampshire countryside for the background of my Connie photos, at least my first ones, and furthermore, an indoor school is indoors which means your flash is going to go off, which is not going to be popular with either horse or rider.† Connie went a dream†† but her dreaminess was especially spectacular on the heels of the horse Jenny had ridden before her.
Jenny has a new project: the night before Horse-for-sale, now Sold-horse, was to leave, she had a phone call from an angry young woman whose new horse was not receiving the training she was paying for at his present location and could Jenny take him? Jenny could. He’s a moderately successful off-the-track thoroughbred who hasn’t a clue about being a riding horse, and his new owner wants him able to do a bit of everything: so far so normal. The peculiarity in this case is that he’s ten years old. He’s been standing around in a field for the last five or six years. Which is bizarre, because nice-looking, nicely-built sound thoroughbreds are usually pretty desirable. But there’s nothing obviously wrong with this one–except his cluelessness.
And I mean cluelessness. I got there early so I could watch him too. He can just about lunge, although Jenny said he’d been all over the landscape yesterday when she tried him out the first time, not vicious or dangerous, just yipe what’s going on here??? You want me to do what? He’s suffering a major shock to the system and at present he’s not in favour of the change: you can also see worry written all over him. He did at least lunge in the direction she asked for today, but he can only barely trot on a lunging circle, he’s so unbalanced: he takes these tiny quick pony strides like he’s trying to keep all four legs under him at all times. Since he’d calmed down a lot (she said) she got on him . . . and spent an hour patiently–and from his perspective, relentlessly–trying to convince him that going forward from the leg into the hand was okay, was a good thing to do. He remains unconvinced. Jenny says there’s nothing in front of you; that he will accept no contact at all: that he will only move forward at all if you ‘leave the door wide open’. And you could see this happening. She’s going to tell his owner that he must at least have his teeth done, and a chiropractor would be a good idea. He’s not lame or tender anywhere but he moves so funny it’s hard not to think there’s something wrong. But then I’m not used to looking at ten-year-old horses who can barely trot in a circle. I was trying to remember what two- and three- and four-year-olds look like when you’re first asking them to do stuff: wobbly. Fortunately Jenny likes a challenge.
So after this poor confused critter was allowed to stagger off to a nice friendly field for the rest of the day and try to figure out what’s hit him, Jenny brought Connie in, who looked like queen of the world in comparison. Of course I have a huge crush on her not only just because I’m riding again but she is, as I’ve said before, so much better than what I’m used to. I’m used to the difficult horses, and her only drawback, as I’ve also told you, is that she needs some stiffish holding together, but with tower bells and hellhounds in my life this doesn’t really register. With Jenny on her she goes ka-chunk onto the bit and just stays there; and once she’s woken up a little she has lovely strong gaits–her trot positively floats, her legs cross beautifully at the half-pass and she does ten-metre canter circles like it’s absolutely no deal. She’s just longing to do canter pirouettes, I can tell.
And tomorrow I get to ride her.††† Beam.
The only problem is that two hours after that I’ll be in the dentist’s chair for two and a half hours. This is, cough cough, only the next step in the £1,000,000 of reconstruction work I’m due to have done; the reason this is such a blitz is that he wants to do two next-door teeth at the same time, which he says will take less time than doing them separately and be cheaper. These are strong arguments. But two and a half hours in the dentist’s chair? Whimper. Whimper. I’ve already put it off twice, once because the original appointment was the week Hannah was here with her lot, and the second time because the ME was acting up again. Well the ME is acting up again now, so I may be toast, or worse‡, tomorrow evening. All positive thoughts sent in this direction gratefully received: and at least I’ll have had my riding lesson.
* * *
* Again. Okay, okay, you’ve watered my garden, thank you very much, will you please go AWAY? The bottoms of local hills are turning into fords. Why can’t the weather catch on that we want a nice drenching rain sort of every other night–every third night if it’s not too equatorial during the day, although I’ll probably have to water a few of my thirstier pots^–and then hellhound-walking, gardening, horse-riding weather during the days? This doesn’t seem to me all that difficult a concept. Cue those Camelot lyrics:
http://www.stlyrics.com/lyrics/camelot/camelot.htm
^ I may end up planting my so-called patio lilac up at Third House because the fricking thing needs to be watered about three times a day. It’s not even what I would call a proper lilac; it’s a syringa+ all right but it’s one of those airy arty horticulturally correct ones. I want the big thumping suburban flower spike kind, with the fragrance that will knock you down at ten paces. Third House already has two of these++ so the airy arty one might do well there because I won’t be busy being cross it’s the wrong kind. That still leaves me lilacless at the cottage. As readers of the dedication of ROSE DAUGHTER will have surmised, my little Maine cottage was walled and moated by lilac bushes, and during that admittedly brief few weeks in spring when they’re doing their stuff I could leave my windows open +++ and wake up in the morning in a Bower of Lilac. I had to plant lilacs at the old house here. Peter had two and a half acres and no room for lilacs? His flapdoodling beauty bush#, which I admit was a stunner, was enormous, only in flower three weeks of the year too, and it didn’t even smell.
+ Word just helpfully respelled this syringe. Thank you guys!
++ It used to have three, but the white one met with a clearing-neglected-garden accident. That still leaves me with a very smelly lilac lilac and a very smelly purple one. Although they both need pruning so you don’t need a stepladder to stick your nose in the flowers, possibly to the consternation of visiting bees.
+++ You have, or you better have, screens on your windows in Maine. You’d better have screens anyway, but lilac season also tends to overlap with black-fly season.
# http://www.findmeplants.co.uk/plant-kolwitzia-amabilis-0625.aspx
*** It’s that Sleipnir blood. People will keep using it in their breeding programmes, but it’s very risky.
† If there’s a way to make your digital camera think it is using 400 speed film, I don’t know it. If I’d thought of it I could have brought my old fashioned camera with some 400 film in it. Although that still wouldn’t have done me any good tonight.
†† Pardon me while I repeat myself: How did I get this lucky?
††† Probably not canter pirouettes however. That’s a joke.
‡ Worse than toast? What is worse than toast? I feel that fish food is worse than toast, mouldy hay is worse than toast, a quart of cranberry juice left in the boot of the car for a week is worse than toast . . . oops.
Life Enhancing Activities
I need fewer.
And don’t anyone say to me, for example, fencing*, knitting**, drawing*** or studying French†, all of which I’ve done and then let slip through my buttery fingers.
But I don’t want to give anything up! No, no, no, that is not the answer!
Maybe I should start keeping a list. Okay, today I . . . shot out of bed at 8 to hustle hellhounds out for their morning walk before I met Vicky on the top of the bell tower, her to take St George’s flag down†† and me to take advantage of her going up on the roof to take photos. Yes! Photos! Stay tuned! Then I ran home again to change into britches and hare off to my riding lesson, a day early this week because Jenny is playing a tennis tournament tomorrow. The riding lesson itself is only half an hour††† and Jenny’s yard is about five minutes away. Tell me why Connie always takes at least an hour and a half?‡
I had maybe two hours at my desk, one doing boring stuff and one doing homeopathy, and then I came down to the mews for lunch, bringing the paperback proofs of DRAGONHAVEN with me . . . and promptly spent an hour trying to figure out the best fingering for Song II . . . and I’m not even finished! I’m also still dubbing around with the introduction! Oisin, drat him, suggested that the ‘drumming’ chords would be better two-note rather than three-note, but that gives an entirely different rhythm (duh) and I keep changing my mind about how to fit it back into the rest.
Then I read far too few pages of proofs.
Then I went up to Third House, where, yaaaaaaay!, either Garden Man had finally been there or the elves had, and the great swathe of the long border‡‡ that was a malevolent jungle of ground elder and bindweed is all magically clear and beautiful.‡‡‡ So I whomped in three delphiniums which were exceedingly unhappy in their pots, despite the fact I had potted them on not that many weeks ago, waiting for Garden Man to get to me and Third House on his list.
At which point I had spent more than enough time in the healthy invigorating outdoors§ and I could barely totter after hellhounds for their final walk, although they, having spent my delphinium-planting time playing Tyrannosaurus Rex vs Godzilla, were uncharacteristically willing to totter with me.
Then I went back to the cottage and watered a lot of pots.§§
Then I came back down to the mews for supper, and I seem to be blogging. Now I am going to read proofs.
Although I bet you I go play the piano some more. . . .
* * *
* There’s a sign I drive by at least once a week that says Southern Fencing. I’ve lived in this area for eighteen years and I still, fractionally, startle, every time I see it, while my mind leaps delightedly to the wrong conclusion. Thank the gods it’s the wrong conclusion. See: I need fewer.
** I so get the yarn thing. I so get the yarn thing I don’t dare read, for example, http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/
http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2004/06/02/feet_treat.html
http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2007/08/01/kauni_questions.html (Note: eeeeek.)
http://www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/archives/2007/06/23/practically_a_cedar_closet.html
because there are all these photos and she writes so well and it’s about knitting. When I was first musing (if you call banging your head against a wall and screaming ‘musing’) on the possibility of starting a blog a knitting friend recommended yarnharlot as a really good example of what can be done with a blog, and it is. It’s just . . . knitting. If I had a second pair of hands I could knit while I blogged, but . . . hmm . . . Ah ha! The Moment for Voice Recognition Software! –Snork!
And even our own jmeadows is dangerous:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/69585952@N00/1436364422/in/set-72157603342951724/
(I have a pink thing)
http://jodimeadows.com/yarn_wordpress/
She has a yarn blog for pity’s sake. How . . . uh . . . committed is that.
Scroll down and look at her spindle. Oh gods! It’s not just knitting! You have to spin too! Now I want a spindle! It’s so pretty! I just barely learnt to use a drop spindle when I was writing SPINDLE’S END, to find out what you did with your hands, how it felt. What I thought I was going to use this for fell out of the finished book of course–almost all my so-called research always does, book after book, like all the bee reading I did for CHALICE. It’s all gone. Feh.
And speaking of thready handwork, I also used to embroider. I believe my first project may have been ‘Burt Lancaster’ in purple satin stitch on a pillow case. (I think I only did one. Memory, perhaps mercifully, fails to record what I did with its pair.) I was, uh, thirteen maybe? Everybody else I knew was mad for the Beatles. Ah well. But I have lately somehow managed to get on the mailing list of these people:
http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/
http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/detail.cfm?ID=933
Want! Want want want want want want!
http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/detail.cfm?ID=451
http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/detail.cfm?ID=156
These are even on sale!
(Oh . . . ratbags. I’ve just been trying these links, and they’re a little hinky. Once you’ve chosen your monetary unit you should be able to click through. Or the home page opens okay, if you’re interested, and the other three, if they don’t open for you directly, are Rosa Gallica, Illuminated Manuscript, and Renaissance Heart.)
*** I always thought it would be drawing I got back to, not music! I can’t sing, I can’t play the piano, and until about six months ago I was in happy ignorance of the fact that I would love composing, if I ever tried it! Also, drawing is quiet! I don’t have to worry about annoying the neighbours! And I can draw a little! Well, maybe sort of!
† I took years of French in school. Years and years. I started in junior high, laboured with it through high school, and took it as my foreign language distribution requirement in college. And I still cannot write, speak, or read it, although I can read it a little. I am embarrassed to be one of those ugly, up my own wazoo Americans who can only speak English because English is the only language anyone needs to bother with, and I also hate waste: all those classroom hours! All that hideous homework! I had to write papers in French! Once when Peter and I were in Paris, quite a few years ago, I bought four or half a dozen children’s books that I knew really really well–THE BLACK STALLION and A LITTLE PRINCESS among them–and settled grimly down back home with my French dictionary, to read them, which still seems to me a rather sensible way to go about it. . . . Um. I think I made them Go Away when we moved out of the old house. They may be lurking horribly in the attic of Third House, waiting to pounce. One of the ways I managed to bond with Jake, writing DRAGONHAVEN, is that neither of us is good at languages.
†† There’s a whole complex church calendar of when you fly whatever, mostly St George
††† A very intense half hour
‡ Have I told you that someone wants to buy Horse-for-sale? His vetting was last week. No it wasn’t. He came in from the field lame, and Jenny scowled at his feet and decided that one of his shoes had slipped. Ah, thoroughbred feet. So delightful. Show me a thoroughbred with good, big, sound, regular feet, and I’ll show you a crossbred. So the farrier came, Jenny put off the vetting, he has been perfectly square and sound the last several days, the buyer rang up and said the vetting was rescheduled for Thursday, and he promptly came in from the field a little ‘ouchy’ again. And there’s no nonsense about Jenny: if he fails he fails, and if he passes and then goes lame a fortnight later, she’ll take him back. I think she’s about to have a nice school horse. Heh heh heh heh heh. Because he’ll stay absolutely sound the minute he knows he’s not for sale.
‡‡ I have a Long Border too, just like the Royal Horticultural Society’s flagship garden, or Sissinghurst, or Great Dixter, or Famous Garden of Choice. Long is relative.
‡‡‡ Although it will be again, because you can’t get rid of either merely by digging. You can beat them back a little is all. And the situation is complicated by the fact that they’re both coming through in vast Gordian knots under the fence from next door’s garden. I took another bucketful of evil twisty roots out just in the process of digging three holes. The bindweed roots are especially evil: up near the surface they’re little wee things and break easily. A few inches down they turn into hawsers. And the hawsers will go on sending up bindweed till the sun goes nova.
§ How do farmers stand all that fresh air?
§§ It’s finally supposed to rain tomorrow night. We live in hope.
Yerk*
. . . Connie is, of course, my latest excuse for running late, at least on Tuesdays and Saturdays. And a very good excuse she is too.** Yerk. I usually eat dinner at 9:30 on bell ringing nights but the rest of the week I try . . . I used to try . . . for dinner at a slightly more civilised . . . or anyway a slightly more social . . . hour. But then given the rest of my uncivilised and unsocial hours, not to mention my personality, I think perhaps I should view a 9:30 supper as merely bringing my final meal of the day into sync with the rest of my whacked-out schedule [sic].
So after Connie I whirled home and zapped through my email*** but then incredibly it was already 3 o’clock so hellhounds and I came pelting down to the mews for lunch† and while I had dutifully brought my proofs with me, somehow I was irresistibly drawn to the piano. I’ve chosen my folk song for mangling, I mean McKinleyfying. Gypsy Rover. Hee hee hee hee hee. Woodie Guthrie or someone is spinning in his grave. I roughed it out yesterday but of course none of it is right so I’ve begun the grisly bar by bar process of rewrite: where every time you happen on a few notes in a row that you like, they don’t fit with anything else, including the last few notes in a row that you liked.
After about an hour of this my brain heads for the high country, shouting, I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!†† So at that point the hellhounds and I charged back to the cottage and I snatched up my secateurs and rushed outdoors to deadhead urgently . . . Sunday’s friend was pie-eyed from jet lag and has no garden of her own; tomorrow’s friend is a gardener. Furthermore I lost yesterday to hay fever ††† and this time of year you really have to get out there with a whip and chair on a daily basis . . . or you do the way I garden. And then I had to spend MOST of my gardening time effing watering.
And now I really really must read proofs. Must. Read. Proofs. Maybe just five minutes to see if any of the few-notes-in-a-row have gelled–or can be persuaded to have gelled–with each other, now that my brain has had a break. . . .
* * *
* Yerk: a kind of baritone eeek.
** We did half pass^ today!! I’ve never done half pass . . . well, not what you could call successfully anyway. There’s way too much to remember to do at the same time–all your various limbs and appendages are each doing something else, individually, and while they probably could, it’s the old brain that breaks down on the management function. ^^ This is obviously something Connie is good at . . . but I don’t suppose we’d be getting many ‘8’s if there was a judge looking at us either.^^^ However I regained my honour as a dweeb by totally ruining our flying changes.+ Sigh. This is the mare, you may remember, who changes leg if you so much as look in the other direction, and here I couldn’t get it when I asked. Eventually Jenny figured out that I was asking wrong: dressage style is with the horse straight–hence being able to ask for a flying change every stride if you like/dare–while the show-jumper style is with the horse very slightly bent in the direction you’re asking for the lead change toward: a show-jumper flying change is practical, it’s about being on the right leg and in the right balance for the next freaking great fence you meet. Oh, gods, I moaned, I’m confusing her. No, no, said Jenny kindly, it’s something to work on. The Positive Teacher Approach.
Someone came to look at Horse-for-sale for the second time today. Sigh. I tell myself that if Jenny sells him she’ll get someone else in who’ll be just as interesting. Which is also to say that my taste in horses is very like hers.
^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-pass There’s a video link at the bottom of the page, and if you go there you’ll be spoilt for choice.
^^ No, wait, does my elbow go in my ear, or–?
^^^ Points out of ten for each movement. If I ever came out of a dressage test with an average of 8, I’d die of delirious joy.
+ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_change I can’t get the video link to work, but there’s always: http://www.horseandhound.co.uk/competitionnews/388/258991.html Long term readers of this blog will remember that I went entirely nuts for Blue Hors Matine or however you spell her. At nearly the beginning of this test you see her from the front, apparently skipping down the middle of the long side: that’s flying changes every stride. Most of us are happy to ask for one change down the long side of a dressage ring. She also does some very nifty half pass a little farther on. But it’s her passage–that high-stepping, dancing trot–that makes me cry. If I have a Riding Goal, it’s to ride a good passage, some time before I’m so old and creaky I need a crane to get in a saddle. I wonder if Connie would like to learn passage . . .
*** Checking carefully that there wasn’t a third set of galleys/proofs about to arrive
† The hellhounds never mind late meals. I wish they minded a little more.
†† Or possibly: Yet, freedom, yet thy banner, torn but flying, Streams like the thundercloud against the wind
††† Yes, better today, thank you. I assume the acute outrage of the pollen-cloud field is wearing off, but I also finally found a homeopathic remedy that made a dent. Both the upside and the downside of homeopathy is the individuality business: you don’t just have a homeopathy remedy for hay fever, you have to find the particular remedy that suits you and your hay fever–which may not be the same as last week or last year. When you’re sneezing your brains out through your ears, it’s very difficult to concentrate on the selection process, and I started at the wrong end of the list.