We rang a quarter peal tonight. 

            Huh?  Yes, my reaction exactly.

            Handbells are in some slight disarray at present, chiefly on account of Gemma being so inconvenient as to change surgeries/clinics and therefore change her Thursday evening schedule.   At the moment Niall and I are double-booked for Thursdays with Colin and Fridays with Gemma, and I have said, in a squeaky, high-pitched voice that I can’t do two handbell evenings a week*, but people’s lives keep getting in the way** so what is getting rung (or wrung) from week to week mostly isn’t two evenings on handbells anyway. 

            Today has been somewhat overshadowed by yesterday’s extreme excitements and I got moving [sic] late even for me.  I had also promised to take Peter to the garden centre this afternoon, this afternoon being the only time even remotely available for the foreseeable future, and if I didn’t do it quickly, this being the time of year when you really don’t want holes in your borders, and anything you plant will, if you’re lucky, riot and burgeon***, Peter might do something drastic like buy a garden gnome at the farmer’s market.†

            I’m broke and my garden is already full of Little Things Waiting to Be Potted On (Again)†† and the only thing I wanted was pink snapdragons†††  so I’d brought the hellhounds because while Peter was cruising I took them for a hurtle.  The only problem with this diversion tactic is that the footpath possibilities around this particular garden centre are unusually excellent, so the temptation is to come back for a nice hellhound hurtle and while I’m in the area . . . ‡

            So we zapped home again and I’d repotted the horrifyingly rootbound viola, which will probably reel and stagger a little and then come on again famously, when Colin showed up early.  Niall usually is early.  So we sat down and Niall started unveiling handbells and said, What do you want to ring?  And I said, well, due to circumstances more or less beyond my control I have No Brain so it had better be undemanding. 

            I know! said Colin brightly.  We should ring a quarter (of bob minor)!  Just to prove we can!  Since it’s just the three of us again!

            What?

            I think I agreed‡‡‡ because it was going to be less awful than trying to struggle through plain courses of frelling Cambridge, which, now that Thursdays are the three of us again, is going to make my life a misery. 

            And it was less awful.  It was even (whisper it) kind of fun.

 * * *

* Which doesn’t take into account the occasional evening at Curlyewe.  Curlyewe tower practise is Monday, so Niall has begun tentatively trying to get over there one Monday a month, they ring handbells before tower practise, and then he stays on—and Curlyewe, like pretty much everywhere else in this area, is hurting for ringers, so they’re glad to have a visitor, especially a good ringer like Niall.  I’d quite like to ‘grab’ Curlyewe^ and supposing there’s nothing particularly strange about the tower or its bells I’m a good-enough mediocre ringer I can probably contribute something to the practise.  Probably.

            Except for the little fact that Monday is my voice lesson, and Curlyewe is well on the wrong side of Mauncester.  Niall leaves New Arcadia at six . . . and I usually get home five or ten past. Niall suggested helpfully that I could just come straight on from my voice lesson, which would probably make up the time . . . uh huh.  It’s twice as far as any of Colin’s towers, there’s handbells as well as tower bells and no break anywhere. . . and I’m shattered on a Monday that I have to drive myself to Colin’s practise and I’ve had a cup of tea and a sit-down between voice lesson and bell practise.  I don’t think so.

            And so, because I am deranged and Niall is my bad angel, I’m going to try to blast back from voice lesson on Monday, pick up an apple and a cup of tea with a lid on it^^, and be flattened into the passenger seat of Niall’s car^^^ as he stamps on the ‘go’ pedal a few minutes later than usual.  

^ Grabbing a tower is going somewhere to ring where you’ve never rung before, specifically to say that you have.  Quite a few good ringers do this in a low-key way because they’re good ringers and like to travel around ringing in different towers and that’s fine.  Obsessive tower grabbing is kind of frowned on, but ringing somewhere you haven’t rung before because the opportunity arises is normal, in so far as bell ringing and bell ringers can ever be considered normal. 

^^ Whoever suggested knitting a slightly oversized egg cozy for a tea mug cozy—thank you.  I’m going to try that.  Supposing I can figure out how.  And whoever said that the steam from the cup is going to soggify the cosy past usefulness, well, I won’t know till I’ve tried it.  I drink my cups of tea pretty fast+ but not quite fast enough, and I like it hot.  Maybe I should knit several, and then I can string up a little tiny washing-line where I peg them out to dry . . . . 

+ If I drank them SLOWER I would drink FEWER. 

^^^ which is only a few years younger than Wolfgang, and has more miles on it 

** Although, life . . . in Niall’s case this probably means that he’s had an offer to ring a handbell full peal of Snarkalepsy Draggleharrow and is cutting us. 

*** Did I tell you WE HAD ANOTHER (*&^%$£”!!!!!!!!!! FROST A FEW NIGHTS AGO?  THE MIDDLE OF UNGLEDAGBLAGUNDERING MAY IN THE SOUTH OF ENGLAND AND WE HAD A FROST?  I’m assuming it was not severe and the stuff still underground is fine.  That’s FINE. 

† Which attracts some pretty disturbing riffraff.  I haven’t seen any garden gnomes yet but then I’m usually hellhounded, and we don’t linger. 

            I could always knit the gnome something . . . inappropriate.  Although ‘wire’ and ‘garrotte’ are the words that come first to mind, which, in relation to garden gnomes, are highly appropriate. 

            . . . Although I’ve always kind of wanted a flamingo . . . 

†† And at least one juvvie robin.  Yaaaay.  Bumptious little so and so.  There may be more than one, but so far I’m only seeing one at a time, and he’s so breathtakingly foolhardy—as far as he’s concerned, I’m the Mealworm Lady, and there are no ifs, ands or buts—I’m assuming the one I’m seeing is the same one, although I’m still hoping there may be a slightly more sensible, reserved one or two still lurking in the shrubbery.  But he, and siblings if any, are clearly flying.

            I’ve also clearly got two adults . . . where are you nesting this time?  I’m not going to supply mealworms to ungrateful robins that go nest in other people’s gardens.  Mum’ll be disappearing any minute now, I assume, to sit on the new eggs.  Whiiiiiine.  

  ††† I did very well.  I somehow picked up a variegated-leaf so-called hardy fuchsia, which they never are with me, but if I keep ’em warm they usually do very well, and a fabulous rusty-orange osteospermum AND THEY HAD PINK SNAPDRAGONS YAAAAAAY^ so I dumped these three modest acquisitions in Peter’s cart and ran out the door. 

^ I’d bought yellow and white elsewhere, but they were all out of pink which will not do.  

‡ We got back to find Peter unloading his cart into the boot and I picked up the gorgeous black-leaved cimicifuga and said oh gods, I almost bought this, I love black leaves, and Peter said, helpfully, I can go back and get you one, I remember exactly where they are.  Oh . . . all right, I said, folding instantly, and then, while he was off finding me a black cimicifuga, I was finishing unloading his cart and oh gods, they have dierama, I adore dierama, they just frelling keep dying on me . . . and I COULDN’T STAND IT so I locked the car (with hellhounds and my knapsack in it, and all the rubbish from the boot on the roof waiting to be restowed) and raced off to find Peter and the cimicifuga to ask where he found the dierama^, and then on the way back from the dierama I fell over a table of (horribly rootbound, just by the way) violas and HAD TO HAVE ALL OF THEM (I also adore pansies and that entire family) but pulled myself together and only bought one . . .

            So, having gone for one plant^^, I came home with six.  Which is really VERY GOOD. 

^ WORD YOU RATBAG WILL YOU FRELLING STOP AUTOCORRECTING DIERAMA TO DIORAMA?  IF I MEANT DIORAMA I WOULD HAVE WRITTEN DIORAMA 

^^ Well, one tray of plants.  Snapdragons are plebeian annual bedding plants.  You buy them in trays.  Six snapdragons counts as ONE PLANT.  Yes it does.   

‡‡ And I was fine with Ascension Day as soon as I was sure it was about Jesus and not the queen.

IS NOT OVER.  You will be glad to hear.  Well.  You are probably blinking slightly, having not realised there might be a question that it was over.  Let me repeat:  last Wednesday’s practise was really, really, really bad.  Bad bad.  Bad to the bone.  B-b-b-b-bad.  I’d been planning to go to the pub after and . . . I told you I ran out of there.  I ran out of there because I couldn’t face the rest of them.  Granted I’m a trifle thin skinned about things.  Still.  It was bad.  And I really did come home and wail and moan and wring my hands and consider spending more time on origami.*  Gemma was a little late to handbells on Friday, so I had time to do a Sarah Siddons** at poor Niall, who was feeling a bit low himself for having been (according to him, although I’m not sure I believe him) instrumental in losing a (tower) quarter (peal) the previous Sunday.  We had got to the point where we were about to swear off tower bells forever and cleave exclusively to handbells, and in another few minutes we’d probably have nicked our fingers and made a blood pact, but fortunately Gemma showed up.  She was quite startled at my Lady Macbeth imitation.***  She must be a fabulous family doctor†:  she does that calm, patient, rational-as-if-you’re-rational-too-and-just-had-a-bad-minute-there thing superbly.  She very nearly cheered me up.  And she did at least convince me that my ignominy Wednesday evening had not been complete.

            As previously (often) mentioned, I sometimes think my single virtue is frelling obstinacy.††  Sheer mindless persistence I can do.  So there was never any real doubt that I would show up at the abbey for Sunday afternoon service ring . . . but I can’t say I was looking forward to it.  The not looking forward was getting pretty disagreeable by last night and by the time I got out of bed this morning I wanted to change my name††† and run away.  It’s a beautiful gardening day.‡  I could stay home and garden. 

            What if I turn up and they stare at me in disbelief and say, For pity’s sake go away?  —Even if Gemma keeps insisting this isn’t going to happen.

            In the first place there were only, and exactly, eight of us.  Including me.  Which meant that with me they could ring triples.  Without me they could ring doubles or minor with the seventh sitting out.  Triples is much better.  So yaay.  I’m useful.  (Which has been one of Gemma’s strongest arguments right along:  they need Sunday afternoon ringers.  You get lots of brownie points if you ring Sunday afternoon service.  As well as more time on a rope.)  So we rang Grandsire Triples—with me (relatively) safely on the treble. 

            But the best thing was that I had a chat with Albert.  I wanted to tell him I wouldn’t be there for practise next Wednesday‡‡ but that after last Wednesday I thought I should probably revert to doubles and minor till I had adjusted a little more to the (frelling) abbey’s (frelling) bells.  And he looked surprised and said oh no, you don’t have to do that, everyone has trouble getting used to these bells, they’re not the easiest bells anyway, the ringing chamber is huge, and the sound is muddy and erratic.

            Well . . . yes.

            And, he added, last Wednesday was a bad practise.  People who have been ringing Grandsire Triples for thirty years were going wrong.  It wasn’t your fault.

            Oh.  Um.  I had actually thought there was a little variability elsewhere, but . . .

            But the thing he said that really sent me away with a song in my heart if not precisely on my lips, was that when he’d first been ringing here he’d had trouble focussing on each bell rope because, the blasted room being so big, the ropes were so far apart.

            Focus.  Yes.  That’s exactly the right word, and it hadn’t occurred to me (so not a word person as I am), because it’s counter-intuitive.  Ropesight is the ability to see which bell you should follow next by PRECISELY where the person ringing it is in their stroke (since everyone ringing will be in a slightly different place than everyone else).  Part of the problem at the abbey is that since it has ninety-seven bells, if you’re only ringing six or eight or ten or twelve, you’re in more of a queue than a circle, and you have got used, in smaller towers with fewer bells, to ringing in a circle,‡‡ and your ropesight has probably developed from looking around a smallish, more or less circular, group of bellropes.  You would think that having them more spread out would mean each comes into much sharper individual focus but in practise, as I have dreadfully discovered, it seems to have the opposite effect:  they all blur together.

           So Albert and I have something in common besides being bipedal air breathers with opposed thumbs.  Yaaay.  And then he said, let’s ring a couple of plain courses of Grandsire Triples, and you ring inside, and you can practise looking.  So we did that. 

            I may still have a future as an abbey ringer. . . .           

* * *

* I was just writing to a friend that I’d bought a couple of books on basic origami to remind myself what folding feels like, for SHADOWS, since Maggie is a folder, and a couple of books of extreme origami to see what the . . . er . . . extremists can get up to, and that I could feel the attraction of another obsessive-friendly activity but that I didn’t have time for any more all-consuming pursuits and would probably stick to cranes, which are hard enough, frankly, if you are over-equipped with thumbs.  The mere fact of possessing twelve thumbs wouldn’t stop me, you understand, since I don’t hold out for things I have some talent for.  See:  bell ringing. 

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Siddons 

*** Out, damned bell rope!  Out, I say!  One; two: why, then, ’tis time to do ’t.  Hell is murky, just like my ropesight! 

† Which is what she is 

†† Not just plain obstinacy.  The frelling kind.  Which is much gnarlier.  

††† Possibly to K MacFarquhar.  Hee hee hee hee hee hee. 

‡  Old Blush is out.  Barely the middle of May is early even for her.  It’ll be another fortnight or so before she’s in peak hurrah, but she’s got three roses full out now.   And I have two robins again, so there must be a second nest in prospect.  Robin #1 was rushing around yesterday dispensing mealworms but robin #2 sat in the apple tree and stared at me as I galumphed haphazardly, potting things on and swearing.  Robin #2 is gigantic.  I am not seeing anything about size differential between the sexes in robins—having just hit three robin-info sites^—but if it’s true that dad sticks around to feed the fledglings, the gigantic one is mama.  And she’s probably deciding if she wants to risk me.  I don’t know if robins re-use their nests?  I won’t clear this one away till the end of the year so it’s available at a very reasonable rate, not to mention all the mod cons, like trays of mealworms on the balcony. 

^ One does mention that robins are so crazy about mealworms they will take them from human hands.  That does, however, mean that the human hand has to be holding the mealworms.  I will pick mealworms up when I drop them+ but the idea of standing there . . . um.  Peanut butter for the chickadees back in Maine was less lacerating to one’s delicate sensibilities.++  

+ And did you know they CLIMB?  You want to be certain of your containment vessel.  

++ When I first moved over here one of the things I missed the worst was all the wild critters I was used to.  Chickadees were very high on that list.  It’s hard not to love something that little and cheeky.  British robins are out of the same box:  little and cheeky.  And the funny thing is that I feel that I’ve always lived with British robins.#  I know my love of skylarks and brown hares and beech trees is only twenty years old.  British robins . . . I can’t imagine life without them.  

# American robins are fine.  But British robins are the real deal. 

‡‡ Fiona and I are going to get into trouble.  Unfortunately there were only tickets available for trouble on Wednesday evening. 

‡‡‡ Mind you there are some fairly strange layouts in small towers too.  But the small part does limit the grievous possibilities.

I’m bored with only chewing on one side of my mouth.*   And Gemma was not at the abbey this afternoon which made me feel more put-upon.  We had eight, however, which meant we could ring triples.  Watch me frelling dive for the treble. . . . At least it wasn’t seven Brilliant Ringers and me:   our eight included two of the middling band members—they’re better than I am, but that still doesn’t take much**—so at least I didn’t have to humiliate myself further by saying ‘no’ when they asked me if I could treble bob to major.***  It wasn’t even seven blokes and me†; Leandra and Moira were both there.  Moira is consolingly middling level;  Leandra is a major frelling hot shot, but has the gift for treating morons and gibbering twits like human beings.  I aspire to being worth her time.††

            Other than that, it’s been SHADOWS.  And maybe a little New Thing. 

KatydidNL

Am I the only one who really wishes she had a copy of these Flowerhair books? 

Snork.  Because I am a depraved human being I’ve been thinking about inserting the occasional excerpt.  I’m just not sure how far this parody thing will stretch. Carooooooooooooom WHACK.           

. . . And it’s not going to freeze tonight.  I don’t think.  I hope.  I planted a lot more tender little green things today.†††  I may just bring the potted-up dahlia cuttings in.  Just because I can. 

* * *

* Because I am a hysterical twit one of my first thoughts after the bloody crown^ chunked out last night, after the screams of horror etc, was, ohmigods can I SING?  I have a voice lesson on Bank Holiday Monday!  —Yes I can sing.  Good grief.  Chewing is, however, problematic.

^ An interesting image.  Sort of Charles I.  

** I’m getting better.  I am.  My mind still goes blank.  But sometimes it comes back.  Sometimes it even comes back bringing the blue line of the method we are (theoretically) ringing with it.

              But just walking over from the car park the middle of a Sunday afternoon . . . the world is full of frelling tourists, and one of the things they’re gaping at is the abbey, which is gigantic and impressive and all that.  And beautiful.  I’ve loved it for years, and when I didn’t seem to be DOING quite so much, including before I started bell ringing, I used to creep in for evensong sometimes, to listen to the voices and the organ in that extraordinary space.  I look at it and I think and I frelling RING there?   You’re kidding, right?^  It takes you a couple of minutes’ hard walking to get round this vast building to the door to the tower, and by the time I climb the ninety thousand stairs, including the rope ladder over the oubliette at the end, I’m in no fit state to do anything but sit in a corner and gibber.^^  So when Og or Albert calls out the name of a method and expects people to step forward and grab ropes, I’m like, Nooooooo!  I’m knitting!  I climbed ninety million stairs (including the rope ladder over the oubliette) to sit in a corner and knit!

            I really want to get over this stage.  Really.  Want.  It’s boring.  Speaking of boring. 

^ I seem to be uttering this phrase kind of a lot lately.  It turned up in New Thing recently which was probably a mistake because we all know life follows art.+  I ordered a bunch of stuff from one of these on line organic save-the-planet sites including six tins of Spicy Lentil Soup which I’m fond of and it’s faster than making it when you’re ringing that night and besides you’re only allowed nine calories a day which means cooking is mostly kind of demoralising.  Five tins were in the box they sent me.  So I emailed them saying, just reassure me you didn’t charge me for the sixth, okay?  And they wrote back saying, we need more information about your order, and then we can respond to your concerns.  One of their list of questions was What colour was the TAPE used on the packaging?  What?  Clearly an occasion when the only possible response is, You’re kidding, right? 

+ Yes, I’d be worrying about those attack mushrooms if I were you. 

^^ . . . And get out my knitting.+  Knitting is very good for the blood pressure++ as I have just been telling Hannah. 

+ Can anyone out there recommend or point me at a pattern for a mug cosy—and before you send me six hundred and forty-nine links to patterns for those wrap-around mug cosies which seem to be a major fashion accessory these days (including some very cute ones on Ravelry), what I want is a mug cosy that looks like a tea cosy only smaller.  This is one of those things that supposing I live long enough to get casual with knitting the way I’m casual with baking (‘okay, fine, that looks about right’) I assume I’ll be able to invent, or devent, from a tea cosy pattern, or a circular hat pattern, or something.  Right at the moment I need to be told what to do, in words of one syllable, and not very many of them either.  

++ Which, after ninety thousand stairs, is banging in your ears anyway.  I only have breath to gibber with because of all that hellhound hurtling.  

*** Major is eight bells.  And the fancy upper level methods have a frelling fancy upper level line even for the lowly treble.  I can treble bob to minor—six bells—at some tower that isn’t the abbey.  Eight . . . well.  I’d like to have a try, some practise night, after I’ve stopped freaking out.  

† This should not matter.  A ringer is a ringer is a ringer and there have been women ringers for the last hundred years or so (although I’m very glad I didn’t have to be one of the first).   But I start feeling all patriarchally oppressed when I’m surrounded by blokes who are all better at something than I am.  This is my problem, not the blokes’.  

†† Along with being a sweetheart to the dim and wussified, Leandra is tiny and fierce.  She’s Albert’s wife and, like him, a major feature in the local guild.  She’s also one of the comparatively few top-flight women ringers:  there are plenty of girls down at my level, but it’s usually only the boys who are obsessive enough to go on to great things.^  There are still a few lingering sexist assumptions in bell ringing, among them that women don’t ring at the back on the big bells.  Colin likes to joke about this, after he’s handed me the rope for the tenor.^^  The back bells at the abbey are seriously large.  Entire fleets of aircraft carriers weigh less than the tenor.  When we’re ringing on eighty-four, look around:  Leandra will be at the back somewhere.  She’s so little that if you’re on a bell on the opposite side of the aircraft-hangar ringing chamber you can barely frelling see her.  The abbey band wouldn’t dream of messing with her, but I’m rather hoping to see her tangle some day with an old-fashioned visitor who doesn’t think women ring big bells.^^^ 

^ I’m obsessive enough.  I’m just not good enough. 

^^ The tenor at Glaciation is not particularly large but it is very deep set which means you need six friends to help you drag it off its perch.  Thus a little innocent merriment may be had on a dull ringing evening.  

^^^ Although watching Wild Robert casually handle a monster bell is as good as a play.  He’s half a head taller than I am but probably weighs less.  

††† While dad robin dealt with an extra serving of mealworms.  I’m going to run out.  I’m going to have to buy maggots till the next delivery.

IT’S RAINING.  Of course it’s raining.  It has always rained.  It will always rain.*  Tomorrow we’re supposed to have gales.  I’m so happy.  Meanwhile the robins have dispersed.  Silly little beggars.  They should stay in the greenhouse where there’s a roof.  I’ve thought of this a lot in the last ten days or so—at least the baby robins in the greenhouse aren’t melting.  There is a good EIGHT INCHES of rain in my buckets.  I’ve emptied my two-inch-measure rain gauge several times.  Robins were still in the nest yesterday but gone without a trace today.  Usually the little-things-in-the-shrubbery start making themselves known immediately—and there’s no way in or out of the cottage garden except by flying** unless I open the greenhouse door, which I haven’t in over a week.***  They’re probably in shock:  they hop out of the nest, stumble along the shelf, nose-dive to the ground, yell, YAAY!  FREEDOM!, and are instantly smacked to the floor by a large handful of rain.    

            The double daily serving of mealworms disappeared as normal today however, so something is eating them.  The mealworm saucer—also inside the greenhouse, where dinner won’t drown—is on the flight path to the nest and I haven’t seen anything else hanging around, so I prefer to think it’s dad robin.  I’ve seen him a few times, looking harassed.  If perhaps there’s a break in the gales tomorrow I would quite like to get outdoors and pot up a few little green things (this will involve moving the dish of mealworms, which is on my potting table) and will try to catch dad poking mealworms into little things in the shrubbery.

            I rang for a wedding today, in South Desuetude, poor things.  I hope the bride’s gown had mud flaps.†  But Colin is bonkers.††  We rang some rather good call changes, nice and brisk and crisp.  I’ve said this before, that you’re usually so fixated on trying to learn methods that you forget that (mostly) well-struck call changes are pretty cool.  Then Colin cast his eye over his band and declared that we would ring bob triples.  For pity’s sake.  Four of us out of eight knew what we were doing—I can’t remember the last time I was offered the opportunity to have a go at a practise course of bob triples.  And we’re ringing it for a wedding??†††  Two of us clueless ones were on the treble and the tenor—but I was ringing inside as was Cora, who promptly went wrong on her first dodge.  Colin dragged us jovially out of the resulting morass and we continued . . . and then Boadicea went wrong.  No fair.  You’re one of the ones who knows what she’s doing.  I never did figure out who I was making long sevenths over.  I know the line on the page, as opposed to in the hurly-burly of ringing, so I just kept counting my line—and Colin kept yanking us on.  We came round.  I have no idea how.  It cleared the churchyard however. . . .

            And I went home for a bracing cup of tea. 

libby.gorman

I do not know about this “warming the cup” part of making tea. Doesn’t the hot water make the cup warm? 

b_twin_1

Depends how long you want the cup of tea to stay hot. If you want the tea to cool quickly so you can gulp it down before you dash out the door then a cold cup will assist. If you want a leisurely cuppa then warming the cup is “proper”. 

::Clutches forehead::  Where were you people RAISED?  Is NOTHING SACRED?  Have the younger generations been DENIED THE WISDOM OF THE AGES?  You warm your vessel for brewing tea—cup or pot—so the tea steeps correctly. ‡  And then there’s the whole commotion about whether you add the milk first or second:  but since I don’t use milk I am allowed to give a miss to this embattled controversy.‡‡

            Now I am going to SING.  Oisin gave me a, you should forgive the term, new thing yesterday, which casts an interesting light on his view of my singing, but I’ll tell you all about it if I manage to learn it.  Mwa ha ha ha ha. 

* * *

* Except when there’s a drought, of course.  

** All right.  I admit it.  Phineas’ previous cat once made it over his garden-room roof into my garden.  I was not amused.  He^ received a bucket of water for his pains and I didn’t see him again.  Grrrrrr.^^  

^ The cat, that is.  Not Phineas.  

^^Q&A page today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2012/apr/27/joss-whedon-screenwriter-director 

Cat or dog?
Cat! Dog: need need, poop, chew, need, lick, need. Cat: whatev. Meow, yo. Here’s a mouse. 

Feh. 

Cat: misses litterbox, plays head games, leaves dismembered corpses on your pillow.  Dog:  craps outdoors, doesn’t mind admitting is glad to see you, finds sleeping in heaps with chosen goddess sufficient glory and does not keep presenting asshole for admiration when you’re trying to watch a film. 

. . . AT WHICH POINT The Cat Anti-Defamation League, or possibly the Joss Whedon for Galactic Supremo Party, nailed me and WORD CRASHED . . . taking, among other things, New Thing with it.  Granted I have New Thing backed up liberally but I hadn’t copied today’s ep yet.  GAAAAAAAH.  Microsoft Recovery seems, in fact, to have recovered . . . this post, anyway, but I’m thinking maybe I’ll start a new file with today’s ep of New Thing, just in case of retrospective accidents.  And the four hundred and six empty documents also recovered are making me nervous.  What I had been trying to do was copy and paste one other quote from this article which maybe I’ll just type in . . .

How do you relax?

I do not understand your earthworld questionings. 

Maybe Whedon should take up bell ringing.  

*** I have MILLIONS of little green (mostly) mail-order things waiting to be potted on and/or planted out.  MILLIONS.  I swear every day Cathy was here there was another frelling delivery of little green things wanting to be potted on.  I’M SURE I DIDN’T ORDER ALL OF THIS STUFF.  And the day of our expedition, the one that was foiled, we stopped at a garden centre on the way home^ so that I could assuage my lacerated feelings and . . . MILLIONS.  I’M TELLING YOU.  MILLIONS.  

^ I was driving.  Cathy couldn’t stop me.  She tried.  

† Although my sympathy dwindled to negligible when she was half an hour late.  I am near as near to finishing my second leg-warmer however.  I wonder what horrors I will produce/reveal when I try to seam the frellers up.  

†† We knew this, of course.  Meanwhile Niall is disloyally going back to Curlyewe on Monday—which is their tower practise night, so it’s easier to organise them to come along early for a slug of handbells first.  He promises this will not become a regular event.  I’ve never rung at Curlyewe (tower) so I’m jealous . . . and then it turns out Colin’s tower practise this Monday is on his grisly little garage ring—with the flowerpots in the ceiling, and the tenor, the biggest bell, weighs eleven frelling pounds.  It’s like trying to cook with a doll’s tea set.  ARRRRRGH. 

††† Maybe if she hadn’t been half an hour late. . . . 

‡ You need half-decent tea for the effect to be noticeable however.  Do not speak to me of tea BAGS if you wish to live.  And the latest fashion nonsense about triangular-solid-shaped bags that bloom in hot water, frelling spare me.  As if anyone who drinks PG Tips cares.  Mind you, if all you want/need is a slug of caffeine as rapidly as possible, it’s all good.  But a really excellent cup of tea worth lingering over requires finesse.  Which includes superior-quality LOOSE tea . . . and warming whatever you’re making it in first. 

‡‡ When I did use milk, I added it second.  But this was not because of philosophical deliberations or considerations of the physics of creaminess.  It was because I wanted to be sure the sixty-four spoons of sugar I put in first dissolved properly.

Blah blah blah blah SICK blah blah blah SICK blah blah blah blah SICK.  Blah.  SICK. 

            I’m actually better—sort of—but not all that much, and after hurtling hellhounds twice and doing some work, now by evening blog time I’m pretty much cole slaw again.*  Not being able to breathe really takes it out of you.  And I have a cough to frighten small children.  Hell, it frightens me.  I have to stop and lean against a wall, or a hellhound, if that’s what’s available.  I’m also at the my-nose-has-been-running-for-so-long stage that smiling makes the entire centre of my face crack painfully.  My ears and forehead throb.  My stomach doesn’t want to know about food.  Since I realised last night was going to be grim I left the radio on—Peter sleeps with the radio on pretty much every night which I am sure has a detrimental effect on the quality of his sleep but we won’t get into that here but I close the book and turn the light and the radio off in the same habitual gesture.  Last night I left the radio on and it was comforting in the dark unpleasant hours.**  And then—I can’t remember if it was at 6 or 7 o’clock—it suddenly got all chatty.  I am an obsessive listener to Radio 3, which is classical, with a few unappreciated-by-me forays into jazz, and they don’t do the in your face DJ thing on classical stations.  But they can get fatuous*** and they can certainly get garrulous.  And apparently the given wisdom is that people staggering around getting ready for their office jobs want chat.   Uggh.  People late (even for them) in bed with demonic head/upper respiratory colds do not want chat.  Blah.  Sick.

            It took me three tries to get out of bed at all and then I only remained upright long enough to shiver downstairs and let poor patient hellhounds out of their crate.  Then I went back to bed (which was popular with hellhounds†).  It was after noon by the time I managed to make and drink my first cup of perilously strong tea . . . gods.  It’s PERFECT gardening weather†† and I’m too wasted to take advantage.  My fritillaries are blooming away like anything, my robin is still sitting on her nest and my new roses came three days ago and I haven’t been up to anything but ripping the packages open and making sure the roots are damp.  Today I at least got them heeled in and roses will last a surprisingly long while merely heeled in . . . ahem . . . although planting them would be preferable.

            Blah.  Sick.  Blah.

            I’m also reading another perfect book for low lurgified distraction—Patricia C Wrede’s A MATTER OF MAGIC, which many if not most of you know since many (if not most) of you have recommended it.†††  And now, if you’ll forgive me, I think I’ll go lie down again and read some more of it.‡  Well, no, first I’m going to go back to the cottage and bring the frelling sweet peas indoors again.

            Blah blah blah blah SICK blah blah blah blah blah STILL FRELLING THRICE BLASTED SICK BLAH. 

* * *

* And I’m sure my mayonnaise has gone off.  

** I can’t believe the timing of my electric blanket going phut.  I’d managed to buy a new one before the lurgy prostrated me . . . but I presently haven’t got the energy to spare to rip the bed apart^ and put the freller on. 

^ It’s an under-your-bottom-sheet one, which seems to be standard over here, and what I’ve got used to. 

*** As during the week of non-stop, all Schubert all the time, which is finally over.  I love a lot of Schubert, and Schubert lieder make me want to get to German sooner with Nadia^, but not continuously, relentlessly, day after day after day after frelling day.   

^ Although this is a classic case of, we have Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, so why?  Stick to Jingle Bells, honey.  

† Oh reckless dog owner beware of precedent.  

†† Except for the fact that we’re having ANOTHER FROST TONIGHT and since I didn’t know that earlier everything at the cottage is still outdoors . . . but in fact I probably will get home earlier than usual tonight.  Like . . . maybe now. 

††† For any of you who read the originals, it’s a one-volume of Mairelon the Magician and The Magician’s Ward. 

‡ But may I just say that it amuses me that yesterday’s blog, preoccupied as it was with not only handbells but the miseries of illness, roused comments about what on the forum?  Knitting.  Most of you remembered to say off handedly ‘oh, hope you feel better soon!’ but clearly your focus was on the knitting.

So after a (splendid) weekend of too much champagne and too little sleep and my usual over-effusive Monday, today of course I stayed home and applied myself strictly to work.  Of course.  Totally.  Except for the mmph-mumble hours in the garden. . . .

            And there’s going to be a vile, putrescent THRICE BLASTED FROST tonight.  Atlas, bless him, who was here today working in Peter’s garden, rang Peter when he got home and had listened to the local weather report—Peter listens in the morning, and I play musical weather apps on Pooka, none of which is worth the 69p or £1.23 I paid for it, but watching a series of them being clueless helps to focus the slowly-waking morning mind.  Atlas tends to be right:  he lives on a farm, he’s a farmer’s son-in-law, and he knows how to do that sniffing-the-air thing about coming weather.  If he agrees with the forecasters, you pay attention.  Anyway.  I was back in the cottage garden, out of earshot of either Pooka* or the landline** when Peter was trying to call me, contemplating saying the hell with it and planting my sweet peas, which are busy climbing out of the little plastic nets they arrived in, because potting on all those sweet peas is way too daunting a prospect.***  Providentially I was distracted by the six or a dozen little vases of things on various window sills that have grown roots and are wondering what happens now—I have this bad habit of putting prunings in water, just in case they’ll decide to grow roots:  a surprising number of your average house plants will—and speaking of plants climbing out of what they’re in, I think some of my geranium cuttings have learned to abseil:  there’s got to be GROUND around here somewhere.

            So I was out in the cough-cough-cough potting shed† mixing compost and vermiculite and putting great fuzzy-rooted cuttings†† in small pots till dark.†††  And dark is about two hours later than it was a fortnight ago‡.   So IT’S SUDDENLY EIGHT O’CLOCK, and I race indoors to slam hellhounds into their harnesses‡‡, discover a phone message from Peter about a frost, howl in a singing-voice-threatening way, furiously put down a plastic sheet in the sitting room since the Winter Indoor-Jungle Table has been put away for the year, and start ferrying stuff through. . . .

            We’d better have a frost tonight. 

* * *

* For someone who is theoretically attached at the hip to her iPhone, I’m out of range far too often.  Most of my friends with iPhones who live in jeans like me keep theirs in a pocket, but noooooooo.  Maybe I just wear the wrong jeans.   

** This is less surprising since the landline only actually rings when it’s in the mood.  Poor Cormac rang the cottage three times before the landline deigned to let us know someone was trying to make contact.  Hannah was beginning to worry:  Cormac said he’d call around now. . . . 

*** I’m saving my potting-on stamina for the 1,000,000,000 dahlia cuttings I always find I’ve ordered.   One of the many conundrums of the gardener’s life is ordering early, before the things you particularly want have sold out, but which means you do your spring ordering while winter is clamped over the landscape like a giant iron hand, you’re convinced everything in your garden is dead and you need cheering up, or ordering late, when the mere presence of more daylight is beginning to cheer you up, enhanced by the fact that all kinds of dead things are producing small green (or occasionally red or purple) bumps and nodules^, and you are at least slightly less likely to order enough stuff to overfill Sissinghurst^^.  But your nurseries will have run out of several of your absolute favourites without which your summer will be ruined, AND what you do successfully requisition will mostly arrive so late you will have gone to the garden centre and bought too much stuff there because you couldn’t wait any longer.  On the whole I do better with choice A but it’s not a perfect system. 

^ I’ve got a few gosh golly WOW ::cartwheels of joy:: surprises coming up . . . but I’m afraid to mention them officially for fear such acknowledgment and acceptance will promptly make them die after all.+ 

+ This probably also goes for mentioning that my snake’s-head fritillaries are coming into bloom.  But I’m mentioning it anyway because if I don’t tell you something I will explode.  They are slightly fussy, but we grew them at the old house, but I had been having disastrous luck with them for years at the cottage when Ajlr mentioned that the insanely evil red lily beetle also eats fritillaries . . . which I then realised was my problem too.  But while I have conclusive evidence that both the weather gods and the unexpectedly-living-plants gods read imprudent blogs, I’m hoping that the insanely evil red lily beetle god does not.   

^^ http://www.invectis.co.uk/sissing/

† Which is to say the all-purposes gardening shed, overflowing with pots, pot saucers, trays, tools, buckets of various sizes and materials, bags of compost and fertilizer and boxes and bottles of intensive plant food, my tiny barbeque and attendant charcoal, plastic sheets and fleece, etc etc etc etc ETC ETC ETC . . . and a robin’s nest.  I was really excited when I saw that—I haven’t had a nest since the blog’s first year, and have barely had a robin.  I know he’s around—there’s always one robin in a garden:  they like gardens and they’re territorial—but the blackbirds have become such thugs that he’s kept a low profile.  Sadly the nest seems to have been rejected, and I haven’t seen the happy couple in a while . . . but one robin is very much in evidence.  I also spent time I might have been spending planting sweet peas hoicking out frelling mats of crocosmia and lily-of-the-valley^ around Queenie and Souvenir de la Malmaison and I had a small feathered opportunist at my elbow.  I was reminded that when you’re outdoors the whirr of small flapping wings is quite pleasant.  

^ Which are WEEDS in my garden.  Bullying invasive WEEDS. 

†† I also had one of my moments of hilarity and decided to do the full soft-wood cuttings nonsense from an obstinate house plant that has refused to die, the gallant thing, but needed serious pruning when I repotted it.  Sometimes obstinate plants can be very obstinate and what the hell.  It’s only a pot, a plastic bag and some vermiculite.   To give it any chance at all, I used hormone rooting powder.  This is a story about egregiously bad design.  The pot of rooting powder—which was simply on the shelf in the store, it’s not like I did a customer comparison^ or anything—is wider than it is tall, possibly to make the whole show short enough to fit on an average shelf, since it has a dibber^^ built into the cap like a slightly distrait unicorn’s horn.  It also has a child-proof cap which is too wide to get your hand around to squeeze.  And I have big hands with long fingers.  I had to use the sticky-jar opener^^^ to get the frelling thing open.  The end of the dibber is also the lid, right?  Which means it’s also . . . never mind it’s too wide to get a proper grip on, you don’t need a proper grip to make holes in compost.  But because the lid is so frelling vast you’re busy destroying your previous hole, or knocking over your sad confused cutting, while you’re trying to make the next hole. . . . 

^ I save that colossal time-suck for things like electric blankets.  I think I mentioned that mine died a few days ago.  I was hoping the frosty nights were over for the year.  

^^ Or dibble.  A long pointy thing that makes holes in the ground/compost for you to put seeds or cuttings in. 

^^^ I have the vicious-with-teeth variety, none of these wussy rubber rings. 

††† Muttering to myself, as I have been doing for seven years now, about getting the frelling shed wired.  Which would be dangerous for a lot of reasons, none of them to do with electrocution.^ 

^ What do you mean it’s midnight and neither I nor the hellhounds have had dinner yet?+ 

+ Nor written the blog?# 

# If hellhounds would like to try, they are welcome. 

‡ One genuine, one fraudulent.  

‡‡ There have been little faces at the kitchen door increasingly often for the last hour or two. . . .

I put Hannah on the train this morning.  Waaaaaaah. 

            I put Hannah on the train way too early this morning in an absolute sense aside from the losing-Hannah aspect.  I haven’t been out of bed that early since I stopped service ringing. . . . and we just lost our frelling spring-forward hour this weekend.   I am seriously not of this planet right now.  But (being awake for) millions of hours of daylight is, I admit, rather jolly, and the weather goes on being spectacular* if spectacularly dry.**

            So I put Hannah on the train and, sobbing brokenly, parked Wolfgang under a tree near the station and took hellhounds for a hurtle.  Of course I brought them with me.  Doesn’t everyone with companion canines take advantage of every possible excuse for hurtling? 

Mrs Redboots 

I love the way you stress that you know every pub in Mauncester by name only. . . . I have to admit I’d been wondering. . . . 

Well, there are critter-friendly pubs, but we’re generally not going inside even when we can.  We’re hurtling.  But Mauncester is a good walking town, I’ve lived in this area for twenty (and a half) years, and ferreting around in the twisty back bits is fun.  I don’t remember when I crossed the line where I (mostly) stop worrying about getting lost because I know enough of Mauncester that I won’t stay lost very long, but at this point I seek out the bits (especially twisty back bits) I don’t know.  During the foot-and-mouth crisis when the entire countryside was closed we hurtled that generation of resident four-legs in Mauncester and Prinkle-on-Weald.***  Prinkle-on-Weald is now pretty much too far away for anything but an adventure, but Mauncester is closer than it was from the old house.  I also have a very minor fantasy about living in Mauncester—where you can be walking distance of a library†, a cinema and a train station, as well as some very nice English countryside.  It’s not going to happen, but it makes an agreeable directional fantasy:  okay, do I want to live in this neighbourhood?  How does the pub look?

            After this we went back to the mews where I alternately poured cold water over my head and guzzled hot caffeine in a (mostly futile) attempt to wake up.  But I still managed to pretend to sing a little, and went off to my voice lesson.  You are probably aware by other standards that life is full of ratbaggishness?  Over the weekend I’d sung less well than I can, because I was busy being nerrrrrrvous about singing for someone.  While, perversely and simultaneously, I found myself able to ham it up more than I can for Nadia or Oisin—because my audience was a relaxed, friendly and nonprofessional one††.  Nadia, of course, heard what I was (or wasn’t) doing almost immediately, sorted me out with rather embarrassing swiftness††† and then threw me into Dove Sei, which I had cornballed up in a shocking manner for Peter and Hannah.  And of course I stiffened up and sang it like a funerary urn, if funerary urns sang—and this despite the fact that I was making a better quality of noise, if you follow me.  ARRRRRGH.  That’s fine, said Nadia, that’s a very nice tone, now sing it like you’re ENJOYING it.

            Sigh.

Diane in MN 

. . . as an opera fan, I tend to cringe when opera singers decide to make crossover albums.  South Pacific may have worked for Ezio Pinza, but Placido Domingo as Tony in West Side Story was not a good idea.  And there is a cruel recording of Jose Carreras singing Jingle Bells. . . . 

JINGLE BELLS?  Oh my . . .  gods.  Oh.  Eeeep.  Did Domingo do a West Side Story?  OUCH.  I lose all respect, etc.  Kiri te Kanawa and Jose Carreras—poor old Jose is listening to the wrong advice, clearly—were bad enough:  I agree that crossover is mostly dire.‡  But I’d gladly—gladly—forfeit all possibility of singing Maria plausibly‡‡ in exchange for sounding like te Kanawa.‡‡‡ 

* * *

* Anthea tonight on the treble commented on the excellence of the view:  where you stand to ring the treble at Glaciation^ is opposite one of those little high arched church windows, and in this case you could see a shiny crescent moon and some glittering planet or other through it.  I had been ringing the treble before her, but I had been staring at the floor in an agony of concentration.  If I’d noticed the moon I would merely have instantly gone wrong. 

^^ I’m still in two wool jumpers to ring there, although it’s shirtsleeve weather in daytime sun.  You wander down the path to the church in your t shirt with your bulging knapsack over one shoulder.  You walk through the vestibule and shiver.  You enter the main part of the church and pull out your first jumper and put it on.  Then you walk into the ringing chamber, hastily don your second jumper, and race to plug in the two electric fires. 

** I was out watering in the cottage garden this afternoon^ and thinking I ought to have a built in irrigation system with All the Plumbing in Hampshire running under my tiny plot of land:  I ought to be able to drill a few tactful little holes, attach those leaky-hose things, and bob’s your uncle.  Pipes should have a nice colour-code system like electric wires, so you know you’re drilling in the right pipe. . . .

^ And swearing.  Later in the year when I shift from my PINK wellies to my (brown) clogs because it’s too hot to be in rubber to your knees, I become resigned to slopping water in my shoes.  It takes skill and dedication to pour water down the inside of your pink wellies.  

*** I missed telling you yesterday that the garden Hannah and I went to was in Chappington Fritworthy.  It’s not like I get to mention it very often. 

† New Arcadia does have a library, but it’s the two shelves and a plastic chair, open alternate Thursdays from 2:45-3 pm and every third Friday from 7-7:17 pm variety.  Mauncester has a proper library. 

†† Not to say clueless.  Clueless would be good. 

††† It’s so obvious after the fact.  Sometimes it’s obvious before the fact too, but that doesn’t necessarily mean you can DO anything about it.  I was aware that my throat was only about half open, the roof of my mouth and my ‘mask’ were pretty well as bright and light as an anvil, and my abdominal support had decamped for Toulouse.    

‡ In both directions.  I HAAAAAAAATED Sting singing Purcell and Dowland.  HAAAAAAAAATED.  

‡‡  heeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheeheehee 

‡‡‡ Or Deborah Voigt or Janet Baker or Marilyn Horne or Joyce diDonato or Beverly Sills or Tatiana Troyanos or Cecilia Bartoli or . . . see really I’m easy to please.

I’ve been singing.  I’ve been singing with Hannah and Peter in the same room.  It does happen occasionally that I sing when Peter’s around—especially on Mondays when I have to warm up before I go to my lesson, and can’t afford to get too precious about circumstances—but I do not sing for other people.*  I’m not sure if I should be embarrassed or not that it was kind of fun—especially the part with them shouting out suggestions.**  I want to say something rude here about neither of them being musical*** but Hannah . . . for pity’s sake, Hannah goes to Broadway musicals.  It’s not like she doesn’t know what proper singing voices sound like.†  Hannah is a very good friend.

            And, more to the point . . . she’s here.  I left you last night in a Perils of Pauline situation, with our heroine(s) suspended on the brink of being Lost Forever in Darkest Hampshire.  Or possibly not even Hampshire.  Outer Mongolia.  Aberdeen.  Saturn.††   I was just driving back to the cottage in despair††† yesterday when Pooka started barking at me again.  I managed not to run off the road—or more to the point did not run into either of the brick-and-flint walls that claustrophobically enclose the single lane of my steep little cul de sac—and further contrived to press ‘answer’ before the call was swallowed up by the entropic maw of the voice-mail system from which none escape unscathed, and . . . it was Hannah.  The driver has decided maybe it isn’t the Egg and Custard, she said in Old High Manhattan Laconic, maybe it’s the Toast and Marmite.  Or the Daffodil and Schnapps.  Or the Militant Stepdaughter . . .  More emphatic male quacking in the background.  Here, you talk to him, she said.

            But where is it, I said.  Whatever its name is.  There is no Caerphilly Road in Mauncester.

            Yes there is, he said promptly.  It runs north-south through the Doggleburies.

            What? I said.  The only road that runs north-south is the Hindu Kush Turnpike.

            After a good deal of witty repartee on the order of “You mean Banded Dogglebury or Sod-all Dogglebury?” and “The giant chalk boulder that looks like the anti-matter Darth Vader is in Gerrymandering, it’s not in the Doggleburies at all,” the driver, who by this time I had decided had no business behind the wheel of a car that contained my best friend, capitulated and said, “I’ll meet you at the Ultimate Fishmonger.”  “Great,” I said.  “I can find the Ultimate Fishmonger, because it exists in this universe.”  In fact he didn’t meet me—he dropped Hannah and ran, possibly in some fear of heavy reprisals from a local who knows all the pubs in Mauncester‡  But at least Hannah was there.

            . . . And it’s been another beautiful day today and Hannah and I went to a National Gardens Scheme‡‡ garden as the sort of thing one does on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in spring in England, and were swarmed by daffodils and crown imperial fritilleries and alpaca, and suppressed our giggles at the extreme High Tory-ness of the owners‡‡‡ and I bought a plant.§

            We also had two gorgeous hurtles with hellhounds over hill and dale and blowing white blossom in the hedgerows and blue, blue sky and general gloriousness and joy and the sap rising in the trees and the human morale . . . and bloody Chaos is celebrating the change of season by not eating. 

* * *

* Although I have made a rod for my own back, in that April’s Visitor^ is here over a Monday and I’m taking her with me to my voice lesson.^^ 

^ I can’t remember what her blog name is, and since my dramatis personae file isn’t in any kind of alphabetical order and it’s gotten rather long over the years I can’t find it.  I could always name her again. . . . 

^^ She’s the kind of friend who makes it sound like she means it when she says, Yes!  I’d love to!  But then I specialise in insane friends.  Regular readers of this blog may have some idea why. 

** Stop laughing.  Folk songs.  I sing a lot of traditional folk songs.  I can do a handful of the obvious ones on request.  Supposing I’m singing with you in the room, which is not likely. 

*** I can say something rude here about Peter not being musical.  Peter is aggressively non-musical, although not, in fact as aggressively non-musical as he likes to pretend.  Still.  If you are going to take singing lessons and are pathological about singing in front of another human being because you genuinely don’t have much voice but (chiefly) because you are intensely neurotic, Peter is a very good person to be married to.  Sometimes fate is kind.  It was not on my list of husband requirements twenty years ago that he had to be able to put up with my singing. 

† . . . At this point I might, as an opera snob, say something about Broadway musical voices . . . but I’m not going to. 

†† Are there pubs on Saturn?  Discuss. 

††† And wondering how long it would take Wolfgang to start again once I’d turned him off.  Since our little erratic fault thingy is continuing.  Yes, I should be ringing up the mechanic and having a little discussion about the connection between the starter motor and the thing it starts, but I’ve fallen into the abyssal pit of ‘I’ll do it as soon as I get SHADOWS turned in’.  The post-SHADOWS agenda is getting a trifle long.  Headed, as it is, by doodles.  

‡ By name!  Only by name! 

‡‡  http://www.ngs.org.uk/ 

‡‡‡ Hannah got nailed as an American, but I escaped by mumbling.  An immigrant with no gift for accents quickly develops an instinct for when mumbling is appropriate. 

§ Surprise.  You’re surprised, right?^ 

^ I’m waiting impatiently for my new roses.  . . . You know, seven years ago when I moved in to the cottage, I’ve told you this, right?, the previous tenant was a terribly proper gardener and the garden was full of terribly proper and high-brow plants.  And everyone said, oh, you’re going to rip everything out and plant roses, aren’t you?  And I got very huffy and said certainly not, I am only going to pull out the boring things, I like lots of plants that aren’t roses . . . But seven years later I’m aware that pretty much every time anything dies I replace it with roses. . . .+

+ No, it was not a rose I bought today, it was a lychnis.  It’s pink though.

Gardening wins.*

            Pooka, as previously observed, has a battery life that is always looking for bridges to jump off of.  I’d wound her back up to one hundred percent last night before I went to bed.  This morning I had errands to run (with attendant hellhounds) so we were a good twenty minutes into our hurtle before I was ready to plug in for my top-up of Japanese**.  I stuck the headphone jack in, turned her on . . . and discovered she was down to ELEVEN PERCENT.  This is about twelve hours after she’d been at 100% and the first time I’d turned her on.

            Meltdown.***

            Upon calm, considered reflection, I think what happened is this:  I am still gnawing away at this app that refuses to download off my computer and onto a device where I can frelling use it.  Preferably the iPad.  So last night, in bed with Astarte†, I asked her technology what the problem was, and she claims she needs an update.  I looked at the specs in the app store and . . . okay, requires IOS 5.  Feh.  But . . . I’m a little freaked by the update thing after the first time I updated Pooka she froze so solidly I needed an archangel to unfuse her again.  I do get ‘wanna update?’ messages on Pooka occasionally, and I’ve been ignoring them till I have a list of stuff and it’s worth sacrificing an Eveready bunny rabbit and examining its entrails for the perfect time to supplicate the archangels.  I have received no such blandishments for/from Astarte.  I didn’t know there were any iPad updates.

            THIS IS A STUPID SYSTEM.

            But it’s even stupider than that, if I’m right about what happened.  Because when I turned Pooka on today, and found her trying to redline on me (again), there was a little message box saying, ‘This app won’t download without an update.  Retry?’  So I assume what happened is that my fossicking around in Astarte’s innards somehow woke up the equivalent gremlin in Pooka’s, which started blindly trying to download this frelling app.  Again.  And again.  And again.  And again.  All night long.  All morning long.  Till I turned Pooka on and interrupted the endless, useless, ridiculous loop, just before she sizzled herself out into exgizmo-hood and became a pink paperweight.

            THIS IS A REALLY, REALLY STUPID SYSTEM.††

            However, I did get out into the garden for maybe two hours this afternoon which was excellent.  Foiled of my gladiolas††† I got all my pansies planted, the snowdrops I never quite got around to planting in the ground last year‡, and potted on a rhododendron and a day lily.  By this time it was pretty well pitch dark out . . . but one of the advantages of a tiny garden you know very well after seven years is that you can pretty much garden by feel.  Ow.  Mostly. 

* * *

*I can truly not suppose

A gizmo lovely as a rose.

With apologies^ to Joyce Kilmer. 

^ But not very many.  It’s a dire poem.  ‘A tree whose hungry mouth is prest/ Against the sweet earth’s flowing breast’?  Huh?  I cannot help but think, in my vulgar, literal-minded way, that the anatomy here is suspect especially when you also have a tree wearing a nest of robins in her hair a stanza or two later.  EWWWWWW.   This one’s right up there with that other paradigm of poetic inspiration:   ‘A garden is a lovesome thing God wot’.  Lovesome?  Since the second line cites roses, if in a meretriciously plonking manner, it pains me to reject it, but it would pain me even more to keep it around.

            This, however, almost makes it worthwhile:  http://wordsmith.org/words/godwottery.html  Godwottery.  Indeed.  A word for regular use. 

** I was going to try to figure out ratbag in katakana for you, which is the syllabary used for borrowed foreign words, but I still haven’t got the Japanese writing system(s) installed on this computer yet^, and furthermore I’m reasonably sure WordPress will have a nervous breakdown.  We’ll try it some evening.  But not tonight. 

^ One of my sources says it’s easy.  Me and technology?  Hmmmmmmmmmmm. 

*** Ee, ah, eeee, ah, eeee aaah, eeee ah.  Standing in the middle of a country lane, singing at my smartphone while hellhounds pretend they don’t know me.  Are there no depths to which eccentric artistic types will not plunge?  Speaking of batteries and bridges.  Yes, someone saw/heard me.  They’re moving out of town tomorrow. 

† You may take that any way you please.  If you prefer you can replace it with:  in bed with Chaos and Darkness. 

†† It’s official.  In the McKinley Standard, Apple is every bit as stupid as alternative OS technology. 

††† Planting my glads, that is.  Which are now instead in a tense, slightly gravity-defying huddle on top of the little refrigerator, since Atlas did take the Winter Table down today and I haven’t got any place to put them.^  However Hannah and I will be able to sit at the kitchen table at the same time.  But I hope there isn’t a fire drill.  And you have to open and close the refrigerator door gently. 

^ He also found several more potential bat ingresses to block up. 

Diane in MN

And yes, I have ordered the mosquito netting to drape over my bed. Just in case.

Hopefully you have ordered a nice supply of garden mesh for your guest, too. Just in case. 

I did think of it, but I decided against it.  My bed is a four poster—the infrastructure is already in place for swathing and swaddling.  Not so the fold-out sofa.  And I boggled at the idea of buying the agricultural frame for the mesh to drape over.  There is a lack of ground to stick the pegs in, in my sitting room, you know?  If I find myself inconveniently bebatted I will either escort my gibbering, hand-wringing visitor to Third House at an unseemly hour as necessary^, or she can spend the rest of that night in the other side of my bed^^ and spend the next night at Third House.

            I knew there was a reason I bought a third house. 

^ You do get used to small furry flying visitors, as you will remember from last year, but they do remain startling when you find one in bed with you. 

^^ After I clear books, journals, iPads and/or hellhounds to make space 

‡ Snowdrops’ unwillingness to thrive in pots is exaggerated.

Milk Wine 

I work at the Antique Rose Emporium in San Antonio, and Madame Alfred is one of my absolutely favorite roses. (: If people are looking for a fragrant climber, I always lead them to her, as long as they have the room. I put her on my parents’ front fence, and she blooms a treat. 

The Antique Rose Emporium!  Squeeeeee! 

https://www.antiqueroseemporium.com/ 

The very last year I was in Maine, I . . . planted stuff.  In a clearly prescient sort of way.  Gardening had never really occurred to me, except as something that other people did.*  I’ve said this (often) before:  gardening in Maine, while other people certainly did do it, looked way too much like hard work.  Gardening in Maine is the Xena Warrior Princess end, with evil gods and zombie unicorns and person-swallowing landscape and so on and I’m much more the Gabrielle before she started going to the gym end.  If there are any zombie unicorns around I am definitely looking for somewhere to hide. 

            But I had a silly fit, and, that last summer, went around digging holes and putting things in them.  Including three roses.  Which actually, you know, grew, and produced flowers—I mean, roses, yipe.  I have no idea where this might ultimately have led:  my little lilac-enshrouded house was heavily shaded by not only the two ginormous lilac hedges but several boulders as tall as the house in the back, and a huge, gorgeous old maple tree in the front.  I never was going to have a lot of opportunity to grow roses there—which is just as well, because the joke is that roses are annuals in Maine, and I’m pretty sure my three didn’t survive their first winter.  But I might have learnt about the roses that will survive serious winter, and how to help them do it.

            Instead I fell in love with an Englishman and moved to England and his two-acre garden where he spent hours every day eeeeeeeeep.**  And after I got my breath back I started putting roses in left, right and centre, and learning the hard way about growing the beggars.  To do this rigorously*** involved ordering catalogues—this was before the web began infiltrating us hoi polloi:  I didn’t have a computer yet† let alone an internet connection—from every rose seller I could get the address of.  This included several in the States.  I don’t remember if The Antique Rose Emporium’s was one of the ones I had to draft in an enabling American friend to lay my hands on—quite reasonably a lot of plant sellers won’t send catalogues overseas when they won’t ship their plants overseas—but the whole ‘rose rustlers’ thing was very attractive††, and little old country cemeteries in England sometimes have drifts of ancient roses with great gnarly stems as big around as trees.    

            The Antique Rose Emporium is pretty much the only American rose nursery I pay attention to any more.  If I want an American perspective on a rose, I look it up there first.  And if I didn’t already have Mme Alfred, on the say-so of Emporium personnel, I’d be looking her up for details of her English performance record. 

            I originally bought her, back at the old house, by accident.  Well, I was very young in terms of rose-growing, and Peter was no help, him and his frelling herbaceous borders.†††  I think I’d actually ordered something else, and this thing arrived with a label saying ‘Mme Alfred Carriere’ and I thought, oh, fie, and heeled her in in a blank-ish spot, because I didn’t know what to do with her and I had a lot of other roses to plant, and I’d look her up and figure out what to do with her later.  Only I never quite got around to it.  And she rioted, as she will do, and took over a large swatch of that end of what had been the vegetable garden before my first rose-beds went in.  I probably somewhere have photos of her pouncing over the trellis that several more modest climbers were dutifully scaling from the other side, and engaging Dortmund in mortal combat.  Dortmund was another of my errors—I made a lot of errors—a single, cherry-red rose, white at the base of the petals, and not at all my sort of thing, except that I loved her.  As I loved Mme Alfred.  And her big double creamy flowers looked fabulous tumbling among Dortmund’s dazzling single red. 

            I totally had to have Mme Alfred even in my handkerchief-sized garden at the cottage.†††  I put her in my first year there and her tallest stems started  reaching above my neighbour’s two-storey-plus-attic roof a couple of years ago—and since I’m looking out my first-floor‡‡ office window, this is not a trick of perspective.‡‡‡   When she’s in flower I get gusts of her perfume through my office window.  Yes.  She’s one of the best.

            Oh . . . and guess what I was doing today?  Ordering roses.  Remember I said I needed another climber?  Just one climber . . . ?

 * * *

* When I shared a house on Staten Island for a while, one of my housemates was a zealous, not to say fanatical, gardener.  That back yard makes my tiny garden at the cottage look large in comparison but by golly it was INTENSIVELY PLANTED.  It was impressive but somewhat intimidating—you could barely squeeze out the back door without being attacked by a radish.^  I felt I wouldn’t have the authority to boss so much plant life around and I was sure it knew it.  I felt no impulse to try for myself.^^  And mostly I used the front door.  

^ Or a banana-sized slug.  Ewwww.  

^^ Being assaulted by the occasional house plant was enough.  I’ve had house plants catapulting off window sills most of my life.  

** Speaking of zealous. 

*** Is there another way? says the woman who is now waiting for her book on Japanese particles to arrive. 

† shock horror 

†† Even if the Emporium’s ‘our story’ about Mermaid as a rose that will withstand ‘droughts and blue northerns’ and thrive in the wilderness makes me feel like I’m living on another planet.  I lose Mermaid.  Repeatedly.  She’s one of the crankiest madams ever to grace these mostly verdant shores.  And I’m not the only one who thinks so:  she has a bit of a rep around here.  And then there are her thorns:  which are long, curved and prehensile, the better to make you bleed.  She’s very beautiful though.  So we all keep frelling buying her when she conks out on us again. 

††† The English cottage garden style has roses.  Peter did have roses.  He just didn’t have enough. 

‡ I don’t have Dortmund now:  she’s one of these great stiff angular things, about eight foot square.^  I do keep thinking about putting her in at Third House, but Third House’s garden is still small, it’s just bigger than the cottage’s.  

^ She also has almost no scent.  And you have to draw some lines somewhere.  Sigh.

‡‡ Second floor in American English 

‡‡‡ Although as I’ve said elsewhere, it’s surprising how many rather too large roses you can wedge into a rather too small garden if you’re stubborn enough.  And don’t mind the sight of your own blood too much.