Coming November 2010
Fire
Available from Amazon.comComplete Your Collection!
Visit Robin McKinley's bookstoreon Amazon.com for any of Robin's books you may be missing!
Gloom
I have (mild) stomach flu. (I think it’s stomach flu.)
I definitely have ME. In the ‘hello darkness my old friend/ I’ve come to talk with you again’ sense.* Glurb. Unggh.** It comes back with knobs and brass knuckles on whenever there’s anything else wrong with me.
And Blondel has left forever. Well, Thursday. He’s leaving forever. On Thursday. His house is full of large bulging cardboard boxes covered in heavy plastic tape. And his mum. I was thinking about hurling myself at his feet and weeping into his shoes, but not after I saw his mum. I wouldn’t want to embarrass him or anything. Under more ordinary circumstances I would have cut my voice lesson today since I can barely breathe let alone make an attempt at that wrestling-with-several-alligators business of organising your disorganised body to produce pleasant melodic noises. But today was THE LAST. LAST, LAST, LAST.
Waaaaaaaaah.
There are, furthermore, supernumerary reasons why this is a Personal Disaster of Epic Proportions. In the first place, I’ve already created the cherub, Blondel’s nearly frelling underage replacement***, in my mind as humourless, demanding and mean.† In the second place . . . Blondel is married, so the cathedral gave him a house. The only person whose life I’ve made a misery in a year of Tuesdays is the neighbour on Blondel’s music room’s side of his terraced house who has a strange compulsion to hang around in his garden in the afternoon. Well, Tuesday afternoon anyway. The cherub is not married, so he’s going into shared accommodation . . . and he’s going to be sharing with not merely another cathedral singer with similarly erratic hours, but a cathedral singer with similarly erratic hours whose mostly-live-in girlfriend is a soprano of some national standing. AAAAAAAUGH. Okay, so, fine, he’s not going to be teaching at home. Where is he going to be teaching?†† One of the cathedral’s rehearsal rooms? (Which I know from Blondel exist and are available.) AAAAAAAAAAAAUGH. I’d be hyperventilating if I had the energy.†††
Blondel did sing for me today: some of Schubert’s Winterreisse, which was divine, and Whither must I Wander? from Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel, which would have made me weak in the knees if I hadn’t already been lying more or less full-length on the chair in his music room (good job they hadn’t packed that yet). I’d bought Songs of Travel for me a while back, when I was starting to get into the (ahem!) baritone repertoire—when I was having such a good time [sic] with Finzi’s Garland. I’d brought it along today to ask Blondel if I might try having a bash at something while I waited for the cherub to arrive—he doesn’t, till September—and he suggested The Vagabond (right answer) and Whither (also an excellent answer) and then stood there staring at the latter a few seconds and said, I’ll sing it, and scampered back to the piano. Golly. I admit that singing some of this stuff that I know quite so well on CD is kind of a mixed, uh, curse, because even if you don’t know what you really sound like you do know you don’t sound anything like Bryn Terfel. I know Bryn Terfel singing Finzi’s Garland and Vaughan Williams’ Songs of Travel as well as I know the first page of THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING.‡ Bryn is a hard act to follow. Blondel can do it. And he’s going away forever.
I think I need to go lie down now and draw some comforting hellhounds up to my chin.
* * *
* I am so old I remember when that song came out.
** You can imagine Paul Simon standing on my flimsy, supine body at this point, wearing big black Doc Martens and looking threatening. Okay, maybe it better be Simon and Garfunkel. Neither of them is really large and threatening-looking enough to sub for the ME Monster. The ME Monster also has extra limbs and a migraine-inducing red shift. And it drools.
Actually as I think about it it looks a lot like this: http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Continuum-2.jpg
(Thank you, Jodi Meadows, for the inestimable favour of directing me to http://www.goodshowsir.co.uk/ )
*** It’s been bad enough taking voice lessons from someone who isn’t thirty yet. The cherub is barely into his twenties. And according to Blondel he’s very talented—well, likely he is, or he wouldn’t have got the job. But the thought does loom that very talented young people tend to be rotten teachers because they haven’t got a clue what to do with the untalented, let alone the old.
† Because I’m a twit. Next question.
†† The one thing we do know is that he is actively seeking to take on Blondel’s betrayed and abandoned students. This might be a good sign, except it probably just means he’s broke. He probably has student loans to pay off.
††† It did occur to me, as I crept along in the slow lane of the bypass to Mauncester—ordinarily I’m a hot smokin’ fast lane pedal to the metal driver—that as the frelling years pass, I don’t know if the edges of the ME get blunted or whether I’m just learning focus. But driving a car is one of my measuring sticks for how bad the ME is. I don’t drive much any more—to Papua New Guinea to look at a garden is about the limit, even on good days—but there have been many days when getting behind the wheel of a car was not an option. I don’t have those much any more. It never occurred to me today that I was going to have to cancel: only that I was going to have to allow a little more journey time, because I was going to be in the slow lane, and focussing.
‡ ‘When Mr Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday with a party of special magnificence, there was much talk and excitement in Hobbiton.
‘Bilbo was very rich and very peculiar . . .’
Moan* Or, Possibly, Lament
My second to last voice lesson with Blondel today. Moan. Now he’s gone for a fortnight, the ratbag, moonlighting at the three choirs festival**, and then he’s back just long enough to give a few valedictory*** lessons and for him and his wife to throw everything they own in boxes . . . and then they’re gone. GONE.
Moan. I’ve been tweeting about this with @emoontx and @violinknitter on Twitter: that’s it’s more than a little absurd that it matters that my voice teacher is leaving.† I’ve only ever been in this singing game because of some cranky idea about widening my musical appreciation, specifically making writing songs a little more comprehensible, encompassable. Or something like that. But I’m old, I have no dependents, few responsibilities††, I have a certain amount of disposable income and I love music. Why not?
And then I had to go and like it.††† Get, you know, involved. And of course a large part of that liking is that Blondel really suits—suited—me as a teacher. I’ve now got the cherub’s—Blondel’s infant successor‡—phone number; I have it written down in the little notebook that lives in my hip pocket, and I can feel it back there, lurking, like a very small snake that might bite. Blondel says he’s a very talented singer. That doesn’t mean he can teach. It especially doesn’t mean he can teach ordinary slobs: too much talent too often means you aren’t able to empathise with the slow and the clueless, or tell them anything they can use. I went through this with riding instructors: it’s the ones who had to work hard at it themselves who could teach me.
A good teacher messes with you, you know? You try scary, dangerous things because your teacher tells you to—because you’ve learnt to trust your teacher enough to give the alarming things they suggest a shot. Violinknitter wrote: It does matter. The rhythm of teacher/student relationship takes a while to establish. And it hurts when it’s broken. (As a teacher, too.) —I hadn’t thought of the teacher side, but yes, this makes sense to me; the teacher has to engage for the student to risk that trust business. I do understand why Blondel is taking this new job (drat him) but I bet he’ll miss us, the students he is deserting. Okay, let me put that another way: he’d better frelling miss us.
I wrote: Maybe it’s the fact that performing (however badly) changes your relationship to music, and your teacher is crucial to the process.‡‡ Emoon responded: That’s certainly part of it…was it as strong with ringing as with singing? Wondering if it’s the same for instrumentalists.
We need a diverse group of people who are good at method ringing, playing a more standard musical instrument and singing to give this interesting topic the consideration it deserves. Tonight you’ll have to make do with me. I’m delighted to hear someone who doesn’t do it herself call change-ringing music; it’s certainly music by my definition. But the crucial, and for these purposes differentiating, thing about method ringing is that you have to do it in company. You may get a few early bell-handling lessons by yourself, and there are computer programmes which will ring the other bells for you so you can practise, but generally speaking method ringing only happens with several of you present.
The other crucial aspect of bell ringing as against more conventional music making is that there are no dynamics involved in change ringing. As soon as you start getting into dynamics you’re getting into emotional response and expression and that’s scary and dangerous and revealing.‡‡‡ And here for me there is a difference between making a fool of myself at the piano and making a fool of myself as a mezzo soprano: the piano is at least itself.§ It’s not like you can hide behind (or under) it in any useful or comforting way; those wrong notes are . . . wrong. Thoroughly, chillingly wrong. But your piano is there. If you hit a key (supposing you are keeping her in tune), it is always that key. The really appalling thing about singing—at least as someone who got into this voice-lessons fix via the piano—is that it’s your body. And there’s almost nothing set or given about it. Are you in good voice today? Is that high G going to be there when you reach for it? Who knows? And all that wretched business about keeping your tongue forward and your larynx relaxed, and singing through your eyes, or coming at that high note from above, or going down when you go up or forgetting about the notes§§ and singing the phrase. . . . Oh come on. I’m trying to remember the frelling tune, all right? It’s not like I am or was ever going to be a great pianist—but there is a limit to the number of things you are trying to keep track of at once, because the piano is a lot of them. With singing there is no limit.
So since last Thursday I have listened to every performance of Dido’s Lament on YouTube at least 463 times§§§, and I’ve worn a little laser-bruise in the Dido’s Lament space on my CD of Dido and Aeneas. And I went in for my second-to-last voice lesson today trying not to think about its being the second-to-last and the need to go out on a relative high and that last Thursday has scarred my psyche forever. I think Blondel was a little worried about this too, so when he asked me what I’d been looking at and I said well, Dido, of course, but I also went back to Che Faro#, he said, let’s try Che Faro.
Che Faro has been good for morale these last few days because singing it now I can see I actually have made progress since I was first learning it for Blondel a few months ago. The funny thing is—that high F? Piffle. It’s nothing. This is not to say I sing it well. Only that I’m singing it better. And so, flushed with (relative) victory, Blondel said bravely: Let’s look at Dido’s Lament.
I’m here to tell you that listening to (almost) every performance of Dido’s Lament on YouTube at least 463 times is not a bad learning tool.## I got through it. I did. It was not wonderful. I have no plans whatsoever to hang a clip of me singing anything, let alone Dido’s Lament, on YouTube any time in the foreseeable future. But it was a whole exploding-planet’s worth better than it was last Thursday. It was recognisable. It was enough there that there was stuff to work with. If Blondel weren’t leaving, I would learn to sing it.
And the high G? The G above the F that almost killed me in Che Faro a few months ago? The G was there. It was there. It was there every time. I have no idea.### Aside from the fact that human bodies are perverse.
* * *
* I am GOING TO BED EARLY TONIGHT. DO YOU HEAR ME? EARLY.^ I barely made it in before dawn this morning^^ and had to roll out too few hours later for another appointment with Rajan . . . which has made me worse. Maybe osteopathy is not the wave of my future.
^ Peter is on his way to bed as I write this. Go to bed earlier tonight, he says. When I woke up last night at 2:30 and you were still here with the lights on I nearly came downstairs and read you the riot act.
Blah blah blah blah blah BLAH BLAH all right.
^^ Shut up, you frelling birds
*** cough cough cough cough. Well, valedictory only means last; it doesn’t necessarily mean there’s a worthwhile product involved, like a diploma, or a ridiculous robe in a silly colour with badly coordinated stripes and a cheezy hood.
† Moan.
†† Except finishing PEG II before my readers run out of patience. Remember, if anything unpleasant happens to me, you’ll never find out how it ends.
††† There is a serious downside to being an easy enthusiast. Twenty four hours in the day, remember? —Remember what? What did you say?
‡ My gods but I would not have taken it well if some pushing-sixty-year-old kept calling me infant and cherub when I was twenty-three.
‡‡ Note that I am detweeting what we all said, not having a 140 character limit in force on the blog.^
^ Ha hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha ha.
‡‡‡ The advantage of an almost total lack of talent here is obvious: you’re so busy struggling with the sheer technicalities of producing any remotely accurate noises you can’t possibly spare any attention for particulars of expression.
§ Or herself, in the case of my piano. Or himself, in the case of Oisin’s.
§§ AAAAAAAUGH
§§§ All right, there are a few that made me snarl and cut them off halfway through.
# http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brGYq97Of6w Janet Baker is one of my major heroines and this clip of her doing almost nothing but just singing the freller reduces me to a little pile of ash every time I watch/listen.
## I’m playing my Dido CD again now. And like automatically my hand picks up and clicks back to the lament.
### And Emoon, if you are reading this . . . I would happily trade in my increasing range for half an octave that anyone would want to listen to. Although I can at least say that my aspirations for the back row of the unauditioned chorus are beginning to look reasonably plausible.
Howling, various
Today has NOT been one of my better days. Let’s start over. It’s 3 am and I’m already asleep.
Blondel had a wedding in London to sing today and it had occurred to me after we’d already made our plan of a second voice lesson Thursday afternoon that, in my experience of weddings, he might be being a little optimistic about timing. So I had a plan for an alternate afternoon in Mauncester. What a pity I didn’t use it. It would have had to have been more successful than the one I lived through. Blondel was in fact a little late, but more to the point he arrived tired and ruffled—having managed to get lost finding his way back out of some London labyrinth*—so we ran a little later yet while he had a glass of water** and de-ruffled.***
And then . . . oh gods . . . the lesson itself was a disaster. Dido? Dido is spinning in her grave. And Janet Baker probably has an unimaginably ghastly stomachache of metaphysical, not to say necromantic, origin.† I was then so freaked out by the destruction I was wreaking that when Blondel suggested we try something else I couldn’t get through Fear No More. I can sing Fear No More.†† But not today. AAAAAAAUGH.†††
There were two brief moments when I wasn’t looking around for a sword to impale myself on. One of them was that Blondel has given me a goofy new exercise that I very nearly have to learn like a new song—but it’s amusing. Kind of a lot of your warm-up exercises are a snore, they’re just excercises for the purpose of waking your voice up and telling it has to work for a living.††† It’s not a big deal; I like scales. But this one’s fun.
The second not-nearly-long-enough moment was . . . Blondel sang Fear No More—upon request, and I suspect he only agreed because he too wanted to end the Hour That Should Not Have Been Born(e) on a better note than any of them thus far—so I’ve finally heard him sing. Ooooooh. My.‡ Maybe I should revert to the impaling scenario. Siiiiiiiigh.
It was now a good deal later than I realised. And I had handbells at 5 pm. Well, I was supposed to have handbells at 5 pm. I rang Penelope and asked her to please tell Niall I was going to be late. Half past latest, I said. But I was still in Mauncester at that point.‡‡ And you may have noticed the way they joyfully rip up the roads in high tourist season.‡‡‡ So by the time I got home I had written several sharp letters to the Hampshire County Council in my head and I was flatlining in both energy and morale—and I had to give poor sad patient hellhounds at least a token hurtle before I went off and left them again. But my presence for handbells wasn’t crucial, because Titus was coming—which was why it was at Niall’s house instead of my cottage, he of the big enough and relatively tidy sitting-room—so he and Colin and Titus could get on with minor (six bells: three people) while I sat down for five minutes and ate a nectarine. And I hadn’t looked at the bob major (eight bells: four people) enough anyway, so—especially after the voice lesson I’d just had—I wasn’t minding the idea of putting off the revelation of my handbell deficiencies a little longer still.
So it was more like 5:45 when I arrived . . . to find Niall and Titus sitting alone in silence. Because Colin was not there. Which I should have known, but I’d forgotten, and I hadn’t written it down. OH. GODS. And the only reason they didn’t kill me is because they’re British. Also, I suppose, because they still wanted to ring handbells. Which was what we were there for after all. Some of us sooner than others.
Handbells, once begun, were relatively successful. I’ve told you about Titus: he’s the one had the stroke fifteen or so years back and only has proper use of one hand—so he rings both bells in one hand, and I cannot BEGIN to tell you how confusing this is, not to mention the inevitability of rather a lot of rows that have seven or eight dings in them instead of the statutory six. But I stayed late enough that we could stop when Titus’ hand started getting tired, by which time people were even smiling at me again. Although Niall, who has no conscience whatsoever, while I was still in grovelling and whimpering mode, whipped out his diary with an evil gleam in his eye, and booked me in for handbells in Frellingham with one of his demon ringers on a Wednesday they haven’t got a third ringer. He’s been trying to get me to Frellingham for months, and I keep weaselling out of it, but this has got harder since I don’t have Wednesday Ditherington practise as a permanent shield and defense any more. GAAAAH. I think I’m nailed on this one.
And now I have a little dog to finish. The way this day is going . . . well. I’ve already decided I want to put my lament through my friend’s door on my way back from my piano lesson tomorrow.§ It won’t be finished, but the friend is, as I’ve said, musical, and if he doesn’t just throw something large and heavy at me the next time he sees me, he might have some editorial input. Also I want to have made the gesture some time before the new puppy he brings home in six months or so reaches its second birthday.
Okay. Onward. And I’m hoping for upward.
* * *
* My immediate reaction was, you drove? When you’ve got a train station in your back garden? I’ve got the American’s view of the British train system too—it may make you frelling crazy, and it often does, but it exists. After almost twenty years here I am still blown away by the sheer fact of the public footpath system, and of the national rail network. Even if the reason I finally broke down and bought my first mobile phone is so that I could make ‘I’m sitting in a train a hundred yards^ outside Waterloo and have been for the last twenty minutes, and I’m going to be late for lunch’ phone calls. Which I suppose is the answer to why he didn’t take the train. The day you’re late to perform for a wedding is the day the wedding will run on time.
^ Or metres, if you prefer
** Normal people would have a cup of tea or a double scotch. Singers are always thinking about their throats.
*** And we compared notes on the weird stuff some people lay on for the euphonious exaltation of their weddings. I am forced to conclude that the average level of musical education among the general populace is even worse than the boffins say.
† Okay, Janet Baker does not have a stomachache of unknown origin today, because if she had a stomachache every time some voice student—even the slightly smaller category of voice students who think she walks on water—mangled something she is famous for singing heartbreakingly superbly, she’d be too weak to get out of bed in the morning, and I’d prefer to think she is still enjoying her retirement.
†† I didn’t say well, okay?
††† Note to self: Do not agree to a second voice lesson in a week. Not even if you’re planning on spending all night at the piano and beating that frelling G into submission (while Peter is safely elsewhere playing bridge). Clearly the pressure is Too Great for a spindly amateur.
‡ Think Keystone Kops.
‡ Golly gosh wowie zowie eeep. Geezum. Gazinklebats. Bryn Terfel had better look to his crown. Although one of the things about Terfel is the size of his voice. He could fill Heathrow. Tear out all those ugly terminals and put in some bleachers. And Blondel says that his own voice is not that large. You couldn’t prove it by me: he was pasting me to the back wall of his studio clearly without trying. I can see/hear why people keep giving him jobs. Although I kinda wish he’d been having an off day when he applied for the job he’s going to the end of August.
‡‡ Sort of the backwards version of the ‘I’m sitting 100 yards outside of Waterloo’ mobile-phone call.
‡‡‡ This makes some sense in Maine, where the temperature may drop below freezing and snow begin falling any time, you just get to complain if it happens in June. In southern Hampshire. . . .
§ My voice lesson today was the little dog’s fault. I may have spent most of last night at the piano, but quite a bit of it was about a lament for a little dog, not for a queen of Carthage.
Happy 26th and tra la la
I know what the calendar says, but officially it’s the 26th. I tweeted about this earlier: we celebrate two anniversaries, our wedding anniversary the third of January*, and the 26th of July, which is the day, now nineteen years ago, that I drove to the Bangor, Maine airport to pick up this skinny, nervy, twitchy**, odd *** English writer wallah whom I knew very slightly, for a harmless tourist weekend and . . . unscheduled things happened. Peter asked me last week if I’d like to go out to dinner for the 26th, which is what we usually do, and I said oh yes, please, definitely.
Then I noticed that the 26th fell on a Monday this year. Wait, no! Not Monday! Now that Wednesday Ditherington practise is no more, Monday is semi-sacred second weekly tower practise! † Peter had already made the booking. I was as humble as possible when I asked if we could change it to Tuesday.††
And it is now rather late at night (as it so often is, about 300 words into tonight’s blog entry) and I am, in truth, a trifle the worse for wear.††† Although a certain amount of this is the calculated fiendishness of restaurants: they ply you with booze, because that’s where the easy mark-ups are, and half a glass of champagne on an empty stomach and I can’t find the floor with both hands. Sigh. You’d think I’d learn to say ‘not till the first course, please’, wouldn’t you? But you scamper into the restaurant—or you do if you don’t go to restaurants much, and we don’t—in a festive mood, so when they come round waving the wine list and lo!, there is champagne by the glass‡, I lose all self-control ‡‡. . . .
Would that‡‡‡ I could lose a little more self control in another direction. I’ve just been having a tweet exchange with EMoon on the subject of practising our singing at home: neither of us does it well or easily, because we’re too self-conscious. Arrrgh. Relax, open the mouth and the throat and the sinuses and let rip: Um. No. Tweet is sadly not a bad description of the kind of noises I make: a sort of muffled eeeping noise. Siiiiiiiigh.
And thus I tell you about today’s voice lesson with mixed emotions. In the first place I can’t stand it that he’s frelling leaving.§ And soon—the end of August and he’s away for a fortnight between now and then. In the second place . . . I’d about decided that Dido’s lament was a bridge too far. Purcell is, in my admittedly limited experience, always harder than he looks—all those lovely long legato lines are full of beartraps and tigerpits of tune and timing—and I’d just about struggled through the early bits of poor Dido’s final moments AND THEN THERE’S THAT FRELLING HIGH G, and . . . nope. No way. I must have been mad to think I could do it—blurt it out there all stark and exposed like that. I’ve been known to hit a G when I’m doing exercises, but then you’re just creeping up the scale while thinking hard about something else.§§ I know the G is there, but . . . it doesn’t come when it’s called.
So I went in today thinking that I’d rather go on with Finzi’s Fear No More, which is what we worked on last week, and I’ve got just about enough voice a year after we started to begin making some attempts at interpretation, cough cough cough cough.§§§ And Blondel sat down at the piano and masterfully opened Dido and Aeneas and started playing. What’s an elderly hag to do? Chiefly what she does in these circumstances is botch things up in a truly amazing manner.# But Blondel, after a year’s practise, pulls my strings pretty well, and just over the course of the hour Dido began to emerge from the banshees and the scalded cats and . . . I actually hit that damned G. I was so astonished that I instantly reverted to scalded cats, but the point is . . . it’s there. It is there, and not only when I’m creeping up on it while thinking of something else.## Okay, this is a good thing, but . . .
And furthermore, because I have no sense, I’m having another voice lesson on Thursday###, to spin out the misery a little more, and get me really cranked for our LAST lesson after he gets back from holiday. It’s going to be a very. . . er . . . a lamentably musical week. I also still have a little dog to finish. The little dog is going rather nicely, I think, thank you. But Peter is playing bridge tomorrow night, and I’m going to stay down at the mews and crouch over the piano and work on a little dog . . . and sing. I am.
* * *
* JRR Tolkien’s birthday. Yes. And your point is?
** Have I told you about him giving the beginning of his Library of Congress speech with his chin on the table because he was pulling up his socks?
*** Also tactless, but that’s another story. Remind me to tell you about lunch.
† Very slightly in my defense, Colin only holds practise if he knows in advance he has enough people, and I’d already said I’d come. On Fridays at New Arcadia^ we just turn up and hope for the best.
^ Peter would know better than to suggest we go out to dinner on a Friday.
†† Clearly it serves me right to have rung like a blind water buffalo last night.^
^ Blind can be done, although not by me. But that lack of opposable thumbs is a ratbag.
††† I might be emphasizing this a little more except it was only a few weeks ago that Alicia and I were forced to drink an entire bottle of champagne almost by ourselves, and I don’t want any of you getting the wrong idea. I am a sober old frump, I’m afraid, and . . . believe it or not, I do feel a strange responsibility to model Sober Old Frumpness as a positive lifestyle choice. I want to work tomorrow, whatever tomorrow we’re talking about, Tuesday, Friday or Zingwath^, and July or November or March, which means either dreadful abstemiousness or an awful lot of water before bed. And the problem with an awful lot of water right before bed. . . .
^ This is a Gflytch day. They have eight or nine in a week, which isn’t a week either, but it depends on the planet. They get around, the Gflytch.
‡ Peter and I had a simultaneous mutual FAIL moment in the taxi^ on the way over when we realised we both forgot the champagne stopper. I’d even got the sucker out. It was lying on my bed next to my keys. I picked the keys up, and . . .
^ So I can get lit, right?
‡‡ Besides, I had something to celebrate. Never mind anniversaries, the hellhounds ate their dinner, despite the fact that it was earlier than usual and there was clearly something else going on.^
^ No, no! No dog noses on this skirt!
‡‡‡ She says cagily, wrenching tonight’s topic progression so violently aside that it screams like a hellhound whose tail has just been stepped on.^
^ This actually depends on the hellhound. Darkness shrieks. Chaos prostrates himself because clearly he was an Evil Dog and left his tail in the wrong place.
§ Not to mention that several of my nearest and dearest—including Peter, Merrilee and Hannah—have made gentle, indirect, non-hellgoddess-rousing noises about how perhaps, since I’ve had what was supposed to be my year to find out what singing feels like as research for writing songs^, maybe I would take Blondel’s departure as a sign and STOP voice lessons. ARE YOU CRAZY? I’M JUST STARTING TO GET INTERESTED.^^
^ Do your homework. Just as I was saying the other night in Ask Robin.
^^ No! No! Not interested! Interest is deadly! Interest takes more time!
§§ Keeping your sinuses open, say. And your tongue forward. And your support supportive. Your body never feels as squashy, eely and lumpy as when you’re trying to organise it for singing.
§§§ And this is really INTERESTING!!!
# Have I told you that Blondel’s replacement at the cathedral is asking if Blondel has any students to pass on to him? And that he’s even younger than Blondel? Can I bear to take voice lessons from a cherub? Can a cherub bear to give voice lessons to an elderly, self-conscious hag with a little skinny voice and a G that does not come when called? What if the cherub is not unflappable? What if he is mean? What if he makes me burst into tears? What if I make him burst into tears?
## Interest is a terrible, scary, despotic thing.
### Right before handbells. Gah.
Deadness and weather
I’m a beyond-dead knackered person. A beyond knackered dead person? Whatever. The weather is not conducive to coherent thought, or even retention of much vocabulary: it’s that kind of swampy fug that makes you feel like one of those several-thousand-year-old bodies buried in a peat bog. You may be well preserved for your age but . . . Could I convince you that my birth language is Gveltch*, and I tend to revert when I’m really tired? Gehgrug. Ardangle brak. Slomag. Dah. Fribkizam daldol rakpek, flob in jestru, dangwhammy. I’ve just told you that anyone who rings bells in this weather deserves to be winkledubbed by the gazortfuls till bragolindon. So there. Colin’s crew meets on Mondays, and they have a second tower to keep rung, like we at New Arcadia are responsible for Old Eden, ** so we were ringing at Little Warbling tonight. Little Warbling is known to be the coldest, dankest, clammiest tower in three counties—and the bells are furthermore rather lightweight, so ringing them doesn’t even warm you up much. Except tonight. By the time we’d rung them up, ready to do something with, I was already glad I’d forgotten to change out of my shorts into jeans. There was no air in that air in that bell tower tonight, and I rang like it.*** I had some company being witless and collision-prone, but the end result was nonetheless not inspiriting. Sigh.
I have a better reason for an absence of brain tonight than merely the weather however. I have, I think, referred to the fact that several crucial planets are apparently laying down the aetherial inter-spheroidal version of rubber in retrograde lately, and I have a whole slew of friends having a variety of really bad times. As most of you will know, there isn’t usually a lot you can do in these situations, except pester them with emails/phone calls and, if you’re close enough, cups of tea†.
One of my musical friends has a much-beloved little dog—who died last week. It’s not that she wasn’t due to go some time soon; she was. She’s been elderly for several years and stopped Going Everywhere with Him about a year ago. But? So? Who is ever expecting it when it happens? And who, having given his heart to a dog to tear††, is frelling ready for the final good-bye? †††
So I was possessed by the insane notion of writing a lament for a little dog. I’m not at all sure this was one of my better ideas, but it’s too late now.‡ I can always lose my nerve and retitle it Hellgoddess Railing at the Universe: why don’t our standard companion critters last longer, for pity’s sake? Unless you have a parrot or a boa constrictor you can figure on their checking out every decade and a half or so‡‡, destroying you utterly, and putting you through deciding whether to do it again or not.‡‡‡ So PEG II had a holiday today§ because after a few days of dorking around looking nervously at the ragged beginnings of my mournful little lament and failing to commit, I really wanted to get on with it, one way or another§§. I’d like to put it through his door§§§ by the end of the week.# Gulp.
* * *
* As spoken by the Gflytch. Long time blog readers may remember the Gflytch. They used to appear, scary and scowling, in the shadows of lj.
** And are occasionally dragged into service at Madhatterington on the grounds that it’s the same benefice or some such.^ I haven’t had an update on Madhatterington in a while, and I’m afraid to ask, because anyone who knows the answer is too likely to reply, Oh, that reminds me, what are you doing Sunday afternoon . . . ?
^ The Church of England hierarchy is seriously beyond me. But I like our priest. He wears that t-shirt that I spent years trying to think of someone to give one to: Jesus Loves You. But I’m His Favourite. –I haven’t quite had the face to ask our priest who gave it to him.
*** I am trying to remind myself that a year ago getting through Cambridge at all would have been a miracle beyond my grasp, never mind without being shouted at. One of the frustrating things about being a Not Very Good Ringer is the way everything makes a difference. If you can ring Cambridge, you can ring Cambridge (or Grandsire, or Stedman, or anything else), right? Wrong. Because each bell perforce must start at a different point of the pattern (like a kind of relay race), you will start learning a new method by ringing it always on the same bell, most often the two. That’s the same number bell, the second bell in the row/circle of six. Except that when you’re learning, you want literally the same bell. The exact same bell. The number two bell is a whole different experience at Little Warbling than it is at New Arcadia or South Desuetude. I have been hacking at Cambridge long enough now that I have rung it at Little Warbling before . . . but, as I now recall, the last time I tried was kind of a disaster. Maybe this is reassuring. I’m improving. Siiiiiiiiigh. I just want to be disgustingly brilliant, you know? Why can’t I be disgustingly brilliant? I must not have filled the form out right. I’m sure I ticked the ‘disgustingly brilliant’ box.
† With or without chocolate bickies. I realise this comes as a shock, but not everybody turns to chocolate in times of stress.
†† There is sorrow enough in the natural way
From men and women to fill our day;
And when we are certain of sorrow in store,
Why do we always arrange for more?
Brothers and Sisters, I bid you beware
Of giving your heart to a dog to tear.
Rudyard Kipling gets it right (again). Don’t let the sentimental twaddle that has grown up around this poem fool you: he’s not in a good mood^.
http://homepage.mac.com/rmansfield/thislamp/files/72e33ce48fa33d32d561c2c2018483e7-165.html
^ And no, you’re right, it’s not Shakespeare. Be grateful.
††† Note that any reference to the rainbow bridge will be deleted. Does. Not. Work. For. Me.
‡ Most of my stuff sounds pretty lugubrious anyway, or at least weird. I wouldn’t tackle an epithalamium.
‡‡ You may get twice that out of a horse, of course, but that may almost be worse, because it’s still only about one-third of what you’re hoping for yourself.
‡‡‡ Probably. Critter people are like that. Which means that one of the saddest, most demoralising curses of our modern era is the no-pets-allowed at old people’s homes.
§ Yes, I know, horrors etc, I am an irresponsible cow, etc etc. Bite me.
§§ I have bottomless, ardent sympathy for people who find words intimidating when I’m trying to write music. Sticking notes together is so . . . is so . . . is . . . uh. . . .
§§§ No, he doesn’t read the blog.
# If Finale hasn’t driven me to running mad with an axe before then.
