Today has been a long spectacular hurtle that even almost six years with hellhounds ill-prepared me for.   I am expecting to fall off my chair and lie on the floor moaning and twitching feebly . . . probably before I finish this blog.  I can possibly semaphore to Darkness what buttons to press to hang it* but I do not guarantee my usual elegant peroration and epigrammatic finish.**

            I was so unnerved by Oisin’s praise last Friday that I’ve hardly known how to practise.  This is that old ‘something to lose’ thing.  The great thing about beginnings is that you don’t know how yet.  It’s all good.  Once you start learning anything . . . you have somewhere to fall.  Down.  It’s very frustrating having no particular talent—or in this case, voice—but it’s also liberating.  I don’t have to take it seriously.  I can obsess, because I will obsess, frivolously.  La la la la la la.  And (for better or worse) it’s not like I’ve discovered my inner Beverly Sills or anything.***  But there are increasing numbers of (fleeting) moments when there is maybe even something going on with my singing . . . and occasionally, thrillingly, a few of these moments string themselves together.  It’s not the high F in Che Faro—F is not high—it’s the terrifying sticking your head above the parapet.  This is your big moment . . . Noooooooo.  Eeeeeeeeep.  And I tend to sing it accordingly.†  Plus that ratbag ‘ben’ you have to sing it on, which is not singer-friendly and which does not help.  The other song I particularly wanted to look at is The Minstrel Boy—yes, I am a sap, sue me—because I start the run up to that first (unhigh) F without much trouble and it’s like ‘okay I can do this’ and then on the second run up to that same F I lose my nerve and get all thin and squeaky.  I think it’s something about emotional engagement—you may remember that this song got mixed up with Diana’s death for me—and it’s like suddenly, whoa, uh, no, maybe not.  But I love the song.  I want to sing it.  Singing is so frelling revealing, even when you do it badly.  Your Blasted Body Is Your Blasted Instrument, Get Used to It.  Um.  And I don’t know what Nadia did—I never know what Nadia did, even though she tells me††—but my last go through was rough and raw and rather awful, but there was something there, you know?  My problem is mostly about shutting down.  This was about opening up to the extent that I could no longer control it.  Speaking of eeeeep.  Eeeeeeep.

            The day was already going a lick.  I’d got down to the mews late (of course) and had my head down over my computer slightly longer than I should have and thus fed hellhounds lunch slightly later than I should have.  But they were milling around my feet looking for Mysteriously Dropped Chicken Bits Oops so I (foolishly) wasn’t expecting trouble.  Whereupon Chaos decided not to eat.  This was absolutely classic Chaos—he was clearly hungry, it wasn’t that he’d picked up some bloody tourist’s dropped chicken bones in the street yesterday—but some frelling ritual or other for a Monday in an even-numbered year when Aldebaran is in the ascendant and Jupiter aligns with Mars had been left incomplete.  ARRRRRGH.  At slightly after the last minute he ate after all YAAAAAAAY, and we then tore back to the cottage because I had an errand to run on my way to Nadia†††.

            I was at best going JUST to make it back to New Arcadia for Niall to pick me up and blast off to Curlyewe.  But I made it.  And then we sat outside the Curlyewe church for fifteen minutes because our handbell apprentices were late.‡ 

            We rang handbells till people started showing up for tower practise.  And then I grabbed my new tower.  And . . . the worst of it is, I like Curlyewe.  Nice bells.  Very nice bells.  And, furthermore, eight of them.  We rang Grandsire Triples.‡‡  The last thing I need is another Monday tower that is, furthermore, too far away. 

              And now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to fall out of my chair. 

* * *

* No, you’re wrong.  If I can learn to circumvent the WordPress gremlins and hang a blog post . . . so can a moderately intelligent dog. 

               Of the local selection, Darkness is the one who is willing to find problems outside his immediate self-focus interesting.  Chaos . . . not so much.  Chaos does not speak the standard human-canine language.  There certainly are days when I shout YOU ARE THE DUMBEST ANIMAL I HAVE EVER MET . . . but I’m speaking to myself.^  Sighthounds have been bred for thousands of years^^ to make their own decisions.  They can’t be asking you for help when they’re flat out after a gazelle.  This has its drawbacks in modern urban life.  Darkness, however, is clearly trainable as most of the world understands dog training, and I am a Bad Owner because I am neglecting this because I don’t know what to do with his brother.  Chaos has his own view of the structure of the universe and while I am the centre of it—more theatrically so than I am Darkness’ holy altar of all—manifestations of his zealous dedication are his own and not particularly open to negotiation or adjustment.^^^ 

            Anyway.  If this post ends abruptly and there are a few short dark steely-grey hairs drifting across the margins, you know why. 

^ Today, for example.  I had a major hissy fit meltdown this afternoon—worst in some time.  Worst since I started singing when my computer is really pissing me off because screaming hurts my voice. +   The cause is that most of my ME symptoms, barring the really life-stopping no-brain, what planet is this, no-energy, never mind I don’t care worst ones, have all come back in a mean-spirited rabble, as a result of . . . wait for it . . . my daring to eat a little restaurant food with Fiona the other night.  I ordered carefully, it was a small meal and there was nothing in it I’m not allowed.++  All my joints hurt, sleep is something that happens to other people, and anything I eat makes me ill.  THIS IS SO GREAT.  THIS IS SO, SO, SO GREAT.  I was running upstairs at the cottage just before I shot off to a long rest-of-day series of events and one of my frelling knees gave out and I had suddenly  Had.  It.  Paroxysm ensued, complete with radical and substantial screaming.  This was right before my voice lesson.  It’s also a really idiotic waste of energy, when you already have ME. 

            I’ve never met a dog this stupid. 

+ I admit this works better some times than other times.  There was a fair amount of shouting at the Metropolitan Opera last night.  

++ Okay, what was in that tea bag? 

^^ No, really.  Salukis have been around recognisably since 7000 BC or so.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saluki 

^^^ See:  eating. 

** What?  

*** All right.  I admit it.  Siiiiiiigh. 

†  Siiiiiiigh.  Another category of sigh. 

†† Except occasionally.  When she invokes Teacher Secrets. 

††† My watchband broke.  Months ago.  It’s a perfectly good watch.  And they don’t make watchbands for it any more.  Finally about the third jeweller I took it to said that she thought their repairpersons could do it.  And they did.  But it still doesn’t close correctly and I predict the mend is not going to last long.  Then what.

            And so to cheer myself up, on the way back to Wolfgang, I made a lightning raid on WH Smith and bought . . . five knitting magazines.  Just to see what they’re like, you know?  The one I was looking for was Vogue Knitting, because they keep trying to sell me a subscription to my iPad, and I have this nostalgic craving to see it in hard copy first.^  On first glance, VK wins hands down for the yarn porn aspect.

            I need more stuff to read.

^ One of the ones I bought is American, so it’s not that imported knitting magazines are too subversive for the UK market. 

‡ It’s okay.  I was knitting. 

‡‡ Only a plain course.  But something went Horribly Wrong and I thought nooooooo I can’t even ring a plain course any more, kill meeeeee, but Niall told me afterward it wasn’t me, it was someone else.  Well, I’m sorry for the someone else, but I’m relieved to be permitted to go on living.  Even if I did make a, ahem, dog’s dinner of Cambridge.

IT’S HALF PAST MIDNIGHT, I’M FINALLY EATING DINNER* AND I STILL HAVE TO WRITE THE BOONDOGGLING BLOG.**

            Fiona had booked tickets for the Gigspanner*** concert months and months ago.  And months.  I think she booked them slightly before the tour had been confirmed or the dates settled on.†  This is also before the doodle situation broke down under the strain of trying to write a novel in five months††.  Our previous set up has been when there’s a concert in view she takes the day off her real job††† and comes down for a few hours during the day and terrifies some corner of my office/files/desk/attic into behaving itself, and then we frolic in the evening.  But while I still have many, not to say numberless other corners of my life that could use Fiona’s services, with 1,000,000,000 doodles‡ hanging over my head like 1,000,000,000 Damoclesian swords I can’t frelling face my office, let alone sort out something for Fiona to do in/with it.‡‡

            But it’s a long frelling way for Fiona to come for a concert—even longer when it involves better than an hour of surplus driving to come and fetch me.‡‡‡  And then another one to take me home.  So I was casting about for something to make the day more value-added . . . and devised the cunning plan that we could go see AVENGERS ASSEMBLE in twoD at a theatre that involves the Greater Footling Triangle, a lesser known but statistically more savage area of geophysical mayhem than the better known Bermuda.  The attraction of this theatre (aside from the straightforward appeal of 2D) is that, if it weren’t for the geophysical mayhem part, where you turn right and find yourself on Mars, it would be my best option for some of the other live-streaming opera broadcasts that are becoming increasingly popular. 

            Fiona, who is agreeably broad-minded, agreed to this plan.  And then the frelling theatre changed the times on us.  And we were no longer going to have time to scamper from the cinema to the concert several towns over before Roger started beating up Peter’s fiddle.§  A mad flurry of emails ensued.           

            We compromised.  We decided to go to a new yarn store. 

            But the yarn store happens to be in pretty much the same area as the cinema, so Fiona offered to take us past the cinema first, so we could find it—who knows, we might even go to a film there some day—before we went on to the yarn store.§§  So she fired up her satnav and . . .

            I think possibly I have been rude about her satnav before?  Shut up, Billy.  Shut up, Billy.  You get various choices for your voice.  Fiona has Billy Connolly.  The Scottish accent, when he’s saying sensible things, is pleasing.  He rather too frequently deviates from the path of virtue however.  Clearly satnav tech is not proof against the Greater Footling Triangle.   Or the Greater Footling Multidimensional Roundabout, where, whichever exit you take, it’s the wrong one, and Billy will be telling you to turn around in a minute.

            HE EVENTUALLY TOOK US TO A SEWAGE STATION AND THEN CLAIMED WE’D ARRIVED AT OUR DESTINATION.  I know most modern films are rubbish but . . . §§§

            We finally saw the theatre—on the wrong side of the dual carriageway [four lane highway] of course—on our way back, retracing our steps to find the yarn store. 

            The yarn store was extremely satisfactory.  Extremely.#  Oh dear.  And as soon as I get this posted I am going to race upstairs and discover that . . . I haven’t got enough of the yarn I want to use for the new pattern I just bought## with the idea of it being my first cardigan.###

            And the concert was fabulous.~  It was also long, which is why it was half past midnight before I even looked at my computer, but it was the kind of long that when you finally look at a clock you think, it can’t be that late.  That second set was short, I know it was.  Live music is just . . . necessary.  Technology these days is so amazing (sometimes even for good) that it’s easy to sit at home with your 1,000,000 favourite CDs and think that’s all you need.  It isn’t.  You need it live sometimes too:  you need to see the musicians doing it and hear it as they do it.  You need to pick up the electricity of what they do together—which is not recordable.  Oh, yes, certainly, some performers can put over that fresh vibe to be caught for the ages by the latest equipment. ~~  But it’s not the same.  And these guys really connect, with each other, with you the audience.  Love love love.  Why aren’t they famous? 

* * *

* Well, we had a dinner-like meal at about 6.  But I don’t eat dinner at 6. 

** Yes, I did think of holding New Thing 10 one more day because I knew I’d be back late tonight.  But I didn’t think I’d be this late . . . and I also knew it would be a day rife with blog material.  I possibly didn’t know how rife. . . . 

*** http://www.gigspanner.com/ 

† What?  She hired a good prognosticator.  How do you think? 

†† Which I also have signally failed to do.  Siiiiiiiigh.  It has not been one of my great years. 

††† What?  Oh, she makes jgrrmgles.  To order.  There’s a long waiting list.  She’s the best jgrrmgle maker in Britain, and possibly the world.  

‡ And a few other random items 

‡‡ Hellhounds and I occupy a narrow strip near the door.  The rest is . . . AAAAAAAUGH. 

‡‡‡ See:  I don’t drive much.  Especially to anywhere I don’t already know.  Yes, this means that anywhere I hadn’t already learnt the route to by the winter of 2000, when I went down with acute ME, I probably won’t drive to now.  And don’t I hate it when they change the road layout. 

§ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c2Rx2KSW3-c&feature=youtube_gdata

Blondviolinist, avert your eyes. 

§§ Film and yarn possible in the same expedition.  Hmmmmm. 

§§§ Which was being renovated or expanded or something.  We sat there while the giant thing with caterpillar tread trundled around moving heaps of rock in an aimless manner and Fiona fired up her iPhone—Pooka, I might add, was refusing to connect:  the signal was fine but she was sitting there going Can’t! Won’t! And you can’t make me!—and ascertained that the post code on the cinema web site was wrong.  Oh.  That’s helpful. 

# Ask Fiona. 

## Yes, I know you don’t knit from stash.  Stash is stash.  If you want to knit something you have to go out and buy yarn.  But I find that—um—sometimes you do want to knit up some of your yarn.  That sometimes you bought yarn not merely because it was gorgeous and was clinging round your leg and refusing to get back on its shelf and what can you do when it knows your name?, but because you want to wear it or throw it over the back of your sofa or something.  That you bought it sure that the pattern it yearns to become is out there somewhere, just possibly not in this shop and besides you’ve already been here six hours fondling yarn and your hellhounds need walking and your husband wants to know where you are and if you’re ever coming home^.  But you want to, you know, knit this yarn up, even if maybe it will have a sort of interregnum period of looking like stash.  Um—does this mean I’m not a real knitter? 

^ And when, bringing your purchases into the house, if you will fit through the door.  

## Hint:  open front.  No buttons.  No buttonholes.  And with only a few changes.  Like about six inches shorter^ and the sleeves will be STRAIGHT not belled.  Ugh^^.  The sleeves will probably also be longer to accommodate my gorilla-length arms.  Sigh.  I am looking FORWARD to sleeves that are LONG ENOUGH.^^^ 

^ Maybe I’ll have enough yarn after all. 

^^ Maybe it makes a pretty line.  All I can see is ‘gets into your tea, your soup, the mouth of the dog you’re petting’ etc.   It’s like Fiona was wearing lady shoes today and then complaining about the stairs.  You’re wearing lady shoes.  

^^^ And for anyone with a memory so good you ought to be ashamed of yourself, yes, I have at least one other First Cardigan, and I even bought the yarn for that one at the same time I bought the pattern.  The problem with it is that it pretty much trumpets EASY KNIT FIRST CARDIGAN, which kind of puts me off because I’m like that.  I still like it and still plan to make it (!!!) but . . . I think I’d like to make something that isn’t quite so obviously holding my hand and saying ‘there, there’ first.+ 

+ Says the woman who is about a third of the way through her third leg warmer having still not sewn up the first two.  But I started sewing up last night and . . . it’s working.  Sewing up was my downfall last time—my squares looked reasonably okay individually, but as soon as I started sticking them together their jolly little eccentricities became serious vice and corruption.  Sigh.  Some day I will have the world’s largest knitted hellhound blanket.   Also the most irregular knitted hellhound blanket of any size. 

~ And I have a crush on the drummer.  Just by the way.  And none of the youtube clips do him justice, so don’t give me that ‘ewwww’.  

~~ Gigspanner has two excellent albums out themselves^ . . . but it’s still not the same. 

^ Although they’d better record their Tom o’ Bedlam soon or I shall grow rude and violent

I have brought Hannah over to the DARK SIDE.  She is going to LEARN TO KNIT.  —Well, relearn.  She, like so many of you—my family of origin seems to have been a knitting-free zone—was originally taught by her grandmother.  But when she and I were festive, swinging, cutting-edge young things, knitting was antiquated, déclassé, extinct.  Your grandmother still did it, but nobody else did.*  And then other things like career, family, and the need for at least three and a half hours of sleep per night, get in the way of rediscovering your handcrafty roots:  How to knit, how to sew a fine seam, how to make nightgaunts out of pipe cleaners.  And then one day you look up from your desk and think, I can make publishing CEOs on the other side of the city/planet** tremble but I’ve never (re)learnt to knit.***

            Or possibly you’ve been moaning on the phone to your best friend about how you spend too much time on airplanes.†  And how when things go well you can read or watch a film†† or even get some work done, but things so often don’t go well, and you’re sitting in the gate area and the PA system is telling you every five minutes that you will be loading momentarily, and then when you finally do get on the frelling plane you have a really annoying seatmate who is afraid of flying, freaked out by whatever was holding up loading, and needs to chat.  And the requisite screaming baby is in the seat behind you.†††  And then, because the plane loaded late, you’ve lost your place in the take-off queue, and you’re going to be frelling around here on the ground for quite some time and I hope there isn’t a connecting flight at the other end and . . .

            At which point your friend may say smugly, You should learn to knit.

            Which is what I said to Hannah tonight.  And there was a long pause on the other end of the phone, and then she said, You’re right.  That’s exactly what I should do. . . .  So then we both spent some time looking up knitting shops in New York City‡ and she’s totally going to do this thing.

            YESSSSSSSSSSSSS.

            I am glad today has had a chance to go out on a high.‡‡  High moments in the last fourteen hours have been somewhat thin on the ground.  To begin with it’s been a gorgeous day . . . the first non-dire day we’ve had in about a fortnight.  I COULD GET SOME GARDENING DONE.  I COULD POT UP THE MILLION LITTLE GREEN THINGS WAITING TO BE POTTED UP.

            Except I can’t.  Mondays are voice lesson and ringing at Colin’s.  I haven’t got time for more extracurriculars.  Tomorrow it’s going to rain again.  Indeed it’s warming up to raining again tomorrow right now.‡‡‡  I did slam in a few sweet peas this afternoon in the little gap of time between getting hellhounds back to the cottage for the dog minder to sweep them away and when I need to leave for my singing lesson, but ‘slam’ is the operating word here and remember I said they needed to be potted on?  Yes.  They’ve got a good quarter-inch of white root showing around the bottom of the porous plant-in-situ pots I put them in weeks and weeks ago.

            And . . . I think I told you that I had gone to Oisin’s on Friday positively charged with tragedy, and was going to amaze him with my profound aural empathy with Orfeo mourning his lost Eurydice.  Ha.  Frelling ha ha ha.  About 95% of all that rich, blossoming cornballery went away the moment Oisin raised his hands over his keyboard.§  GODS FRELL IT.  I knew some of it would go away as soon as there was Someone Else Listening but I was pretty depressed that nearly all of it did.  This demoralised me sufficiently that I never really got it back over the weekend, and the Che Faro I took to Nadia today was a poor thin shadow of its last-week self. 

            It was not all bad.  In the first place, Nadia knows.  She’s a singer, and when she says ‘you’re your own worst enemy, Robin,’ she says it sympathetically.  In the second place she’s a girl.  (This was pretty funny.  She was saying ‘I’m a girl’ simultaneously as I was saying ‘he’s a bloke’.)  In the third place . . . she was serious about letting me work on it with her.§§  And in the fourth place . . . I went in saying, you know, even at my cornball best last week when I really was ( . . . I think . . . ) producing some vague, uncertain drama about the whole thing, that top F is an utter ratbag . . . and F isn’t high enough to inspire this amount of angst and perturbation.  And she said immediately, it’s on ‘ben’, isn’t it?  (Yes.)  That’s a really bad vowel sound for singing.  —So at least I wasn’t just being hopeless.  And she gave me some stuff to do.  And I love my voice lessons, even when they’re on THE ONLY GOOD DAY WE’RE GOING TO HAVE ALL MONTH, and when I’m singing like a slightly defective robot.

            And then tonight’s ‘tower’ ring was in Colin’s garage, with his inverted flower-pots.  I am so useless with those ridiculous bells.§§§  But tonight uselessness was general.  We all went home healthier than we came because laughter as we all know is the best medicine.  But in terms of ringing. . . .

            OH GODS IT’S SHEETING OUT THERE.

            But at least Hannah is learning to knit. 

* * *

* And the things your grandmother knitted for you—I had friends with knitting machines for grandmothers—made you cringe in fashion horror, as you drew up your leopardskin spandex with the roses and skulls,^ and snicked on your stud bracelets.^^   A lot of white rats and guinea pigs belonging to dashing, contemporary young things with knitting machines for grandmothers slept extremely well in those days.  

^ I had a pair of jeans-equivalent in this fabric until fairly recently.  

^^ I still have most of these.  I amuse easily.  

** http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Steinberg_New_Yorker_Cover.png

. . . Whew.  Read the caveats at the bottom of the page.  Art is harder.  You can’t excerpt 200 words from art.  If you just drew a square with ‘Kansas City’ written in it it wouldn’t have the same effect. 

*** Or how to make nightgaunts out of pipe cleaners.  Your grandmother probably didn’t teach you that one. 

† Uh-huh.  There was that convention in Hawaii you went to several times.  There was that other convention in San Francisco that gave you enough free time to go on a wine-tasting tour of the Napa Valley.  I’m pretty sure that last trip to Paris—when you came home with the fabulous dress—was work-related.  My heart frelling bleeds.

 †† On your iPad.  In hindsight I realise that I should have known that when both Hannah and Merrilee not only bought iPads but adored them, that I might as well embrace my doom.  I don’t think either of them plays computer games though.  And I’m afraid to ask.  I think they might yell at me. 

††† Or the requisite screaming baby is being held in a parental lap behind your really annoying seatmate so that the requisite marked-for-death toddler with legs just long enough to kick the back of the chair ahead of it every time its parents are looking the other way can be behind you. 

‡ Oh gods look at that gorgeous yarn.  Thank the gods it’s three thousand miles away.^ 

^ No!  I don’t want to know if they ship overseas!  Nor do I want to know the brand so I can see if anyone over here sells it!  NO! 

‡‡ I say nothing about the night.  Which is young and full of dreadful promise. 

‡‡‡ All right, all right, it’s after midnight, it is tomorrow.  The frelling rain doesn’t have to be so sharp off the flapdoodling blocks. 

§ Or keyboards, in this case:  he suggested he try the organ.  The accompaniment sounded really nice on the organ.  What we’re doing here is giving a miss to the main event, which would be me. 

§§ YAAAAAAAAAY.  Sorry.  But . . . YAAAAAAAAAAAAY. 

§§§  From the sublime to the ridiculous or what.  Colin’s entire garage would fit inside the mouth of the abbey’s biggest bell.

Hellhounds and I put Cathy on the train in Mauncester this morning.*  Hellhounds and I then headed farther out, to Warm Upford, to check on the bluebell situation.  And the heavens opened.  Sweet bleeding demiurges, I thought it had been raining before.  This was the solid wall of water variety, coming down so hard you not only can’t see out of your windscreen, but you wonder uneasily if it’s going to dent your roof and rip your windscreen wipers off.  You’re going at 20 mph because you can’t see . . . and then you fall into the Mississippi River, SPLASH, and here you thought you were in southern England and what the frell happened to the frelling levees?**  Fortunately Wolfgang is equipped with an amphibian button from his secret life as a stunt car for James Bond, and so we swam to shore and continued on our way, which had become brown and given to whirlpools.  We were the second car behind a monster lorry, and when it hit a road-flood I swear the bow-wave was taller than Wolfgang.  This kind of downpour doesn’t last, I told myself, clinging valiantly to the steering wheel, and indeed it didn’t, it slacked off to mere sheeting between onslaughts of cannonball rain.  We got out to Warm Upford and turned around despondently to come back by another route and . . . there was suddenly and unexpectedly this astonishing manifestation called ‘blue sky’.***  I pulled Wolfgang over at the first opportunity and hellhounds and I got out for a sprint. A wet sprint.  A very wet sprint.  A very, very wet sprint.  A very, very, very wet sprint.  A . . . .†

            I had a concert to go to tonight.  In Frellingham.  Arrrgh.  Frellingham is about forty-five minutes from here.  Nina lives there now, and she emailed me a while ago about the schedule at the little concert venue a few blocks from her and her bloke’s new house.  We had agreed that tonight’s visitation looked amusing:  a ragtag collection of old folk-hippie musicians who have (apparently) banded together against the encroachment of electro-techno alternative art prog dance-punk-metal experimental grungehorror cyberthrash, and gone on tour.   Nina had bought tickets.  Hellhounds and I got back from our wet sprint, and having used up sixteen towels getting half dry, I emailed poor Nina in a bit of a panic saying I’m not driving to Frellingham in this. 

            It cleared off.  Sort of.  Comparatively.†††  Hellhounds and I only got semi-wet on the afternoon hurtle, and the wind wasn’t blowing more than 80 mph except for the occasional gust, so I slid a few extra lead weights into the special James Bond slots under Wolfgang’s chassis†† and we went.

            The concert was . . . amusing.‡  Sometimes it is a good thing to be reminded that your youth is something you get to grow out of.  And I only got slightly lost on my way to Nina and Ignatius’ new house—I’ve only been there once before and which way you go on the unmarked roundabout(s) may take a little while to lodge in the memory.

            Tomorrow . . . reality bites.  And SHADOWS reign.‡‡ 

* * *

* Waaaaaah.  But . . . pretty much everything about the timing of this visit sucked dead (you should forgive the term) bears.  She was supposed to be coming after I had finished and handed in SHADOWS.^  She was supposed to be coming after I was caught up to Hamaker New Thing Monkeywrench #s 1 and 2.^^  She was also supposed to be coming here to have long walks through the countryside and, it being bluebell season, she would not only see bluebells, but we might possibly get a hellgoddess and hellhounds surrounded by bluebells photo.^^^

            No.  None of the above.  But she did see baby robins.  And we lay on the folded-out sofa at the cottage with a plethora of hellhounds# and watched WONDERFALLS## on the Shiny Two-Ton No Longer New Entirely Rebuilt Ex-Lemon### Laptop, thus proving it can do something right.~  Also, that bartender is hot.~~  And the rain drummed on.        

^ And was far enough along on the doodle backlog that you could actually get into my office again.  Not, I suppose, that she needed to get into my office, but it’s easier to browse my F&SF shelves, which are what live (mostly+) in my office, from within arm’s length than . . . not within arm’s length. 

+ There’s a wall of homeopathy too.  Which is why SF&F spills into the bedroom. 

^^ When in fact I’m writing ep 12 and it’ll be another one or two before we get to HNTM one.  We started #3 while she was here anyway. 

^^^ Instead she drank a lot of tea out of my bluebell mug+, since that was as close as she was going to get.  Well, there are a few bluebells in my garden, but given the, ahem, lushness of the planting out there, you’d get just as soaked going to look at them as if you went and found some wild ones. 

+ http://www.emmabridgewater.co.uk/flowers/bluebell-12-pint-mug/invt/ngbb002/

Hmph.  It’s got more expensive since I bought mine.

 # They expand to fill available space.  I’ve noticed this before. 

## http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wonderfalls 

### She says with dramatic emphasis. 

~Including, evidently, playing a region 1 DVD.  I am so clueless about all of this. 

~~ So is Beth. 

** Ask George W. Bush. 

*** It was still raining, of course.  This is southern England^.  It rains out of blue sky all the time.  But it doesn’t usually rain the pummelling you all over your body kind of rain out of blue sky.  Usually. 

^ Unless it’s the Mississippi delta. 

†  And I’m afraid the rumours that it’s a bad year for bluebells appear to be true.  There aren’t as many flower stalks at all, it seems to me, and the ones there are have four or six little bells per, and usually you get twelve or fifteen.  Aside from the tricky questions about taking photos in the rain, if I can’t find a better forest floor of them, there won’t be bluebell photos this year.  I have a couple more places to try, but I’m not too hopeful.   That was my best bluebell sea today.

†† Very bad for mileage, but they do keep you on the road. 

††† I’ve just had a frelling email from frelling Cathy saying it was beautiful and clear all day where she was on the south coast.  WELL ISN’T THAT SPECIAL. 

‡ There wasn’t a single person there under forty.  There was also way too much khaki hemp^ and Birkenstocks, but I lowered the level as much as I could in a salmon-coloured turtleneck and All Stars and a watermelon-coloured pullover.   My frameless glasses are against me though.

^ No, no, not that kind of hemp.  

‡‡ And New Thing gets a nice padded footstool.

It’s okay.  I can write a blog tonight.  Darkness ate dinner.  *&^%$£@#~}+!!!!!!!!!!!  Cathy, on the other side of the table, is breathing a deep sigh of relief.  She’d made the perilous, not to say fatal, offer to write another guest blog if I found myself incapable on account of the extreme reprehensibleness of hellhounds and the resultant need to wail and rail incessantly all evening.*  Which is to say, Darkness stopped eating.  Yesterday. 

            I know, I know (and you regular readers know, you know).  Normal dogs—well, normal sighthounds—miss meals occasionally.  It’s not a big deal.  It’s a big deal with these guys because of their history.  And it’s a big deal to me because I’m the human supposedly in charge of managing they survive their history.  And they are a lot better, about food, about eating food, and about stopping eating (food) and about looking like they’re at death’s door after about twenty-four hours of not eating.  And I may have an ever so slight tendency to hit red alert before it’s absolutely necessary.  But. . . .

             If you graphed hellhound appetites and the amount of food I actually manage to get in them, the lines would swing up and down wildly anyway, like the surface of Lake Superior just before the Edmund Fitzgerald went down.  I’m used to this.  I don’t frelling like it, but I’m used to it.  Occasionally, however, one or both hellhounds ship a really big wave and head for the bottom.  If I hadn’t been distracted by having fun with Cathy—because I am an irresponsible dog owner and a horrible selfish thoughtless human being—I might have noticed that the current oh-well-maybe-I-will-and-maybe-I-won’t food mood was hardening into something more drastic.  It had crossed my mind that the current lack of enthusiasm phase was going on a little long.

               AND THEN . . .

               It has not been a good day.  Today was our last chance to get out into the country and look at bluebells.  And it rained.  Again.  It’s been raining all week.  It was raining when I picked Cathy up at the train station.**  It was raining as we both arrived at and left the abbey.***  It was raining most of Sunday in both Hampshire and Bristol, although Cathy managed to find a little sunlight and follow it around for a few hours.  It rained on my voice lesson.†  It rained on our going to Glaciation to ring with Colin.  It rained on our trip to Mauncester yesterday.††  IT’S BEEN RAINING FOREVER.  IT IS GOING TO RAIN FOREVER.†††  It is just about hip deep around town and squelching out over the countryside when Cathy only has two pairs of shoes with her is not really a credible option.

                AND THEN DARKNESS STOPPED EATING.  AAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.

                It has not been a good day.

                 But Darkness ate dinner.  Enthusiastically.  So I can revert to being all wet and soppy and droopy and soggy, not about the rain, but about the fact that Cathy is leaving tomorrow. . . . 

* * *

* The deep sigh of relief may have been as much to do with the lack of incessant wailing and railing as the fearful prospect of coming up with another 1000+ words that could pass for a coherent synthesis of some damn thing or other only two days after the previous guest blog.  

** It had only just started raining (again), fortunately, since I was late.  Of course I was late.  I’m always late.  And then we had to hare off at extreme speed for the Reification of the Overgoddess at Forza.  I have rung my first service at Forza del Destino.^  Eeep.  This blood-freezing adventure began last Wednesday, when Ulrich said at practise that it was an all-hands-to-the-pumps situation Saturday afternoon for the reification.  I looked away and shuffled my feet because I am not, after all, an abbey ringer, but Gemma said, oh, go on, I’m going to.  So I checked with Cathy about train times and then, in fear and grovelling, although it’s difficult to get grovelling across in an email, I wrote to Ulrich, asking if they still needed extra hands for the reification, and he wrote back pretty much by return electron saying they’d be happy to see me.  Oops.  Now I’m for it. 

            In fact they didn’t need all of us shmo-level ringers, but they were nice enough to pile us all on for rounds on forty-eight.  And Og came by with his clipboard and said to me, smiling in what I’m sure he was under the impression was a friendly manner, You are now on my LIST.

            I may have a bell tower again.  That is, I admit, may.  I’m still expecting them to pull themselves together and bounce schmos like me.+++  And I wish it weren’t a gigantic, ancient, tourist-magnet, one hundred and twelve bell frelling ABBEY.  However, I’ll take what I can get.  And they’re still, with an irony so shiny and sharp it needs a scabbard++++, my best practical choice for a new tower.  Hahahahahahahaha.  Ouch, that hurts. 

^ I’m feeling just a trifle creeped out by my having long ago carelessly blognamed+ it The Force of Destiny.++ 

+ I invent a verb.  I feel it could have wider application however. 

++ It could be a lot worse.  I could have named it La Traviata or Aida. 

+++ Or I could revert to not being able to ring anything.  Anything.  But we are not considering this possibility.  We reject it.  

++++ And its name may be Doomblade. 

*** With a spectacular escort of guards.  Yeep.  We never had guards at New Arcadia, but then we didn’t rededicate goddesses either.  But Cathy and I crossed three different cordons, getting in—I’m a bell ringer! I kept squeaking, feeling a complete fraud—and two getting back out again.  Our favourite was the nice German lady (in the scary guard uniform) who wanted to know about bell ringing.  

† Yes.  I took Cathy to my voice lesson.  And if she tries to write a guest blog about that I will destroy her.^ 

            It was pretty interesting though.  I hadn’t thought about this when I asked Nadia if I could bring a friend that Monday, but it was the day after Diana’s memorial and I was going to be another jigsaw for Nadia to put back together, as well as in (fractured) avert mode because There Was Someone Else Listening.  It was not my most brilliant lesson—but it was not, in fact, my most embarrassing either.  Nadia says sometimes your worst practises and your worst lessons are the most educational—and this one taught me some stuff.  Nadia spent some time talking about channelling emotion into your singing.  The impulse—my impulse anyway—is to stomp all that slithery, squishy stuff down, and the stomping process is a lot of what breaks you up into jigsaw pieces.  Feh.  I’ve told you about the frelling chasm between what I can do at home when no one is listening, but where I don’t have all of Nadia’s tricks for getting a better quality of sound out of me, and what I can do for Nadia, whom I want to please and therefore am afraid to get stuff wrong for—I mentioned that I’d torn the heart out of Che Faro over the washing-up and Nadia said briskly, I look forward to hearing it next week.  EEEEEEP.  This is pretty much the same kind of exciting and same kind of terrifying as the prospect of maybe having a bell tower again.  I would LOVE to work on Che Faro with Nadia, but I’ve assumed that was seriously down the line from where I am now.  And it probably is, you know?  I’ll take it in to her and . . . 

^ No, wait, I can’t destroy her, she’s helping me with New Thing.+ 

+ And in answer to some forum question or other, yes, it will get a title, at least of sorts, as soon as you learn the protagonist’s name, which is in ep nine or so. 

†† More *&^%$£”+=}]~#@!!!!!!  Our trip was supposed to produce a certain outcome which was going to produce a particular blog post.  And we were FOILED by . . . well, never mind what we were foiled by.  I’ll get there in the end.  And then I’ll write a blog post about it.  Grrrrrrrrrr.  

††† I tell myself, rain is good.  We’re in a drought.  We need this rain.  I AM SURE I AM GROWING MOULD ALL OVER MY BODY.

I had FOUR new songs to learn, or to try on for size and choose from, the last fortnight, since Nadia, the lazy slut, was taking Easter Monday off,* they just don’t make voice teachers like they used to.**  And then I had flu.***  I’ve only been really singing for about the last three days.†  So, at rather a pelt, I learnt a song and a half:  Long Time Ago arranged by Aaron Copland†† and half of When Daisies Pied by Thomas Arne†††. 

            In some ways the increasing gap between what I do or can do at home and what I do or can do for Nadia is INCREASINGLY FRUSTRATING.  I do my most emotive singing . . . mostly over the washing-up.  Please.  But there’s something about having something that is just slightly distracting‡ to do with your hands and about one-tenth of your brain, as well as no audience‡‡, that enables all kinds of freedom.  I caught myself breaking my heart over the dead Eurydice some time this weekend . . . and of course the moment I noticed it went away and I couldn’t get it back.  Arrrrgh.  But in terms of sheer howling frustration at the perversity of self-consciousness . . . I was doing scales at the sink.  It was, again, some time this weekend.  I’d been singing for a day or two at that point but this was my first attempt to get back into my top end.  Oh dear, I thought, that A is still very squeaky.  So I went to the piano because sometimes having the piano to lean on is comforting.  And it wasn’t the A.  It was the B.  I don’t have a B—yet—but I’ve thought I probably will because I have the A# most of the time at home and an occasional chalkboard squeal above that.  This was definitely a B, and while it was far from a thing of beauty, it was real enough that if I could make it on demand it would be useful in a choir where I’m being covered up by a lot of better Bs.‡‡‡

            Of course it only lasted long enough for me to go, glibberglingglang, that’s a B!  That’s a real, live B!  Whereupon it went away so emphatically I could barely hack my way to the A.  Siiiiiiiigh. 

            When I went in today the first thing Nadia did was make me do a lot of physical stretches to get the bits reconnected since, post-flu, they’ve all shut down in postures of rigid defense.  The point being that I was even singing badly . . . but I had still managed to produce that top B I don’t have (yet) simply because I knew I had had flu and wasn’t expecting much.   ARRRRRRGH.

            She then asked me what, of whatever I was singing, I’d most like her input on, and I pulled out Long Time Ago.  And here’s the thing . . . she didn’t say anything about the notes and all that basic stuff (despite the fact that they are not perfect).  She went immediately into phrasing and interpretation. 

            You know this improvement scam is kind of intimidating. . . . 

blondviolinist

Yep. So the performer who listed it as “cello” was probably a nice enough person, and the performer who listed it as “violoncelle” was full of themselves.  

I did wonder.  It’s the ‘violoncelle’ performer that we missed.  The cello player was a nice young man—and I think I remember he placed in the instrumental category.  I did know about the “ ’cello” from reading lots of old books, but I assumed that since this was in some other language it must be some other instrument. 

Diane in MN

Unfortunately he’s not the least interested in opera and unless he has a voice teacher at some point who wakes him up to the glories of the operatic repertoire I think we’ll lose him to the West End. Feh.

How good are you at subverting voice teachers? 

SNORK.  That approach hadn’t occurred to me.  Well, the family have been threatening to move south, to be nearer the rest of the clan. . . . 
I didn’t hear Traviata this afternoon and from your description, I would have disliked the production a whole lot. As when:
[. . .] she realises he’s asking her to give up Alfredo forever SHE TAKES HER DRESSING-GOWN OFF and trails around in her slip. Oh gods how I hate the wandering around in your underwear to indicate vulnerability and innocence thing. (She does it again later at the party. [. . .])
This would have taken me right outside the performance, 

YES.   THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT IT DOES.  ‘Surreal’ has rules (even if I’m not sure what they are) just like ‘fantasy’ does, and if you break them, you ruin the story, and the spell.  The end of the first act, when she’s singing about how she has to be free, and then she hears Alfredo off stage singing about the power of love, in his wet way, and it stops her . . . in this staging, he comes on stage and confronts her, although I think you don’t have to know the standard set-up to recognise the dream-like quality of it here:  she is confronting herself really.  And it works.  That’s one of the things that works a treat.  It’s hard to believe that someone who came up with this would also come up with trailing around in your slip. 

even if other elements (like Alfredo in his underwear) had failed to do so.  

Indeed.  I was having a little trouble, although I would have coped, with the cabbage roses.  The boxer shorts broke my suspension of disbelief snap.  Reasons Never to Be A Stage Actor:  your director can make a fool of you and there’s nothing you can do about it. 

I dislike and am distracted by staging that wants to trump the music or libretto or both.  Aaargh. It’s too bad that on top of that, the singers were not at their best. 

Yes.  And part of the frustration is that a good deal of this staging was really interesting.  But . . . I was talking to someone else who saw it, who agreed that Dmitri sang like a stick.  It may have been characterisation—Papa Germont is a stick—but it was not a good choice. 

Blondviolinist

I haven’t seen many productions of La Trav, but I’ve yet to see one in which the 2nd act didn’t bore me. (Well, except for Papa Germond’s aria. He’s being a jerk, but oh! is it gorgeous music.) This includes two of Zeffirelli’s stagings. Maybe the act is simply hard to stage effectively. 

We-ell. . . . I wouldn’t say boring, myself, but then I love the opera too much.  I do absolutely know what you mean.  For me the music, well sung, can deal with anything (and Dessay, even not in top voice, was well worth watching, and I’d see her in it again without hesitation).  What I guess happens with me is that I look forward to all three scenes, and I would have said that it’s pretty hard to get both Germont and Violetta and the party scene wrong, they’re both oozy with easy drama.  All right, it’s not hard:  put Violetta in her dressing gown, and then make her take it off, and then wander brokenly around the rest of the stage pulling all the cabbage roses off the furniture.  ARRRRGH.  Anyway.  It shouldn’t be hard to stage both those scenes.  The rough one is the one between Papa the Thug and Alfredo the Wet Brat. 

              And yes, since you ask, I’m insane, we knew that, I’d love a chance to try. . . . 

* * * 

* I think this was a toddler-minding problem rather than a desire to loll around at home in her dressing-gown all day eating bonbons and watching soap operas.  

** WHAT AM I GOING TO DO WHILE SHE’S ON MATERNITY LEAVE FOR TWO MONTHS?  I’LL FORGET EVERYTHING.^ 

^ Drama queen?  What?  Clearly you don’t take music lessons from a Nadia. 

*** I know.  I still owe you a what? blog about how the New Thing came to be.  It may be some help if I mention now that ‘raving with fever’ had something to do with it.

 † And I still have one spectacularly blocked ear which is very, very boring.  

†† http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-D8wqsmkYT8  So I have a thing for baritones.  Sue me.  Of the half dozen that come up immediately on YouTube this is my favourite.  And having listened to all of the ones I liked twice (and this one three times) I have STOPPED because Nadia doesn’t like me listening to YouTube—I told you this, that she believes that you pick up interpretations without meaning to and she wants her students making their own mistakes.  And their own not-mistakes.  As recently as when I was first learning Dove Sei I thought she was straining at gnats with me—I could certainly see why she’d be thinking about this with a student who, you know, had a real voice and was really singing—but . . .

               Um.  Okay.  Yes.  I’ve crossed that line too.^  Granted that Long Time Ago (or When Daisies Pied) is a simple song, but my excuse for heading for YouTube was to learn the actual line as quickly as possible without worrying about my eccentric piano-playing.  But I was pretty much ignoring the melody because I knew I could pick it up, and listening to the phrasing.  How does he do that—oh.  Oops. 

EMoon
It is amazing, as I take more lessons and crawl slowly forward in the singing, how much more I can hear in others’ singing. 

Yes.  Exactly.  I’ve been aware of it increasingly—as I mentioned again on Friday after the Pan-galactic finals, that your listening is different in kind if you’re having even a feeble and talent-free stab at doing whatever-it-is yourself.  But I don’t think I had realised till I started listening to good professional singers singing Long Time Ago the other night just how far down this road I’ve come.  Oh wow.  Look.  Elephants.  Toto, I have a feeling we’re not in Kansas any more.  

All I need is more work, more work, more work, and no other things interrupting it. (Bwah-ha-ha-ha! she sings, with expression and only the right amount of vibrato. . . .

Well . . . that might be true with you people with voices.  It’s certainly true that I could use more practise time to good effect but . . . I’m still going to hit the wall with this voice-equivalent sooner rather than later.  Good reasons to keep singing off the McKinley Obsession List. 

My friend Susan . . . mentioned today that a great contralto died a few days ago at age 90, Lili Chookasian. I knew nothing about her, but Susan gave a link to one of her recordings and I was completely wiped out by it, tears and all. Well below both our ranges, on the low end, but in case you’re interested, here’s a link:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xrZTUm8IUAU&feature=relat ed 

Oh my.  Yes.  (Which is why I’m sticking it in here, for musical blog-readers who don’t look at the forum.)  I would love Kathleen Ferrier anyway, but I also love her because she’s the only true contralto I’ve pretty much ever frelling heard of. 

              I also sing Blow the Wind Southerly and even though I love the song and there’s no reason I shouldn’t, still . . . why?  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjvHg9cBriw ^^  

^ For better and worse.  Generally speaking I’m fine with the fact that I’m not going to be a (very) late-flowering Beverly Sills.  But I do kind of catch myself wishing that I had the chops+ to be a big frog in even a very small pond.   Some of this is worrying about the future of the Muddles:  I’ve told you we’re going to be getting a new director and Who Knows.  And thanks to having more throat trouble this last year than I have had since I was a bronchitis-prone preteen and that the Muddles have lots of long breaks from rehearsal, I’ve never quite fully committed to them.  If our new leader wants us singing medleys of old Beatles hits I’ll be out of there so fast I’ll give myself road burn.  

+ Er . . . croaks? 

^^ And Che Faro.  And He Was Despised.  And O Waly Waly.  She sang a lot of my favourite repertoire.  And I am a glutton for self-punishment.  

 ††† http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HxiTrRwsW0E  

‡ There are good musical moments out with hellhounds too.^  But you can never afford to be too distracted from continuously scanning your surroundings for sudden perils.  And I’ve never had a spoon or a tea mug leap out of my hands and go scalding off after a rabbit. 

^ Even if Chaos will not stop looking up at me earnestly when I sing.  When we’re out hurtling he trots at my side.  At home he gets out of the nice comfy dog bed to stand near me and stare.   No, I’m not in pain.  Go away.   

‡‡ Other than a deranged hellhound.  

‡‡‡ Or at least Griselda.  You really only need Griselda.

The delicate, easily disturbed and faint-hearted should look away NOW.  (You can skip down to the opera review.)  

GROSSNESS ALERT.  DON’T SAY I DIDN’T WARN YOU.

So, what is the worst thing?  The very, very worst thing?

            Think about it a minute.  I can wait.

            Hint:  It has to do with dogs. 

            Do I see a certain dawning horror in your eyes?

            Yes.  That’s right.  It’s when your plastic bag breaks and you find yourself holding a NAKED HANDFUL OF DOG SHIT.*  And have I mentioned lately that hellhounds, due to their little digestive issues, tend to produce squishy excreta? 

            I was also wearing fingerless gloves at the time.  So maximum vileness, disgustingness and destruction of personal property.**

            I WILL NEVER USE THIS BRAND OF PICK UP BAGS AGAIN.  Part of the complete scenario here is that I know these bags are, ahem, crap, but I was loath to throw out the rest of the packet not because it was a waste of my money—pick up bags are cheap—but because I worry about all that additional plastic in the environment that town-dwelling dog-owners produce and so I’ve gone on using them checking them carefully first.  HITHERTO the breakages have been visible as soon as you drag the thing open to use it.  Not today.

            And no, we weren’t even on the river walk at the time, with nice easily available water.

            I will spare you the details of the rest of the walk home.  In this case hurtle is an understatement.

            AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAUGH.*** 

* * *

I wasn’t sure even La Traviata, my favourite opera, could save this day.  When I was failing to get to Manon last week due to the remains of the lurgy I was telling myself that NOTHING was going to stop me going to La Trav this week.  NOTHING.  And in fact nothing did.  Not even the need to keep washing my hands every five minutes. 

            It was Natalie Dessay’s first Violetta† and I’m a big fan of Dessay—she’s an actor as well as a singer, so you don’t have to close your eyes and concentrate on the music.  And she had Matthew Polenzani as her Alfredo—and Dmitri Hvorostovsky as her Papa Germont.  What could go wrong? 

            Well, the first thing is the production—it’s the famous Willy Decker Red Dress, Big Clock and Doctor Death production.  I’m embarrassed to say I’m not sure if I’ve seen it before or not.  I don’t like surreal††, so it’s not naturally going to, ahem, sing to me.  And there was a lot of it I didn’t remember—but there was quite a bit I seemed to remember so . . . whatever.  Maybe that’s all part of the surreality.  At least with this team a lot of it did work.  One of the built-in problems with La Trav is that Alfredo, the romantic hero, is a nasty, spoilt, self-centred little wet.  I don’t know how he does it, but Polenzani is good at making wet-tenor characters you badly want to slap understandable and appealing.  He managed it here, but this is also one of the things the production (I think) gets right:  he is really persecuted by the dissolute crowd Violetta hangs out with and you can sympathize with him going a little off the rails. 

            Another inherent problem is that the only reason you know Violetta is dying of consumption is because the plot says so.†††  What you see is some singer strong enough to carry an extremely demanding role.  In this production Violetta totters onto the stage during the overture, spends some time bent over coughing (silently) and has her first encounter with Doctor Death.  So you’re set up for the situation.  And you see her pull herself together and morph into the heartless courtesan as the party starts.  (This is the sort of thing Dessay is really good at too.)  And she periodically addresses herself to the doctor during the action, which reminds you that she’s under a death sentence.   I thought this worked really well.

            The things that didn’t work so well . . . in the first place, poor Dessay was having an off night.  You could hear it, and during the intermission interview she said as much—and you could see her dismay in her face.  I’d guess her to be a perfectionist, possibly beyond the perfectionism any Met singer needs, and here she is in her first Violetta, which is one of the plum soprano roles, at the Met, and on the Live in HD night broadcast across the globe. . . she’s having to nurse her voice along and still isn’t quite succeeding.  Her speaking voice sounds like she has a head cold, but that wouldn’t necessary screw up her singing voice.  Except that it did.

            After a killer first act—Alfredo’s wooing and her response is especially effective—I thought most of the second act sucked pond scum.  The basic stage set is very stark, which is fine, and the beginning of the second act, when Violetta and Alfredo are tucked up in their jolly country love-nest, everything is draped with great swathes of fabric covered in big fat pink and red cabbage roses.  Duh.  Okay.  Got it.  They’re wearing dressing-gowns of the same stuff and—first mistake—our hero, under his dressing-gown, is wearing an ordinary business shirt and boxer shorts.  This is not a look even a major heart-throb could bring off, and the pudgy Polenzani does not succeed.  The business of Alfredo finding out that Violetta is bankrupting herself to keep him in the style to which he has become accustomed is bungled . . . and then Papa Germont shows up.  Violetta is  still in her dressing-gown.  What?  She’s an effing courtesan and this is the seriously bourgeois dad of her lover.  She would be rupturing herself to be as proper as possible—and when he starts out being rude and she says that she’s a lady in her own house—done well this is terrific putdown but SHE’S IN HER DRESSING-GOWN.  And . . . the awful truth is that I was not convinced by my hero Dmitri.  He sang well but . . . but . . .

            And then when she realises he’s asking her to give up Alfredo forever SHE TAKES HER DRESSING-GOWN OFF and trails around in her slip.  Oh gods how I hate the wandering around in your underwear to indicate vulnerability and innocence thing.  (She does it again later at the party.  OH STOP IT.)  The face-off between dad and son is no better.  This is an inherent problem that this production did not solve.  Dad starts the ‘come home to your loving family’ routine just as Alfredo has read the letter from Violetta saying she’s leaving him, so he’s not at his most relaxed and persuadable.  And the poor actor playing Alfredo doesn’t really have anything to DO except fulminate for several minutes while dad sings.  I’ve never seen this done persuasively.  In this case they made it worse by Papa slugging his son . . . and then instantly dropping back into his ‘all is forgiven’ refrain.  What?  Who needs to forgive whom here?  Papa Germont is the most awful thug to begin with.  He doesn’t need any help.

            The third act was a mixed bag.  I was smarting from the second act—and there’s no way to get around the fact that the reason the Germonts come to see her is because they know she’s dying and won’t mess up Papa’s snug little middle-class life much longer.  Although the surrealism does mean that they get away with the doctor saying authoritatively ‘she has only hours to live’ which kind of whacks your suspension of disbelief in most stagings;  and that there isn’t a bed solves the problem of whether Violetta, with only hours to live, gets out of it and runs around or not.  And Dessay is a very, very good actor.  I usually do burst into tears at the end—indeed I feel all coitus interruptus if I don’t—but I didn’t have to think about it this time.  I was totally heartbroken. 

            Oh, and that second leg-warmer is almost done.

 * * *

* I admit this may tie for first place with projectile diarrhoea indoors, which I also have some direct experience of, but despite the sheer grossness factor the really distressing part of that isn’t the clean up but the throat-closing, heart-squeezing worry about your critter.  

** Can These Gloves Be Saved?  Probably not.  I’ll boil the right one a few times, but . . . probably not. 

*** I’ve washed my hands so often the skin is coming off.^ 

^ Will I Ever Use My Right Hand Again.+ 

+ Probably.  Typing one-handed is a ratbag.  And while I can use chopsticks with my left hand, it’s not a fun time. 

† At the Met, anyway.  I think she said in the intermission interview it was her first ever. 

†† I like practical fantasy.  I like the magic to have rules, and I want to know where the latrines are and if they’ve got good drainage. 

††† And whoever wrote this year’s synopsis is a moron.  It begins:  ‘Violetta Valery knows that she will die soon, exhausted by her restless life as a courtesan.’  SHE’S DYING OF TUBERCULOSIS, YOU CRETIN.  Her lifestyle is certainly contributing to the speed of her decline, but if that were all that was wrong with her she’d last a good while yet.

Grandson did not win.  Grandson came fourth in the vocal category.  I wouldn’t have expected him to have stage nerves—he’s been in amateur and semi-professional gigs pretty much since he was old enough to toddle on by himself, and was eye-catching enough at one of the latter to have had the offer of a scholarship at one of the big flashy London performing-arts schools but decided for himself he didn’t want to be that single minded and that far away from home yet—but my guess is that there were some nerves in attendance.  He’s a charismatic performer, and that was a little muted today.*

            But it was a much more interesting show generally than either Peter or I was expecting, I think.  The first thing that happened was a reprieve.  The order of performance is done by lot, and his mum said that he always draws early, so we were going to have to be there for the first shot over the adjudicators’ bows.  And then last thing last night, news—he was going to be in the second half, after the break.  So we could drift in in an idle and well-rested manner at about 11 . . .

            Except we didn’t.  We didn’t leave that much later after all, had an easy soar down there** and only missed the first performer.***  And . . . what it was was a free concert with great seats.  I’m not sure what I was expecting—these are the national finals after all, and the Pan-galactics are no slouch.  But.  Wow. 

            In the absence of pianists† I was far more interested in the singers, not only because we had our hero to cheer for (who was, just by the way, the only boy).  But (as I emailed Nadia, because I had to talk to somebody who would understand) while before Blondel and Nadia I would have been able to pick out the bits these young singers haven’t quite nailed yet†† I wouldn’t have been so aware of how they were trying to do what they were doing—and of some of the pitfalls on the way they have successfully negotiated.  I don’t think anyone who cares deeply about music and listens intensely is ever unaware of what a lot of work doing it well is, but there is definitely a difference in kind of your appreciation if you’re having a small stumbling whack at it yourself. 

             There were a few repertoire choices that I thought were a bit ill advised, but the slightly unsatisfactory deliveries may also have been nerves rather than that the singer was overfaced by her material.  And there were a few real jaw-droppers.  The girl who won looks about twelve.  She came quietly out and announced her pieces with perfect self-possession but no particular panache . . . and then started to sing.  Big major yeeeeep.†††  Golly she was good.  She was one of the first, and was instantly one to beat.  And then as it happens the last song by the last performer was the other real jaw-dropper, Cherubino from the Marriage of Figaro raving about love.  She sang it with exactly the right wildness for the adolescent male‡, but it was also the most fully realised complete performance:   an ordinary teenage girl in a nice party dress suddenly transformed into a lust-maddened teenage boy.  It was extraordinary.  She came second.  The girl who came first was probably the more polished performance but this last babe had passion.‡‡

             And I got a lot of knitting done.  I really am going to have a pair of leg warmers by next autumn.‡‡‡    Possibly conceivably just-believably even two pairs.§ 

* * *

* I admit I’ve never heard him in public before.  But he knocks the back wall of the kitchen out when he sings here.  His voice has got amazing over the last few years.  I remember him as starting out a perfectly nice light tenor and he says he’s still a tenor but I’d call him a baritone.  He’s got the baritone boooom at the bottom of his range, although he says it’s the top end that’s stretching.  Well, I bet the bottom end will stretch too.  Or maybe he’s just going to grow up to be one of the heldentenors of our time.  Unfortunately he’s not the least interested in opera and unless he has a voice teacher at some point who wakes him up to the glories of the operatic repertoire I think we’ll lose him to the West End.  Feh.  

** My gods.  The Jaguar.  Yeep.  I don’t ride in fancy cars all that often and I forget.  The sensation of gliding rather than sitting in something with mere wheels.  The way you are forced back into the leather upholstery if your driver decides to pass some mere vehicle.   

Caligula

What sort of Jag was it?  

I haven’t the faintest idea and they didn’t know. (It originally belonged to Saxon’s dad.)  I did ask.^  Georgiana said that it’s a Sovereign, and I can tell you that it’s the xj type, but in the great hierarchy of Jags I haven’t the slightest.^^  I’d be surprised if it was more than about ten years old, but then Jags age well.  But speaking of charisma. . . . 

^ I said someone on the blog wanted to know.  Most of the members of the immediate clan are aware of my curious nighttime activity. 

^^ Slatey blue-grey with creamy leather insides.  You want to have brushed hair and clean fingernails when you sit in it.  Hellhounds need not apply. 

*** Okay, here’s an oddity that perhaps some music teacher out there can explain.  There was one cello and one violoncelle—I don’t even know what a violoncelle^ is and it’s the one person we missed—and everything else you blew into, and all but one were winds.  The one blowing-into that wasn’t, was a euphonium, which I wouldn’t have been able to describe to you either, but I can tell you now it’s a bit like a big rectangular French horn and has similar big fat scary notes and I have no idea how he managed to get so many of them out of the thing so accurately.  The rest were three flutes, a clarinet and a very snazzy recorder.  No violinists?  No pianists?  

^ And the only on line definitions I can find are in French.  Is it the French word for cello?  There has to be some reason to call it a violoncelle rather than a cello? 

†  !!!!!!!!!!!!!  

††  Someone sang Dove Sei.  Snork.  But the irony about her performance was that she didn’t take advantage of her opportunities to hit that note and hold the freller till your audience begs for mercy.  You come in on a fermata:  Doooooooooooooove sei, and there’s another one in the ‘vieni’ before your top G, which is as hair-raising as it gets in this innocent-seeming little aria^, but that little phrase is set up for you to go for it.  Nadia, whose mission in my life is to loosen me up, has even said go for it, and that (if I need a light whip of vengeance to get my blood circulating) here is my opportunity to make Oisin follow me, because this is the Singer’s Big Moment.  You even repeat the vieni-with-top-G phrase on the second go-through—and then run down the last few bars to the end.  I can’t do it, but I do grasp that it’s rife with opportunity.  And this little girl with the lovely sweet voice and the appealing manner went straight through all her hot chances without anything remotely resembling a fermata.  This may, of course, have been her stage nerves, but I’d’ve said the accompanist was expecting it.  

            Speaking of the accompanist(s):  most of the performers brought their own.^^  There was one fellow who appeared several times whom I had little trouble identifying as the one laid on locally, and I wasn’t too impressed.  Till the introducer mentioned that he had in fact stepped in with about forty-eight hours’ warning when the fellow they had booked went down ill.  Yowzah.  Suddenly he’s a hero too. 

^ Nadia keeps telling me it’s not that difficult a piece and I’m just reacting to the fact that it’s from an OPERA. 

^^ Our hero’s accompanist is lovely.  

††† She sang an aria from Cosi fan tutte, where Despina is chirpily and dancingly telling her mistresses (she’s their maid) how to catch a bloke, and then this moooooournful legaaaaaaato lied by Brahms. 

‡  Yes.  It’s a trouser role for a mezzo. 

‡‡ Other standouts for me included one of those Italian arias from the notorious soprano student’s ARIE book that I sing:  Se Tu M’ami.  She did it a lot better.  Surprise.  Not.  And ‘Batti batti’ from Don Giovanni was also charmingly and flirtatiously done—which is the only way to bring it off.  Mozart is so frelling tuneful you can forget what complex personalities his characters are. 

‡‡‡ Barring rogue yarn-bomber raids where masked individuals steal your projects to wrap around lampposts and bollards.  

§ Well I need an assortment of COLOURS, don’t I?

My dog minder didn’t show up today. 

            Ordinarily I don’t absolutely need a dog walker to give hellhounds their second long sprint of the day Monday or any other day.  But I found out the hard way that if you don’t get your dog minder on retainer, so to speak, she’s less likely to find time for you when you really need her for the exciting one-offs of life*.  So I have her every Monday, and then I can come home and have a nice cup of tea after my voice lesson and before I have to go ringing.** 

            We had a traumatic morning*** when I bundled hellhounds into Wolfgang and went out to Warm Upford for fuel.  It is insane that there are no petrol stations within about five miles of New Arcadia† but that’s the way it is.  New Arcadia has several thousand residents and Warm Upford has several hundred, but it’s Warm Upford with the petrol station.  It took sixty one quid to fill Wolfgang’s tank.  I nearly had heart failure.††  Granted the tank was unusually empty, thanks to the petrol-strike panic-buying nonsense which I wanted to give a miss if at all possible (and there was no sign of it today), but for sixty-one quid in the current economic climate I could buy a perfectly serviceable, low-maintenance pony.†††

            We did still have an excellent hurtle—it’s the beginning of April, the progress of the bluebells must be closely monitored from here on.‡  And this is the beginning of my favourite time of year:  from the daffs and forsythia and the first little bluebell florets and the swelling lilac buds through to the great midsummer hurrah of my roses:  everything is rushing out at increasing speed and your mission, Ms Briggs, should you decide to accept it, is to try and frelling keep up.  I squeezed nearly an hour in the garden out of a schedule that had time for no such foolishness in it‡‡ and I did think, as I pelted off to Wolfgang‡‡‡ and Nadia, that it was odd my dog minder hadn’t come yet.

            Nadia was teaching in a new place—and fortunately I met her previous student leaving or I might never have found it, hidden away as it is behind some trompe d’oeil hedges.  It’s a nice if fairly ordinary looking bungalow and then you get inside and . . . golly.  Serious music room.  Yeep.  Intimidating.  But it was still Nadia.  And it was Nadia who had told me during my last lurgy§ that often enough to be hopeful about it, you can sing through a lot of head, throat and upper respiratory malfeasances, and this is (so far) one of those.  It’s positively bizarre, to sing as well as you ever do§§ and then as soon as you stop, to be sneezing and talking in a hoarse, scratchy voice.  And I have not one but two new songs to learn over the Easter break§§§.

            I then came back to the cottage, feeling a trifle worn, wanting only to pick up well-hurtled hellhounds and sweep down to the mews to have a nice cup of tea and perhaps some extravagance like an apple before ringing . . . and my dog minder hadn’t come.  Weep.  Weep.

            I hurtled hounds—perhaps a little slower than usual, and with more pauses for nose-blowing.  I rang Niall to ask if he was going ringing tonight.  He answered the phone sounding like me.  I will if you will, he croaked.  So we went, trying to breathe shallowly, although a bunch of ringers is not so unlike a classroom of virusy children, and you all know how that works out.#  It was a particular ratbag to be tottery and brainless too because my old ringing master, from the veriest deeps of time before ME and the turn of the century, was there, and he can ring anything.  He does, however, need the band to ring any/everything, and . . .

            I am so going to bed early.##           

* * *

* Or possibly the opera-season-offs. 

** I like that have to go ringing.  Well, I do.  Ringing is necessary to my life.  Which is a good reason for living in England, which still has the highest density of change-ringing bell towers anywhere on the planet.^ 

^ Not to mention the beginner handbell education seminar tomorrow.  Did I tell you about this?  Niall got me into it.  Of course.     

*** Aside from the ‘getting up’ part.  Lurgies share with ME the delightful business of making you need more sleep and allowing you to get less.  La la la la la la la.  Well, my TBR pile has lowered noticeably, although I may be throwing the rejects against the wall sooner than usual. 

† I suppose one positive side effect of all the new-build we’re going to get whether we like it or not, or whether we sign petitions till we’re blue and purple in the face or not, or whether we attend town meetings twice a day for the next sixty years or not, is that we may finally get our own petrol station.  I guess that’s positive. . . . 

†† I nearly bit the attendant, who was way too jolly and perky.  I could probably have claimed it was an uncontrollable spasm. 

††† I tweeted the £61 and had a few tweets and emails in reply that I should stick to walking, biking, buses and trains.  In a perfect world.  Nadia is twelve or twenty-plus miles away.  When she’s twelve miles away the bus service between here and there exists, but it would take me all day, and I could probably knit cardigans for all of you in the time I spent waiting around for my next connection.  When she’s twenty-plus miles away . . . I don’t think you can get there from here.    

           I will not bike on Hampshire roads.  People certainly do and they shouldn’t.  They’re a danger to themselves and to fossil-fuel-powered traffic.  The little country roads are mostly barely two lanes wide—at least when they’re one lane wide you jolly well ought to be driving carefully—and usually close-bordered by hedgerows, but most of those tiny roads nonetheless have a 60 mph speed limit, which most cars are eager to take advantage of.  And then you hove around a blind corner and find a bicyclist pedalling slowly down the middle of the road, either because he is a careless moron, or because he’s read or been told that it’s safer to occupy your lane and make cars slow down than to hug the edge and encourage them to blast past whether they’ve got room or not.  I don’t know why we don’t have gruesome bicycle fatalities a lot more often.  I personally slow down on blind corners, but then I’m a wuss. 

            And local trains are a species of fiction out of P G Wodehouse or Dornford Yates. 

            The pony-trap could at least carry my music.  But it would still be a long jog to Nadia on Monday afternoons. 

‡ Yes, gods willin’ and the crick don’t rise, there will be the Ritual Sea of Bluebells Photos in a few weeks. 

‡‡ The robin is still sitting on the nest.  Yaaaay.  The first time I saw her she was sitting high and proud but as the days pass she seems to be sinking lower and lower.  I wonder if the fault in three-dimensional space on that shelf is likely to spread.  I could use some hidden space for empty plant pots, which breed like mosquitoes in a marsh, but only if I can get them back out again at need. 

‡‡‡ I half-expect his fuel tank to Glow with an Unearthly Light 

§ Generally speaking I rarely get this kind of dumb short-term bug.  I resent being ill AGAIN. 

§§ Poised under the ceiling dormer with the glass sun roof, where the acoustics are a bit friendlier 

§§§ And a third if I’m feeling silly.  I do need to be kept away from Una Voce Poco Fa for another . . . decade.  

# The seminar tomorrow may sound like the ear, nose, throat and pulmonary ward. 

## EARLY!  EARLY!  EARLY!

Ravenel is leaving the Muddlehampton Choir (in the lurch)!*

            He’s retired, for pity’s sake, but like a lot of other old people who are only old chronologically**, he’s a consultant, and they love him in Bandar Seri Begawan.  He’s been out there several times and that was supposed to be the end of his contract—but they’ve just offered him a longer-term one and he’s TAKING it, the ratbag.

            I was all ready to be devastated . . . and then he started us on a new song*** last thing tonight which is so unutterably loathsome I found myself unable to pry my tongue from the roof of my mouth and sing it.  Arrgh.  People have frelling quit choirs for less.  (It’s supposed to be funny.  It isn’t.  And the music is BORING.)  So maybe I’ll like having Ravenel in Bandar Seri Begawan better than I expected.  Meanwhile . . . the post of director/conductor is open† and to some extent the structure of the choir with it.  NOW IS THE TIME FOR OISIN TO START THE NEW ARCADIA SINGERS.  AND WE WILL SING NO LOATHSOME SONGS.†† 

* * *

 The problem with writing the blog on fumes is that you tend not to say what you mean to say, or you leave stuff out, or you fail to express yourself clearly enough, or you don’t make all the caveats you should make.  Caveat number one:  I know I’ve said much of what I said last night before.  But the doodles remain undone, and I owe you an update occasionally.  Blogmom also needs to be able to say something useful to understandably plaintive non-blog-readers about what’s going on.  

Catlady

Well, I am the one who originally suggested 2017 as a possible mailing date for the doodles, 

Yes, I remember you ’17ers.  I like you a lot.  

and I’m sticking to that, so by my count, you’ve got five and a half years (if we’re counting to the Christmas season in 2017, so that we can, if we desire, give doodles as gifts. To ourselves.). 

I’m also a strong believer in self-selected gifts.  Who needs surprise when you can have exactly what you want?††† 

And I am quite looking forward to Shadows, and am glad that it’s taking the time that the doodles would take. The motto I’ve been trying to live by recently is: there are always important things I’m neglecting in favor of the important things I’m doing, but that doesn’t mean what I’m doing is wrong. 

Yes.  I’m with you all the way on this one.  Prioritizing, and all those clever punchy annoying business-speak words, only work so far.  We’re still waiting for our thirty-six hour day.  With the brain stamina to go with it.‡ 

katinseattle 

Robin, stop whacking yourself over the head. 

Huh?  Um.  How am I whacking myself over the head?  I’m fairly cranky at fate, but then I am often cranky at fate.  And I might have handled last year better, but that would mean going back to about this time last year and realising expeditiously that PEG II had a serious and insoluble from the then-current approach problem,‡‡ and when one’s critical errors start fading into the mists of time . . . maybe it’s just my short attention span, but I’m much more interested in coping with now.  And it’s more what catlady said:  I may be screwing up, but that doesn’t mean what I am doing is wrong.  I’ve prioritised:  SHADOWS must come first.  This isn’t getting the doodles done.  And I’m sorry about that—as I should be.  That’s not whacking myself over the head.  That’s being fate’s hellhounds’ chew-toy. 

We’re here because we like and admire you. 

Thank you!  But some of the people who ordered books and doodles last autumn just wanted their merchandise.

Personally, I’m sorry for your sake that Shadows is taking longer than you wanted, but I’d much rather have quality McKinley than earlier McKinley.  

Well, so would I . . . but it’s also not really my choice.  The Story is the Story, as I keep saying.  I can only do what it lets me do.  And if it doesn’t like the quality of the blood flow it’ll make me find another vein.  Ow.  

lorelibrarian

As for the doodles, well, I’ve forgotten I sent off the money now, so it will feel like I’m getting a free amazing gift from the universe whenever it does arrive.  

I love this.‡‡‡  

* * *

* jmeadows

She doesn’t knit because nothing happens fast enough? Hee. Someone is clearly not a process knitter. I like the way knitting feels! I’m perfectly happy to wait for something to happen. (Though I don’t like waiting TOO long. I’m not made of patience, you know.)

 This would be me too.   Especially given that I’m still doing the knitting equivalent of moving my lips when I read, if I were into product I would be in big trouble.  Certainly at my level—squares, and Very Basic Ribbing, knitting is meditative, and I can use all the calming options I can get.  And wasting time winds me up something vicious, so it serves a dual purpose:  the knitting itself is soothing, and the not wasting time is sort of soothing-plus.  And I was casting off The World’s Longest Leg Warmer during break tonight.  Because I’m not made of patience either^ and I would like to wear these things, that’s things, plural, as in TWO of them, next winter. . . . 

^ Shock horror.  Film at eleven. 

**  . . . Ahem. 

*** Remember I said that nobody knows the playlist for the summer concert? 

†Nice young Japheth is going to a new job inYorkshire or somewhere equally extreme at the end of the year, so he’s not a candidate.  But we may have him through the summer concert if Ravenel slopes off early. 

†† I will be sure to be on the board, and the first rule we will pass is that all items on the musical programme must be okayed by the board.^ 

^ The Muddles are looking for more board members . . . NOOOOOOOOOOOOO.+ 

+ Not unless we can pass this one little new rule. . . .  

††† And some people want vampire muffins.

 ‡ Last night as I lay sleepless in my icy cold bed^ I was thinking about kinds of energy:  creative, which overlaps with but is not the same as intellectual;  emotional, which also overlaps with and adds resonance to creative, but is definitely not the same as, and which is in a constant running fire-fight with intellectual which is inconvenient, wasteful and stupid;  and physical energy, which is a crucial support for all the rest, as well as necessary for hurtling, gardening, and singing exercises at your computer.^^  I no longer remember what it’s like to be juggling all this as a normal, un-ME’d^^^ person, but with ME you also have the spoons issue.^^^^  Different kinds of energy also demand different numbers of spoons.  And I’m terrible at maths. 

 ^ My electric blanket went phut the moment the temperature dropped back to gelid again.  Thanks so much.  Maybe there will be a nice sale on electric blankets in April. 

^^ There’s at least one more but I’m not sure what to call it.  Moral energy, possibly, which is a kind of immaterial resilience or fortitude. 

^^^ And possibly younger.  Something else I’ve said here before, I’d rather blame the ME for being stupid and feeble, than just that I’m getting old.  

^^^^ http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/articles/written-by-christine/the-spoon-theory-written-by-christine-miserandino/

This link is also in the ‘about’ section of this blog.  I have a very mild case, as ME—and lupus, and fibro, and a lot of other auto-immune things that lead with tiredness and pain and general offness—goes.  

‡‡ And, you know, there’s a first time for everything.  I could do expeditious one of these years.  I could.  

‡‡ This is also the argument for, for example, pre-ordering books.   You can forget they’re coming.  And then . . . what’s nicer than a desirable new book to read??