Nonstandard Monday
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.
Whinge snarl cavil
I have just been trying to book next season’s tickets to Live from the Met(ropolitan Opera) and . . . ARRRRRGH. Glasnost and jelly donuts THERE ARE A LOT OF FRELLING AWFUL WEB SITES IN THE WORLD. The heavy hand of my suspicion falls on the shoulder of the Met Opera itself in this case, although the home site of the national Rapscallion Cinema chain is not my favourite battleground either arrrrrrrrgh. But in the first place you have to book every individual opera separately. This is such a confounded nuisance it literally loses them some of my custom—if I’m wavering about whether I want to see The Pirate, the Anglerfish and the Epipelagic Zone* I’ll decide against it just so I don’t have to groan through their horrible purchasing system again. This includes timing you out if you take too long. They timed me out three times tonight. Once it was because their site had hung.** The other two times I wasn’t anywhere near the end of their so-called time limit, they just threw me out for laughs. And then I had to START ALL OVER AGAIN. Now, I am a member of the sodding Rapscallion community, for the single purpose of being able to book Live at the Met a week or something early before rank and file are allowed in***—which system is at least finally working.† When I log on it greets me by name, and is happy to present me with my back catalogue of many, many Met Live tickets. But the moment I try to book another one . . . they want my name, several times, my email address, several times†† . . . you’ve got something like ten screens to get through FOR EVERY GODSFRELLING SODBLASTED TICKET, including things like ‘choose credit/debit card’ and you click the drop down AND THERE IS EXACTLY ONE CHOICE: CREDIT/DEBIT CARD. But if you don’t tick it, the page wipes itself and tells you you need to choose a credit/debt card. There are also at least two screens that merely say ‘confirm’. One of them is the one that crashed me. One of them is also the screen that prevented me from booking Francesca di Rimini at all. It hung for a while and then said Oops! There’s a problem!, and crashed me back to the beginning. I tried three times and gave up. I don’t know whether I want to see Francesca di Rimini anyway.†††
The day did not get off to a good start when we had a frelling tourist invasion.‡ Go. Away. I feel you notice the ‘not our town, we don’t give a rat’s ass’ much more strongly in a village than you do in a city—I remember this from Maine. In New York City it’s the tourists who are at risk.‡‡ Today’s high points were (a) when hellhounds and I were rolling along the wide green way to the mews and found an SUV the size of at least one House of Parliament rolling down the PEDESTRIAN PAVEMENT straight at us. He wanted to park on the grass so he didn’t have to pay the fee in one of the car parks. Like it costs a lot in a town the size of New Arcadia, you know? But most of the green way is blocked off from the road by trees. If you want to be the world’s biggest asshole, you have to drive on the pedestrian pavement. ARRRRRRRRGH. And (b) when both hellhounds picked up chicken bones. I want to kill people who throw their trash around anyway, and I really want to kill people who throw food trash around . . . but I suppose it’s just conceivable that some of our overweight not-at-all-wild‡‡‡ ducks might eat sandwich-ends before the rats got there, but CHICKEN BONES? People who throw chicken bones on the street should be buried standing up under the cornerstones of important civic buildings, and thus be of some use to society at last.
Okay. I’m not in a good mood.
But, speaking of wildlife—and of tantrums—cross-species adolescence, I love it. After various responsibilities and crises had been dispatched I said THE HELL WITH IT and rushed out into the garden, where I dug and toiled and planted for . . . longer than I should have, but I came indoors much more cheerful.§ My adolescent robin was perched in the apple tree right outside the greenhouse—the greenhouse where the saucer of mealworms lives§§ having a complete paddy that dad wasn’t dedicated to bringing him mealworms. Hey, you big fat turkeybutt, go get your own mealworms.§§§
* * *
* They all die in the end. Including the entire crew of the bathysphere. But the soprano goes out on some amazing top notes from the helium.
** You’re sitting there, knitting furiously^, and glancing periodically at the large banner heading that says ‘do not hit refresh or not only will this transaction crash and burn but we will refuse to let you back on our delicate, easily disturbed site forever and your kitchen will blow up’. So you don’t and . . . tick tick tick . . . eventually you time out, and then you get a snooty message telling you that if you’re going to frell about you deserve what you get. ARRRRRRRGH.
^ Got a couple more inches done yesterday, thanks to a forty-five minutes late bride. Who as a result got about seven minutes of ringing because most of the band had to go on to another wedding. Why it’s not in the contract that you’re hiring your ringers for exactly one hour from the time your wedding is scheduled to be over . . . I have no idea. Us hoi polloi keep suggesting this and the higher-ups keep muttering inaudibly and not doing anything.
*** After three years I have my seat. If My Seat is ever already taken I may have palpitations. I even found myself, this time, thinking, as I viewed with deepest gloom the six hours of Parsifal, that I wouldn’t book now, I’d wait till nearer time and if My Seat wasn’t taken . . . ^
^ This won’t actually help me much. It won’t be taken. The long Wagners are only attended by the faithful, which doesn’t often include me. There are many valid excuses for staying at home and doing your knitting from the comfort of your own sofa. I have ME. ‘I can’t stand that misogynistic Aryan bully, I don’t care if he knew a few chords’ is also valid. One of the things I have against Shakespeare is he goes on so. Wagner?? Dear merciful gods.
† First year I tried it, they took my membership money . . . and then declared ‘special events’, as for example the Met Live broadcasts, were not included. GAAAAAAAARGH.
†† They will also throw me out randomly for having ‘non matching email ID’. The first time, maybe. Typos are always a possibility. The second, third and fourth times, no. I guarantee my email address was accurate. But the gremlins were clearly getting bored.
††† And I decided I really can’t face Rigoletto in 1960s Las Vegas. Gods, demons and bell-bottoms. Why are directors allowed to pull idiot feckless crap like this? WHY?^ Stick to Broadway, honeybun. They love you there.
^ If every critic in the solar system gives it five stars, I’ll reconsider.+
+ But My Seat will have been taken, for a five-star Rigoletto.
‡ Trippers who stroll up my cul de sac because it’s quaint and part of their Sunday afternoon expedition should have boiling oil or at least hot borscht poured on them from an upper storey windows. I keep thinking about it. You know how beetroot stains—? So, you want a memento of New Arcadia? It can be arranged.
‡‡ ‘Hey, wanna buy a nice bridge?’
‡‡‡ And Darkness is going to nail one, one day. I’m just hoping he doesn’t take both himself and me into the river in the process. There would be language.
§ Until I decided to tackle the Met Live.
§§ I wouldn’t dare show my face in the garden if I didn’t top up the saucer both when I come out and when I finally go in again. In between I may be sworn at, but there are some limits.
§§§ Although speaking of the robin’s unbridled passion for mealworms: while I was inconveniently using the potting table in the greenhouse, I’d put the saucer farther in, on a shelf near the other door. Dad robin was not best pleased with this arrangement, and kept whirring in and out trying to dodge around me (and the paddying offspring in the apple tree. Dratblast it, where is the new nest?). I’d come back to the greenhouse when, apparently, he wasn’t looking, and was bending over to fetch a trowel off the ground as he came fizzing back in again—more or less as I was starting to straighten up. Both of us were dismayed—and neither of us stopped fast enough, and I briefly had a robin on the back of my neck. He trampolined off again . . .
Shut up, Billy
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
ME Awareness Week. And some bad bells.
Hey. People. I read the forum. But you don’t seriously believe I’m going to post the second part of Corellia’s saga right away, do you? Blow off two guest posts in a ROW? If I had two nights in a row off I’d have established a habit of lying on the sofa covered with hellhounds during blog-writing time, eating bonbons and reading trashy novels. Marabou-trimmed satin lingerie optional. No, no, no. Besides, torturing blog readers is one of my few pleasures.
. . . ‘Pleasures’ certainly not including bell ringing. Oh gods. Practise tonight at the abbey was unbelievably awful. Awful. As I said to Albert as I raced out the door* to escape as soon as possible, this habit of taking one step forward and two steps back is getting discouraging.** Profound and utter humiliation is disagreeable at best but in this case I don’t know what to do about it. I’ve only ever learnt . . . well, pretty much anything, but particularly bell ringing . . . by grind. Relentless grind. You don’t get to grind at the abbey—there are too many ringers at too many different levels (especially upper) to have time for grinding any of them.*** I’d been hoping that I was far enough down the ringing road generally that I wouldn’t need to grind the way I used to . . . wrong. But the big spiky unmediatable situation here is that it’s specifically the abbey that’s the problem: those bells, that frelling ringing chamber, the fact that it’s the abbey. I can ring Grandsire Frelling Triples at other towers—not gloriously well, but I can ring it. Or I could. I think I’m forgetting, because what I’m chiefly doing lately is failing to ring it at the abbey. I cannot begin to tell you how WILDLY FRUSTRATING it is to listen, or to stand behind and watch someone else ringing, something that in any other tower I’d give my eyeteeth† to have a go at—I should be consolidating my Grandsire Triples and practising bob triples and major, Stedman triples, Cambridge minor, treble bobbing to surprise major. But I can’t ring at the abbey.
I wasn’t even expecting the worst tonight. Usually I’m horribly good at expecting the worst. Tonight when I pulled off the bell felt familiar—it is not, in fact, the bells, it’s the ballroom-sized ringing chamber and the abbeyness of it. And I thought, pulling on this familiar bell, oh good. I’m getting there. I’m making progress. This is, or at any rate is going to be, my new home tower.
Does anyone have a bridge handy that I could throw myself off?
* * *
Meanwhile . . . @cambridgeminor/CathyR tweeted me this today:
I know there have been ME awareness weeks—possibly every year at this time, one of the symptoms is really bad memory—but I’d missed we were having one now. And ME, like way too many other badly understood and/or scary don’t-want-to-think-about-it-because-it-might-happen-to-me afflictions and ailments, can use all the good press it can get. Yes, it’s a real disease.†† No, we’re not all malingerers.††† Hurrah for journalists who write articles‡ saying that ME is a nasty kick in the head from fate and to take it seriously. And I’m very glad to see someone making a noise about the appalling so-called ‘treatment’ of enforced exercise, which I’ve railed about here before. If you have ME the last thing you should do is force yourself to do stuff. That only makes it worse. As I’ve also said—but to me, being someone with ME, this is all worth saying again—there may be a few ME-diagnosed people out there for whom enforced exercise worked . . . but I’d personally doubt that in that case what they did have is ME. It’s a fairly slippery disease/syndrome and there’s a lot of overlap with other fateful kicks in the head.
But I want to add (again) that my experience of it is also that what energy, physical and mental, you do have you MUST USE, because if you don’t it will not only go away again—but you’ll feel worse, just like if you forced yourself to do too much. The Lack of Slack Syndrome. One of the things this article also mentions, and good for her, although I’d put quite a few underlines around it too, is the good days and bad days thing—you may also have good half days and bad half days, good hours and bad hours . . . good minutes and bad minutes. She mentions people who have to put their lives on hold because they can’t do anything consistently. Yes. This is one of the big ratbags about managing it—and leads to why I seem to get away with so much. I’ve told you (often) before there are a lot of smoke and mirrors on the blog—well, if I have to lie down for an hour or a day, I just do it. I don’t have to tell you or my boss about it—and the hellhounds adore it, of course. But one of my bottom lines is that I have no stamina, despite all that hurtling. I gave up horses (several times) because I can’t ride regularly enough. I don’t ring quarter peals because I never know when I’m going to have a bad day or a bad hour, and you’re letting down five or seven other people if you fold up unexpectedly. I don’t travel for a variety of reasons, but head of the list is the ME. Managing it on the road is . . . well. I’d rather have bell practise nights like tonight, when throwing myself off bridges seems like a rational reaction, than cope with a bad ME day away from home.
This is one of the things I’d like to see more recognition of—that most people with ME are still capable of doing something—and most of us want to: who wants to be helpless, hopeless, dependent and bored?—but we need SLACK from the healthy, functioning world. We need FLEXIBILITY. The business/working/income-oriented world is still lousy about people who don’t fit their pattern. It’s like the colossal waste of energy and talent of parents who want to, you know, raise their kids themselves. The corporate world still seems to think that kids are something you do in your spare time, and that making widgets and earning money is the real centre of the universe. What is wrong with this picture.
Everybody would be happier if they could work and live to a model that suited them better, you know? You don’t have to have ME or little kids. Elasti-world! Now all we need is a logo and catchy tag line.
* * *
* Not a good idea from this tower. GERONIMOOOOOOOOOO!
** I’ve also started wondering again how long before they tell me not to come back.
*** Except in terms of ‘into little pieces’. I came home in a basket.
† As if anyone would want these eyeteeth. I did, however, get my crown glued back in today.
Dentist from R’lyeh was on holiday, so I saw An Extremely Chirpy female dentist. Extremely Chirpy. Except that I guess you aren’t allowed to make jokes about doctors on drugs I’d say she’s on drugs. Nobody is that chirpy without chemical assistance. I commented, as I produced the small offending object, that it was remarkably clean, as was the post-stub it used to be stuck to. This is, in fact, a crown put in by Dentist from R’lyeh himself, so they could look it up in their records and the chirpy dentist went off into peals of tinkling laughter when the assistant declared that he’d glued it in originally with Glurpbggg™ ^ which is a temporary cement. Oh, that’s why the crown was so clean! sang Ms Nitrous Oxide. Temporary cement always dissolves over time!
Erm, I said, spitting out the crown, which she had spronged back in place to check rapport and congruity with the surrounding teeth, and then couldn’t dislodge again, why?
Oh, because it’s such a good fit! she trilled.
Um. From where I’m sitting . . . the temporary cement was always going to dissolve? Therefore I was always due to be back here in this chair having spent x number of days chewing on one side of my mouth and worrying there was something actually wrong, and then spending an afternoon I might have spent getting on with novel-in-progress schlepping into Mauncester to have it put back in?
Um. Why?
^ I can hardly wait to see what WordPress does to the TM symbol. I wonder if I need popcorn.
†† Although I personally think it’s a syndrome. As I keep saying. If I were going to guess more, I’d guess that it’s caused by a variety of sensitivities to the extremely not-what-we-evolved-for life we lead now. A kind of uber-allergy.
††† Note that of course there are malingerers among us. It’s like some accountants embezzle. That doesn’t mean the definition of an accountant includes ‘embezzler’.
‡ Although please the frelling gods couldn’t they have hired a PROOFREADER? Text as bad as this undermines both the message and the professionalism of the journalist or the paper or both . . . or maybe that’s just that I’m a professional writer with ME.
Happy happy happy. Happy. Happy. Grrrrrr.
IT’S THE FIRST DAY OF A THREE-DAY BANK HOLIDAY WEEKEND. AND THE CROWN ON ONE OF MY HORRIBLE STUPID TEETH HAS JUST FALLEN OUT. I’m so happy. Happy, happy, happy, happy.
It has not been a brilliant day and furthermore Peter is in Cardamomlinghamshire visiting relatives so I don’t even have him around to blame.*
Gemma told me last night, cheerfully, on her way out the door after handbells** that she probably won’t be there for afternoon ringing at the abbey on Sunday. She saw the stark panic flood my face and said hastily, you’ll be fine. You’ll be fine. I’ll be fine, eggs grow on trees, teabags make the best tea, and Charlemagne was a girl. AAAAAAUGH. Last Sunday it was five fabulous male ringers . . . and Gemma and me. AAAAAAAAUGH.
I’ll be fine. Yes. I’ll be fine. I’ll take my knitting. . . .
AND WE’RE GOING TO HAVE A FROST TOMORROW NIGHT. A FROST! A FRELLING, FRELLING, FRELLING, FRELLING FROST! IT’S MAY! IT’S MAY IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND! WE’RE ALLOWED TO PLANT LITTLE TENDER GREEN THINGS OUTDOORS IN THE GROUND IN MAY IN SOUTHERN ENGLAND!***
Usually.
I had quite a nice time in the garden a couple of days ago—when it finally stopped raining long enough to make this practical—playing eenie meanie with all the racks and rows of little green mail-order things that arrived during the floods and are still waiting to be put somewhere they can settle down and grow.† I planted the sweet peas, finally, some begonias, some (tender) fuchsias, most of the rest of the glads, some petunias. Today . . . today I (furiously) planted the dahlia cuttings in pots two or three sizes smaller than I meant to—I don’t have TIME for endless potting-on: stuff goes in an intermediate pot and then it goes into the ground or into its big permanent pot—so they’d all fit on a tray in case I’m bringing them indoors tomorrow night. The stuff that is already in the ground is going to have to take its chances†† . . . but the sitting-room is going to be frelling impassable if I have to bring in all the unfrost-proof things in trays and pots or still in their mail-order plastic cells. . . .
* * *
* You made my crown fall out! You did! You know you did!
** Have I told you we seem to have morphed into Thursday and Friday handbells?? Wait, wait, I have a novel to finish and I do need to reserve some brain. I think I’ve told you Gemma is a doctor, and she’s just changed clinics/surgeries which means her schedule has changed, and Thursday afternoon handbells are no longer possible. So we had, I thought, moved handbells to Fridays right before New Arcadia bell practise^ . . . except that it turns out Colin can’t do Fridays but was too polite to say so.^^ I have this habit of not really paying attention to details and therefore found myself saying to Niall and Colin, well, okay, we’ll just have to keep on with Thursdays, and Niall and I can ring with Gemma on Fridays . . . WHAT AM I SAYING. This week was the first of the new schedule and . . . two days in a row of handbells is . . . intense.
^ Which means I will now stuff hellhounds into their harnesses and pelt out the door so as to be out of earshot by the time they start ringing up. I’m getting better at sleeping through Sunday mornings though.
^ The British. ARRRRRRRGH.
*** I’m having another of those ‘why do I DO this to myself??’ moments. I moaned this to Peter tonight over the phone and he said, because you’d think less well of yourself if you didn’t^, which is true as far as it goes, but it still begs the question why do I have to choose activities where terror will be my natural environment? Why couldn’t I collect stamps or go to more films?^^
^ And given my standard level of self-appreciation this could get dangerous.
^^ No horror, of course.+
+ Avengers Assemble is playing semi-around here this weekend and I am half-tempted to go except for two things: (a) it’s in frelling 3D, and my loathing for (frelling) 3D was renewed and reinforced by (multi-frelling) THOR and (b) I haven’t got time. If I’m going to ring bells and sing and rescue all the little green things drowning in my garden(s) and finish a novel before the hellhounds and I have to stop eating, although the hellhounds wouldn’t mind, I haven’t got time.# And, just by the way, Sunday morning ringing at New Arcadia is forty minutes plus a one-minute bolt from the cottage to the tower and a more leisurely several-minute stroll back. Sunday afternoon ringing at the abbey is an hour, plus a half hour commute. Also, terror is tiring.
# And the blog is a not insignificant eater of time.~
~ And there are a lot of doodles waiting to be doodled. Siiiigh. I should draw you a Venn diagram of Available Energy Usage by Robin McKinley some time. I don’t know if this is the frelling ME, or advancing age, or just that I’ve always been peculiar, but what I can and can’t do isn’t just about whether I feel (relatively) alert and intelligent or as if I have ham salad for brains and limbs made of half deflated inner tubes. It’s more of a Chinese-menu situation where you want stuff from as many columns as possible. And your fortune cookie is still going to tell you you’re frelled.
*** Meanwhile friends in the Midwestern prairie are having temperatures pushing ninety (°F).
† I’m still seeing disturbingly few little feathered things in the shrubbery.^ I wouldn’t have thought literal drowning was all that likely in my garden-on-a-hill, and there’s still the greenhouse to take shelter in. Nor would I have thought I have many predators out there, although what is that unpleasing line about there always being a rat within five feet of you? I’m sure my local rats would be more than happy to tuck into adolescent robin. But dad robin is still hanging around for mealworms. Robins are such fearless little critters^^ that you get a prime view of what’s going on with them. There were still two adults^^^ when I started putting mealworms out but they were very chary of me—which served to reinforce my guilt about how little gardening I’ve been doing recently and it’s not all down to the weather—but robins don’t really do chary and dad, at this point, pretty well gets in my face and says, Mealworms? Where are the mealworms?, if he’s dispatched the previous serving. I put them out twice a day, and he must be feeding them to someone because if he ate all of them himself he’d explode. The mealworm saucer normally lives on my potting table in the greenhouse but I put it out in the courtyard by the kitchen door when I want to use my table, on top of a tall pot that will have a dahlia in it eventually. He knows this. So first he sits in the apple tree next to the greenhouse and stares at me, and then he perches on that pot and looks at me meaningfully. I may have to start buying more mealworms.
^ I did get a couple of photos of the babies, but they’re not very good. The nest is tucked back behind various jars and plastic boxes of plant food and it’s dark. I didn’t want to blow a flash in their tiny fluffy faces and I haven’t been very lucky with the right angles of sunlight . . . or any angles of sunlight, lately. They’re only in the nest about ten days, I think—maybe two weeks. Not long at all. And I didn’t notice they’d hatched immediately—they were already beginning to grow feathers by the time I saw them—since I’d been trying to leave mum alone so she’d go on sitting. But I’m reasonably sure there were five of them to begin with. Five’s a lot.
^^ Unlike their human namesake
^^^ If there’s only one parent left, it’s probably dad, because mum has sashayed off to start a new nest somewhere else.
†† I may raise the odds a bit by throwing a bit of bubble wrap around. After potting up the frelling sweet peas—usually I just slap them in the ground to begin with—and bringing them in and out for about a fortnight I am VERY RELUCTANT TO LOSE THEM NOW.